Study finds learning music won’t make children smart

I dislike the sensationalization in the article ("Put down the banjo, Timmy"). The headline makes it sound like learning music is about as useless as sitting on your couch, as far as intelligence goes. But it goes on to say that the study talks about looking at a wide range of studies and stating that quality studies compare music learning with control groups that do other types of activities, like sports.

You don't really need a PhD in psychology to figure out that any activity that involves putting effort over long periods of time will yield _some_ sort of result. Whether that actually translates directly to hyper-specific measurements (e.g. school math grades) as opposed to only "soft" long-term changes in behavior (e.g. developing an interest in the relationship between music and math, leading to e.g. an interest in software engineering over medicine, or an increased interest in arts, or whatever) seems to me like asking the wrong question.

Both music and intelligence are incredibly multidimensional. Trying to narrowly define a supposed correlation between two very narrow aspects of both might be a disservice to the idea of the development of a well rounded individual. I feel that many people take these sorts of soundbite titles to heart as if they were little life hacks to "get ahead", rather than thinking about life as a holistic experience.

The question becomes 'as opposed to what?'

The article says that studies which controlled against dance or sports showed no additional effect. Which looks really good for music IMO- because exercise has incredible benefits.

Maybe as compared to sports, music doesn't show additional benefit- how about as compared to watching YouTube videos? Playing flappy bird?

I find it hard to believe that we can really 'prove' anything with respect to child development. The studies have a phenomenally low lack of control on one end, which produces a LOT of noise. On the other end- we have no effective ways of measuring child development. Standardized tests or IQ produce metrics that are somewhat useful to measure how productive a child may be, but is that really what you want to optimize for as a parent?

What we really want to do for our kids is optimize for lifelong happiness. And we aren't even remotely close to measuring that.

Terrible reporting when it doesn't include a link to the publication:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13421-020-01060-2

This only concerns tiger moms. I learnt a bit of music when 10-12 and I am forever grateful for that, because music is a bridge between your senses and a lot of physics phenomena. It is a way to create bridges between feelings/senses and knowledge. For example, you can hear how a DSP filter or a modulator changes the original signal; you find the reasons why an engine with a certain number of cylinders sounds better; and so on.

Having some IQ is one thing, using it is another.

I’m not sure an IQ test is the best metric when looking at the benefits of playing an instrument.

Music teaches patience, dedication and rewards self-motivation and self-teaching, among other things.

Personal anecdote. I worked in a top lab in my country’s university. My lab mates went off to work in top universities, as is the tradition. The lab employed two top students in the country by some specific metric. People working there had not a common background, upbringing or optimized method of work I could identify.

The only thing in common was that they all been taught to play instruments at a young age. We could have made an orchestra with the people working there.

The way I saw it at the time wasn’t that they were smarter, but that they had the understanding that practicing was important and that looking or sounding ridiculous at their first steps on anything was a usual process.

It wasn’t that they had developed intelligence, grit or perseverance, it was just another day for them of engaging something new, a paper or work item, and getting down to it.

Lack of self doubt and emotionless engagement in unfamiliar topics is probably more important than a few points higher in an IQ scale.

IMO, someone who perseveres through the horribly difficult early stages of learning an instrument to the point where they can play something passably well is learning delayed gratification. The ability to delay gratification is directly correlated with success in life: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experimen...

Doesn't surprise me but the study also seems to be just trying to measure academic achievement.

I mean sure, I'm incredibly skeptical of "baby Mozart" approaches to music. Certainly starting young and practicing early goes a long way towards being successful in anything. Discipline in any field builds discipline towards others.

We can go on and on about the mathematical nature of music but I would argue it's easier for people to do it by not thinking about those things and being in touch with how it feels.

I'm kind of bothered that anything to do with IQ these days is pursued by researchers or is given a fair shake by our dear readers at Hacker News.

Stop trying to max your kids stats. It's incredibly dehumanizing. I get that we all want children to have the best opportunities, but maybe it'd be a more equitable situation if we stopped reducing ourselves to a numbers game.

Maybe they'll be smarter when they learn to do things they feel passionate about and not conditioned to perform like a trained monkey. We already have enough performative identity for careerism in high school kids. Maybe intelligence and success comes from knowing yourself, and not from being told to do things because you get points?

Sorry parents! An essential part of culture and discipline of art and pleasure might not be inherently advantageous to your child's ability to fill out tests so while you're at it make sure they never do anything for themselves beyond the sole purpose of getting in somewhere just so they can realize they don't know who they are!

Edit: Also the use of "put down the banjo". Let's talk about that. This is a study done in Japan and the UK. Are they even playing the banjo? Nothing wrong with the banjo, banjo's great. But specifically going with the banjo as their title and image lends itself to a specific tone for some readers. Not exactly what some people would consider "intellectual" music for vague reasons in class and race perhaps. I'm detecting a bias here against the "utility" of folk music. I wish they'd link the actual paper. Did the researchers give a bunch of banjos as part of a controlled study? I'm so sure a lot of well-to-do parents in Tokyo and London are feeling burned by having to keep up with the competitive nature among children in banjo culture.

Studying music will make you better at music. Studying IQ tests will make you better at IQ tests.

I think we put too much emphasis on general intelligence when it's not well defined and easily gamed. It's also a talking point for racists.

A link to the referenced journal article "Cognitive and academic benefits of music training with children: A multilevel meta-analysis" published in Memory and Cognition [0].

[0] https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13421-020-01060-2

I have a subjective and still esoteric(be warned) theory about attention span. As someone who have learned to play an instrument at my early teens, i've learned that to be actually good at something, you need to learn to deal with the primary discomfort feeling. You are learning to fighting your natural 'cavemen nature', the more primitive parts of your brain that are more inclined to satisfying immediate pleasures. As i've said, is a subjetive observation, but in my experience at least, people that tend to have lower quality results in what they do, apparently have lower 'attention spans'. Their effort to concentrate into something is faster, and if you see a puppy dog, or a cat, or even a human baby, you can see they are distracted easily, jumping from one subject to another very fast.

Now if we think about humans that we regard the most, like Newton, Beethoven, Einstein, Curie, Rodin, etc..

The research or the product of their labor require a very big attention span, as in, they need to meditate over long periods of time on the same subject.

Now, getting back to the point, i've learned that things like learning a musical instrument, programming, learning some math, or reading classics, helped me into acquiring long attention spans, resulting in a improvement on the quality of my thoughts, ideas and products of the thinking process.

Maybe just learning music alone wont prove anything, but i bet that if you mix the right kind of activities, you can have at least, a starting point to sophisticated human beings.

My parents (who have both never played an instrument in their lives) signed me up for piano lessons when I was a child. I'd regularly be sent home with homework that I didn't know how to complete, no one taught me how to practice, and I'd frequently show up to lessons without any idea of what I was doing. I'm sure my parents paid a hefty fee, but I got zero value out of the experience.

As an adult, I revisited the piano, and learned more by myself over several weeks than I ever did going to lessons as a child. The experience taught me how to practice better, and it gave me a stronger intuition for how the brain learns.

The mistake my parents made was thinking that all the learning happens at the music lesson. That simply attending classes was enough to make me a better musician and a smarter child. I wonder how many other parents out there are making that same mistake right now.

From the conclusion of the published article:

> music may be beneficial for non-cognitive constructs in children such as prosocial behavior and self-esteem ... [though] any enticing and empowering activity may improve children’s well-being

I would say those who study music (classical) at young age come from quite wealthy families, which mean easier access to resources, e.g., books, good schools, dedicated teachers, etc which could eventually lead to better iq test results.

Sounds like the same argument someone linked to chess - that playing chess doesn’t make one smarter. Funny thing is, do you know what has a direct influence on neuron growth? Lifting weights, running, exercise. Not saying we have it all wrong, but I would question every sensational article that’s out there.

The benefit of playing music is that some people find it fun. What’s wrong with that?

People have such weird attitudes to IQ. Either denial of it's significance or hope to improve it by applying the right life experiences. It all seems based around the fear of the possibility that some of us really are born inferior and doomed to a worse life than others.

But we are. By far the easiest way to improve a child's IQ is to select parents with high IQ. But nobody wants to deselect themselves so wanting a high IQ child goes against the instinct of wanting to reproduce for most people and they're stuck in a cognitive dissonance.

We can reduce it through neglect and trauma but there's no known lasting way to enhance it beyond the natural limit each person is born with.

How about just accept that we're not all born equal? Nobody worries that a dog is less intelligent than a person but we still have pet dogs and happily accept their limitations.

I feel reminded of "gym science" when it comes to a lot of parental development strategies for children. Everyone does it so there must be something to it. If controlled studies can't replicate any effects it does not appear to bother parents much.

Why is it so hard to accept that domain transfer does not exist. If kids learn chess for a few years, they won't be better at mathematics. After five years of practicing Violin kids don't find learning a foreign language easier. Adding insult to injury, learning Latin (like many Europeans still do) contrary to common sense does not improve scholastic results of students when learning other languages.

"Smart" is one of those nebulous things, until people give it a too-narrow definition like IQ. It's important to acknowledge that there are many kinds of intelligence, not all of which are pure logic or knowledge-gathering.

You can't change IQ (You probably can, but it's not simple)

But you can change the second biggest life impacting testable factor in people, conscientiousness.

Seems like learning music is a good way to learn conscientiousness.

This article is really bad advice.

But it does raise the question do people in the United Arab Emirates think most Americans play the banjo or are they self aware about the ironic-ness, or does the 44C weather temperate that day mean it's just to hot for them to think much about the article they wrote.

The study doesn't conclude that learning music is useless. They focused only on generalized cognitive measures.

Dedicated learning of any activity over time, music or otherwise, likely has long-term benefits in terms of learning how to focus, how to achieve goals, how to manage time, and other structural improvements.

The authors even cite other studies showing that learning music can improve well-being, improve self-esteem, encourage prosocial behavior, and even lead to more narrow cognitive improvements in math fields that might not necessarily appear on generalized IQ tests.

> First, music may be beneficial for non-cognitive constructs in children such as prosocial behavior and self-esteem (e.g., Aleman et al., 2017). These possible advantages are not likely to be specific to music, though. In fact, any enticing and empowering activity may improve children’s well-being. Second, elements of music instruction (e.g., arithmetical music notation) could be used to facilitate learning in other disciplines such as arithmetic (Azaryahu, Courey, Elkoshi, & Adi-Japha, 2019; Courey, Balogh, Siker, & Paik, 2012; Ribeiro & Santos, 2017).

Sounds a bit counter-intuitive to me. I always thought the brains of musicians are much more analytical as playing music requires a lot of understanding and (usually) good memory. Classical and jazz musicians typically remember a lot of music in their heads, which require tremendous effort and a rigid process.

Anyway, even if learning music doesn't raise IQ, there are so many benefits. Other than having an enjoyable hobby, I always thought the process of learning classical music properly is very similar to programming (or other aspects in life). You start from small segments, practice until you're good enough to move on, repeat, and slowly put larger pieces together. You then listen to your playing, find out what's unsatisfying, then repeat the process until you've mastered the piece. After learning a piece, you also need to maintain it from time to time if you still want to play it well. This kind of learning process cannot be shown in an IQ test, but is beneficial to a child's development if adopted early.

Where did the idea come from that studying music was meant to make kids smart? I don't see the presumed connection. Not everything we learn is meant to increase our cognitive abilities. Schools teach music to product more well-rounded individuals, not to make them smarter. Schools are something more than IQ factories.

Not everything needs an objective quantifiable measure of academic performance to make it a good thing people should know.

Even if Music may not have an affect on academic performance or cognitive skills, it's still a fun skill. Most primary school programs introduce kids to basic music reading, singing, and simple instruments. Some kids like it and enroll in more music programs. Some kids say it's not for them and do other things. But it's nice to give kids that introduction and those options.

If you like music, it can provides decades of enjoyment to learn how to play. It doesn't make you better than people who just listen to and appreciate music, but it can enhance your happiness to be able to pick and and fiddle around with your fiddle or harmonic or guitar every once in a while.

What happened to learning just for the sake of learning and enjoyment?

If you take out "music", it becomes, "Study finds learning won't make children smart".

I see learning to play an instrument as a self improvement exercise. It's a process. There's a lag between our hands and our ears. It's easy for the ears to know a "good" song. It's hard for the hands to play a good song. To play a song well is to bridge the skill gap of the hands. When you can play a song well, you "complete" a task. The process improves our skills and our cognition. We can recognize "good" from "not so good". Overtime, it can improve our baloney detector. It improves self awareness. You know when you suck. And you know if you work diligently, you'd be able to improve. I think it's a valuable skill. It's more important than high SAT or IQ scores.

This sounds more like correlation.

The kids who gets music lessons probably come from richer families.

The cost is rather high. Instruments, uniforms, maybe private tutor, space and time to practice. Irregular schedule because of music practice.

Kids from richer families are well taught and end up being more competent in general.

I played music for several years when in school, starting in Junior High. Didn't read the article, but the title inspired me to make a comment.

I think the skills you learn in music performance are extremely valuable. Sure, there are plenty of people who "learn music" but don't apply themselves like with any discipline.

This is only anecdata, but if I had to guess I'd say there is a correlation between my ability to toggle into and out of a "flow" state when working as a programmer and my past life when I spent a great deal of time learning music.

Sure everyone's experience will vary, but I found that "flow" is a phenomenon I regularly experienced when performing music once I reached a certain skill level.

Some of the best programmers I know were music majors turned programmer. There's something about the creativity or learning of another abstract "language" that music brings that seems to tie well into programming.

Are there similar studies regarding chess?

I found this, it seems chess doesn't make you smarter: https://theconversation.com/does-playing-chess-make-you-smar...

Relevant quote:

"The fact that skills learned by training do not transfer across different domains seems to be a universal in human cognition. In other words, you get better, at best, at what you train in – which may just sound just like good old fashioned common sense."

I think learning music is very effective for self-improvement for other reasons, it's a very effective exercise in reconciling feelings with reality. Do you love a particular section of the music in your head and it's really hard? You just have to keep wrestling with reality to learn it. Are you trying to express a certain feeling with music? You have to get skilled enough at the music/instrument to be able to express it. I don't know if that means it actually helps teach emotional self-regulation in general, but I wouldn't be surprised.

Learning music might not may a child smarter, but it may teach the child "metaskills" like character which cannot be learned directly. Here's an (snipped) quote from something I read a while ago: [1]

"When a student learns piano, all Americans can see is that the student is now equipped with the skill to play the piano. Under this view, unless the student can put that skill into use in the future somehow, the time spent on acquiring that skill is wasted. This is a deeply mistaken attitude, and the ever-smart tiger cub Sophia Rubenfeld-Chua has the perfect answer showing the flaw of that attitude:

''I’m never going to be a professional pianist, but the piano has given me confidence that totally shapes my life. I feel that if I work hard enough, I can do anything. I know I can focus on a given task for hours at a time. And on horrible days when I’m lost and a mess, I can say to myself, "I’m good at something that I really, really love." I want my kids to have that confidence – confidence rooted in something concrete, not just "aww everyone’s a winner!!!" confidence, because in your heart you never believe that.''

The point of learning the piano is NOT about acquiring the skill of playing the piano so that the student can earn a living as a pianist. It is about building the character of the person. Here is the thing about character -- you can't build it by explicitly setting out to build it. Character is not a skill like tying your shoelaces. If it must be put in terms of "skill", character is a "meta-skill" -- a foundational human skill that is necessary to perfect any number of mechanical skills. And the only way to develop this meta-skill is to develop at least one highly sophisticated mechanical skill, such that the student may acquire the meta-skill in the course of building the mechanical skill.

... it is about acquiring genuine confidence and iron discipline. With such confidence and discipline, she can move on and do anything she wants in her life because there is no task in life in which confidence and discipline hinder success."

[1] http://askakorean.blogspot.com/2011/05/confucianism-and-kore...

Music is one of the most enjoyable ways to create. I don’t really care what my kids do specifically; I just want them to learn how to experiment and create and have fun and never stop playing.

A potential issue with music study is that only a certain fraction of kids who are given music lessons actually thrive at it. Many people remember being forced to take lessons and hating it. Others failed on multiple attempts until it finally "took."

So for this reason, I'm not sure that music training is a single "thing" that can be analyzed without looking into how each person experienced it.

Another possible study is to measure successful musical training by whether someone is actually a musician or not.

I would argue that studying music (especially music theory) at a young age has helped me tremendously as a programmer in my old age.

I am writing an algo trading bot right now and I make a habit of reading the entire codebase fairly regularly to make sure I understand exactly what is going on at all times while the bot is running.

Which seems similar to reading and understanding a sheet (or a book) of music before you play it.

There must be some correlation there although I have no hard evidence.

It could simply be that growing up in an environment where being taught music is possible (with tutors and teachers and instruments all paid for) is correlated with doing better in school. If you're growing up with parents who struggle to pay the bills, who can't afford the time or money to teach their kids music, odds are those kids are struggling in other parts of their life too.

Learning music doesn't make you smart. But for smart kids, learning music sure as hell makes you more interesting and useful in life.

Probably goes for anything children are forced to learn.

But this doesn't mean you shouldn't send young children here and there to TRY stuff... just stop early if they don't like it.

Iirc my parents sent me to do music, football, computers and martial arts. Two of them i HATED, two of them i stuck with for my lifetime.

But it does correlate with lower risks of dementia later in life.

https://www.alzdiscovery.org/cognitive-vitality/blog/does-mu...

I love that the article shows a kid with a banjo. Something about the banjo really appeals to me-- I started learning to play it a few years back.

It's truly fun. And you get to follow Steve Martin, who is both funny and knowledgeable. It's a good hobby.

Learning music wont make your child smart, but it will come in handy when your child grows up to be viceroy of a small overseas colony and must function as a member of aristocratic society.

This has been known for so long that the “Mozart effect” is routinely used as an example of bad science in undergrad psychological research methods courses.

The idea that you shouldn't play music because psychologists say it won't make you smarter by some quantitative metric is so on-brand for this site.

Wait, because there are people who make their children "do" music "to make them smart", and not for music itself (and all it encompasses)?

Not sure the smart the post talks about here is IQ, if it is, I believe there is no such thing can make children's IQ higher.

I like this and agree with it, however they should have a follow-up study to measure music’s affect on language skills.

Maybe it doesn't make children smart, but it certainly makes them look smart.

Note that since we are talking about averages, it could be true both that music training on average doesn't have a visible effect, but that some specific ways of doing music training are helpful and others are harmful. There are a wide variety of ways to teach music and a broad study won't figure out which ones are better or worse.

Or it could be the musical training is effective for a certain people but detrimental for others, and the average would be near zero.

However, there's a limit to how much research you can do. Chasing after effects on subsets of the population has problems too. https://xkcd.com/882/

Wow first chess and now this?!?!?

How about discipline?

Yes, and instead all the children should go smoke cigarettes instead and drink alcohol.

I don’t care what a study says in my case: chess makes you smarter. It makes you better able to concentrate, visualize, and plan. Not sure if it helps you discover anagrams or find number patterns on an iq test but who cares