Music Students get Better Grades!

"Clinical Studies have established a link between early musical training and the development of the higher brain functions required for language, math and science. [Rausher, Shaw, Levine, KY and Wright (UC Irvine - 1994]"

It is really no surprise that music students would get better grades than students that take no music courses. The above quote refers to a study from 1994 and there have been even more recent studies that show this to be even more true. We as a society have made correlations to this fact for centuries.

Here's how it works. In our early years our brain is growing rapidly and it is when we are young that we learn the easiest. That’s not to say that you can't teach an old dog new tricks, but a puppy is much easier to train. Music education has shown to be a positive influence in many ways, and one of the most important of these areas is spatial reasoning. Spatial reasoning is our abilities to think of things in a 3D way. For example, most people have had to move things around their own house. If you can picture how your living room looks before moving that furniture then you are using spatial reasoning. Playing chess requires deep spatial reasoning and so does allot of advanced mathematics. Even just parking your car requires a certain amount of spatial reasoning.

There is "form" in music. Much of our western music is written in two bar phrases which we double to make four bar phrases. Yes that sounds simple; 2+2=4. A musician not only understands it as 2+2=4 but we begin to hear and feel that in the phrases. We begin to know and feel that the end of a 32 bar section is coming up. In other words we actually see math in a completely different way. Our right side of our brains really like the 2+2=4 but it is our left side that really enjoys hearing and feeling those 4 bar phrases and those 16 and 32 bar sections of music. If you study the same subject from more than one angle you get a much deeper comprehension of it.

One of the focuses here at Phoenix Music Lessons is "form" and how to memorize entire pieces for performance. Our students learn to see the entire big picture in their minds, and then perform those pieces from memory.