Music helps with brain development!

Author Philip Sheppard has written about the power of music in a child’s development. He is Professor of Cello at the Royal Academy of Music, London as well as a senior lecturer in Principles of Education.

Below is an extract from his book, ‘Music Makes your Child Smarter’…

Active participation in music assists all forms of personal growth, both mental and physical. It builds many skills essential for everyday life and can aid mental development and learning processes. In fact, it appears that music can encourage the brain physically to alter its very structure as it grows. Involvement in music helps all ages define their own identities, and music can create associations between groups and helps to forge links between people. In other words, music helps children to build essential social skills. Music can create great feelings of self-worth - being creative in an artistic discipline can have a profound effect on the way children perceive themselves, and can even benefit health.

Music can change the shape of your brain

Regular participation in musical activities stimulates the development of the brain and improves mental functions. The very plasticity of the brain, the way it shapes itself, can be positively affected by repeated musical activities. The conduit of information between the two brain hemispheres, the corpus callosum, grows larger as a result of being musically stimulated, and the pathways of communication between areas of the brain are more comprehensively connected together.

Musical activity aids the creation of new synaptic pathways, enabling multi-tasking and general creative thought, and it promotes cognitive development and helps abstract thought processes.

© 2005 Artemis Editions. Reproduced by permission.



This came from the Hofnote.com website which you can use to help improve your aural skills.

ABRSM conference

I attended this conference in Birmingham on 11 September. The sessions on the new piano syllabus were fascinating and gave us all a chance to listen to and learn more about the pieces set for the various grades. It was great to find out about the alternative pieces set as so often you don't get round to finding out, and yet some of the very best pieces for 2011-2013 can be found here. I shall definitely be teaching some of them! I also attended sessions on teaching sight-reading and aural and was delighted to discover that my ideas and techniques are exactly what the examiners at ABRSM recommend- using the music itself as a learning tool and not just attaching onto the end of lessons a quick bit of aural etc. I had a chance to rummage through some of the ABRSM music and purchased the new aural books that look much more exciting and interesting than some of the older ones. Plus I purchased some music set for some of the grade exams so that I'll have "alternative options" music to hand to play to students when we're deciding which pieces to learn. I'll definitely want to attend again.