Respected Music Educator and Admired Opera Conductor

I last spoke briefly about what I will begin to discuss and I mentioned to you the Northwestern University researchers. If you made have had trouble viewing the site here it is again. www.soc.northwestern.edu/brainvolts/. There, they show you that the brain is engaged in many different ways through music. A person learns to read music, which is stimulated by a different part of the brain as then of memory. Through music training, depending on what your focus may be, your brain focuses on one specific area than another. 

Northwestern researchers recognized that musicians can encode speech better than non musicians. They show a graph where musicians are better at hearing speech in noise over a number of years. So the longer you are musically inclined the better off you are hearing a conversation in a crowd? Slideshow 13 shows the difference of a musician and a non musician when it comes to processing speech in noise. The way it looks like, I could have a conversation with another musician at a rock concert more than I could with someone who has no musical knowledge at all. 

With musical training your brain begins to grow and strengthen with different characteristics than that of someone who is not a musician or musically incline. This is the difference between a passive music listener and a active or critical listener (as a music engineers should be). The brain continues to grow even after one stops playing music due to the fact that they have the knowledge of music within them. Even though the body may not be involved with music, as in playing an instrument throughout their lifetime, the brain can still determine a sense of direction from where an instrument may be placed in a song.

Near the end of the Northwestern University auditory neuroscience lab slideshow, it displays the breakdown of ages that musical training and brain development have been tested and the outcomes learned through music. 

Below is Richard Gill, is an Australian Music Director specializing in Opera music and vocal and choral training. He is also a music educator. This video is a seminar he does around the world explaining his point to adults of why their young children need to be taught music in their growing minds and why music can help them focus.