Free Report On The Influence Of Music In Early Childhood Development

Introduction 3

Sense Experience 4
Visual 4
Auditory 5
Kinesthetic 6
Tactical 6
Skills that are learned and developed though music 7
Memory 7
Accelerated development 8
Conclusions
Proving that the thesis is valid and true 10
Reaffirmation 10

Works Cited 12

Introduction
Nowadays, in the United States and Western Europe interest in the question whether learning classical music influences other non-musical achievements in the fields of intellectual activity - such as mathematics, language and mental processes, self-esteem, general intelligence and cognitive development in general has been extremely increased. The idea that music makes people smarter, has just crashed into human consciousness. The theory of the positive impact of music lessons for broader educational achievement is not new. The early theories mostly originate from occasional observations that children with significant musical talent usually had significant achievements in other academic areas. Thus, this gave the reason to believe that music classes, through improved musical abilities may also improve other cognitive functions.
Still many people while listening to music of different styles and genres do not even think about its impact on their psyche and behavior. It does not matter how this influence is reflecting, how it is shown, but it can be stated with great confidence that this effect, this influence, one way or another is a fact. Let's start with the fact that sound waves - a natural phenomenon occurring in various states of aggregation of matter. Everyone has repeatedly felt the magic of music. One memory of favorite compositions are able to lift the mood and give a sense of joy. Playing a musical instrument or singing also cause the greatest pleasure and even happiness. Almost all natural phenomena - the rustling of leaves, wind noise, falling raindrops - contain his melodies, awakening in the hearts of people different emotions. Remain indifferent to the sounds may be the only people completely devoid of hearing. In modern medicine, undeniably positive impact of music on the human use for the treatment of many disorders and ailments.
Music – is an art of powerful emotional influence, which reflects a huge opportunities for all side human development, especially in the early childhood. Music is one of the arts. Like painting, theater , poetry, it is an artistic reflection of life. Music is understanding people, awakens and maintains a sense of kinship, embodies social ideals, helps everyone find the meaning of life. First of all, its amazing ability to reflect the experience of people in different moments of life. People rejoice - this results in a solemn joyful sounds of music ; man depressed - sad sounds help express grief. Music accompanies and influences and shapes the personality of the child for life. The impact of music is not able to influence the audience with the same force. Every child in his own shows interest and delight of music. The way kids learn how to read, write or draw, the same way they have to learn how to recognize, evaluate music, listen carefully, and observe the dynamic development of portraits, their clashes and endings. Listener perception has to follow the whole music development.
In the early childhood baby distinguishes music from surrounding sounds and noises. It focuses on the melody. And as we all know, music it is that kind of art, which significantly affects the formation of personality in early childhood. It enriches the feelings and perceptions of the child, promotes the development of the ability to feel the rhythm and melody.
Huge number of medical and psychological researches only proves the positive impact of music on the function of respiration and circulation, the level of immune processes, brain work and language development, kinesthetic and tactile improvements. It is proved that not only hearing sensitivity increases, but visual one as well as mental processes of attention, perception, decreasing the anxiety level. The use of music as an extra touch flow significantly improves the function of language in under school age children, improves the memory for key phrases and facilitates the assimilation of information for preschoolers. Music improves short-term verbal memory, remembering color names, geometries, numbers and images. According to scientists music alleviates common perception. It is confirmed that music reduces psycho-emotional stress, promotes focusing attention and involvement of children in activities that help in mastering different skills. Music for young children is not so much an art as a sphere of life. The child perceives the world of music as a natural environment of existence, and this specialty of music perception by young kids is necessary to be taken into account.
Unfortunately, even living in 21st century there are still too less researches on how the music is actually influencing on child’s development. One of the main reasons of this horrible issue is that government always sacrifice such researches while cutting the funding of the educational programs. Chairmen may not understand the value of early childhood development at all and that we need to understand how to bring the bright future and the most of knowledge to our offspring. Any concerns about funding music influence researches were mostly ignored or replied with no interest. Of course, chemistry, mathematic, physics, especially technology related works are in higher demand, but how our future generations can develop our results and forward them without appropriate background? Music might speed up the development of this background, but we do need to know how it actually works.
Sense Experience
Visual
It is not fully proved that music can improve the child’s visual ability, but definitely music is actually creating the imagination, it is creating pictures and make us visualize our feeling. As we all know, people with visual disability are always listen to sounds and music to at least try to imagine the world around us. The same with children and even more, as their early life is all about feeling. This statement has been recently proved by the scientist from University of London Joydeep Bhattacharya and Nidhya Logeswaran. They proceed with the experiment where participants were shown different subjects either happy or sad ones. On the background they were listening to music, happy or sad in accordance. In the end they were asked to rate their emotional state from 1 to 7, where 7 the happiest and 1 – the saddest. The result was that those participant who were listening to happy music felt much happier, and those who listened to the sad one – even depressed (Changizi).
As we may see the weighty result after listening to music for adults, the more feeling and experiences receive the child as his receptors are much more sensitive to any kind of effect. We all know how important is to give the kid listen to classic music such as V.A. Mozart, L. van Beethoven, F. Chopin and others. While listening to such music kid’s imagination is developing and increasing with the huge steps and, moreover, making it more intelligent.
Auditory
This is one of the main sense experience that music provides with the human and especially important in the early childhood. It is very important to develop auditory receptors from the early childhood as this helps to identify different sounds later on. To understand the music effect on auditory sense we will use the event-related potential (ERP) term. This ERP responses of the children are mostly lead by slow positive waves, which means music listening is meant to advance kid’s development what is going to be seen at the age of 4-6 years old. Also, numerous studies is telling that music listening develops such feature as brain flexibility. Thus, it is then way easier to examine the child’s ability to learn and his opportunities at all. Scientists and child developing centers proved that music trainings have double effect on children’ development: domain-general and domain-specific. Much more awesomeness has brought the reports after passive listening to classic music, especially to Mozart. Although, so called “Mozart effect” has short-term duration and it is very depending on the overall surrounding, while the classic rock can improve the perception much more deeply (Hannon and Trainor).
The presence in the music preset intonation, inherent in every kind of era of intonation vocabulary hierarchy of musical language, which is associated with the musical syntax expressions and sentences of verbal language, the existence of a system of rules that govern the accordance of elements of languages - these and other similarities music and languages allow highlight the importance of linguistic and auditory approach to teaching music.
Thus, a little, but prevalent result of music exercise may appear as it improves children’ attention and makes them more functioning, and this is highly improving their cognitive ability. All in all, listening to music in early childhood helps to learn how to read, talk, or even make friends! Additionaly, listening to music is highly recommended to listen with the closed eyes and while the child is sleeping, as his brain is much more eager to gain new information and activates the principle of washcloth. At last, but not the least our eardrums are always improving and developing their abilities to percept the sound and such music lessons are only helps it.
Kinesthetic
This is an ability to use your body to express ideas and feelings, including the physical ability to use hands, legs or other parts of the body for creating or transforming things around us (sculpture, paintings, dance etc.). In this case, music is only improving muscle memory, making your moves softer and more consistence. All in all, child’s kinesthetic intelligence is developing much faster, rather without music. Thus we can define main points of what is actually child is experiencing while listening to music:
easily discovers the environment through touches and movements;
have very good coordination and properly feels the time;
discovers great agility in work that requires both small and large motor skills;
demonstrates balance, grace and accuracy in performing physical tasks (Armstrong).
According to numerous researches music is influencing to the main points of kinesthetic intelligence: motor logic, kinesthetic memory and kinesthetic conversance.
Motor logic includes neuro-muscular skills and here the music affect is very important as while kid is listening to it his neuron connections are in the high tension.
Kinesthetic memory gives a possibility to the child to think in terms of movements, thus music is making them more sophisticated and graceful. This memory is a kind of “procedure knowledge”, automatic moves that adults are doing unconsciously. If you start developing such memory in the early childhood with classic music it will bring the great result in the nearest future.
Kinesthetic conversance is actually that kinesthetic feeling which gives the child information about degree, direction and weight of the move. This feeling operates though the special proprioceptors in the human body, which send the information regarding the pressure and position of the muscles and the music has the direct influence on these points (Zdenek).
Tactical
Tactile sense is very connected with kinesthetic, so the most of music influences on the child are the same. Still, we may identify some specialties, such feeling warm and cold, barbed and smooth, soft and hard etc. At this stage, we cannot identify the direct music influence on these senses, but it can be affected though memory on which music for sure has a huge impact. Thus, once child touches any kind surface he just memorize that feeling, so then it could be recognized after the next touch. As well as remembering what kind of surface can bring satisfaction and are likely to be touched and those, what can bring pain or unnecessary problems. This is usual process of learning: method of tries. Music is only helping to remember the result, so then the child will never do the same mistake, or will understand what should be done to gain pleasure. As some of reflexes are innate, such as clothing your eyes when watching on the sun, getting your arm out of hot surface etc., we have to develop our acquired reflexes, thus if you switch on the music to the child, while teaching him different features, the kid is going to learn and understand them faster.
On the other hand, according to different experiments and experience, the way children learns this or another subjects cannot only depend on does he listen to music or not. As the huge influence in early childhood is made by society and actual environment. Usually, kids from trouble-free families are more able to learn at all, rather than from the poor and underprivileged surroundings. We all know that even in poverty can be born a genius and one of the most famous examples is Ludwig van Beethoven, but how big is a possibility of that. If we consider all pros and contra, the music is for sure a huge effect on infants in the early childhood, but we should not make the main accent only on it, as the whole development depends on too many factors and circumstances. Childhood at all is one of the most complicated part of human development and parents, or anyone who is carrying on the child, should prevent any possible issues and make an impact on providing the infant with the most suitable surrounding.
Skills that are learned and developed throw music
Memory
Memory is one of the main human ability and even the most important. Scientist have spent a lot of time and efforts to define its structure and the system of work. Nowadays, memory is still mostly unknown part of our abilities and we may only guess how information stays there and what kind of neuron connections help us to remember so much and how this information is actually stored. Analysis of modern researches makes sense to state that one of the most important factor of the developing perception, music to consider, is music. While making the research of music influence it is very important to remember the three phases of memorizing stuff:
Memorization phase;
Saving phase;
Playback phase.
And right on the first phase music can bring a huge help. For example, if you need to memorize some large amount of things it is much more helpful to listen the music before, thus you can remember more, rather without this procedure. The most interesting is that nothing can connected with music you listen before and things you have to remember! It is believed that Bach’s polyphonic works helps the best and after system trainings with this compositions in early childhood it becomes visible that child starts to remember things much faster and there is no need to revise the information day after day. Numbers memory is the first thing that improves after music trainings, then goes symbols, logical forms and different descriptions. The role of music listening also should be noted in the phase of memorizing. While placing in memory highly organized musical structure contribute to a more rational structuring memorized material, after organizing the actual process of remembering, which resulted in the same structures sorting the material is integrated much more compactly. Also, the third phase, phase of playback, is affected as music creates a lot of different association of what was remembered and as a result it takes less time to create the actual playback. The only thing is, as was mentioned above such improvements requires a lot of music trainings day by day starting from 2-4 moth old child.
At the modern stage of cognitive psychology development it is very important to make accent on the music effect to children’ intelligence ability. Everybody knows that music is a kind of art, and any art is only influencing the right hemisphere of the brain. Still, music is more than a usual art, as after several music exercises the effect of music starts changing the “field” of activity to the left hemisphere, which is truly great, as it positively resulting on mastering non-musical and non-art subjects.
Accelerated development
Many studies have shown a correlation between musical and non-musical abilities achievements, including abstract thinking, literacy and general intelligence. However, the correlation is not the proof of a mental phenomenon. Only the effects of music education on the dynamics of positive processes, states and abilities of the child may be proof of the hypothesis. It should be noted that in the world of psycho-pedagogical science there are a number of experimental studies about the problem described above. Here we examined the experimental study of the effect of music training on the non-musical spheres of intellectual activity.
Previous research has studied people who played music for a long time (more than five years), so it was interesting to set the time duration of the musical relationship between classes duration and improve memory. To find out how music trainings accelerate children’ development let’s have look at the experiment that was made in the beginning of the 21st century: first of all, it was compared the memory of children with different duration of musical trainings. Then they assumed that infants, who attend music lessons have to show better level of memory rather than those who do not. It was additionally assumed that there should be correlation between duration of the lesson period and level of oral memory. And yes! After successful finish of the experiment scientists has proved that those who attended musical lessons, as a result, demonstrated better level of memory than those who did not. Taking into consideration the fact that at the very beginning kids were chosen with mostly the same IQ, the difference in the memory level cannot be accounted as the difference in the overall intelligence. The result of this experiment showed positive effect of musical lessons on the memory level with not a long period of such lessons (less than 6 years). Therefore, the more musical lessons infant receives in the early childhood, the better oral memory they have (Ho, Cheung and Chan). It means that the better memory in children engaged in music is not just the result of difference in age, education level or family, social and economic statuses. These conclusions are only proving the hypotheses that increasing the number of music trainings will result with transformation of the cerebral cortex in the left hemisphere and, therefore, positively influences on learning ability, so it is accelerating the overall development.
However, some studies have failed to establish a significant connection between music lessons and educational achievements. Although the impact of music on achievement in mathematics is a contentious issue, any of experiments have found that music lessons reduce the development of student achievements. For example, it was found that there is no difference in achievement in mathematics and language between the pupils in the primary school, who did not attend the lessons because of music ones and those who had regularly lectures on these subjects. There are interesting results of the statistical survey of American children, take piano lessons, and their parents and teachers. It turned out that the majority of students-pianists are female (70%), white (80%), live in the suburbs and have a piano at home (96%), live with both parents (84%) with higher education (80% of parents have at least one university degree) and salaries which are above the average (83% of revenues are recorded more than 40 000 USD) (Kvet). Both children and parents, and their teachers believed that music classes multifaceted improve the lives of these children in various ways. The question remains open - is the real cause of these positive effects are lessons on piano or many other elements of their environment.
Another experiment investigated the possibility of a long-term employment relationships between music and intelligence, namely whether these links are permanent after music trainings in early childhood. Students on the first year of studying were proposed IQ test and a questionnaire with questions about grades in the primary and secondary schools, their music classes and family situation (family income, parents' education). Most of the students, who had music lessons before, have finished these classes a few years before the survey. As in the Ho, Cheung and Chan’s experiment, an additional objective was to determine whether music lessons have a general or specific connections with intellectual ability, and determine whether any observed relationships are evident after controlling for potentially mixed factors (family income, parent education, social status) (Plomin et al).
The results of this experiment showed that music lessons in the childhood has a significant impact on IQ of youth and educational success in high school. In particular, regular music lessons have a small but significant and substantial connection with FSIQ (Full Scale IQ), organization of perception, working memory, and these relationships remained significant even after taking into account individual differences in family income, parental education and gender.
The research of these types, as discussed above, have an experimental character and do not derive only from theory. They do not set themselves the goal of developing a theoretical concept which includes music training in the context of the human mind in general. However, attention is drawn to the leading trend that unites many scientists in their quest - to bring music education beyond just hearing perception, and find common links between different activities.
Conclusions
Proving that the thesis is valid and true
Reaffirmation
The results of such experiments have shown that 1) the length of music lessons as a child has a positive effect on general intelligence, and 2) this effect (though small, but significant) applies to general intelligence in adulthood, 3) relationships between music and intelligence have general and broad sense, not specific to a single specific skills, 4) these relationships apply to educational achievement, even taking into account individual differences of general intelligence, 5) any connections between music lessons and social behavior has not been established and 6) non-musical extracurricular measures had a similar effect on intelligence. We know that the role of intelligence in everyday life is very important. For example, the level of intelligence in childhood is critical to academic achievement, school evaluations and professional status, even professional status in 50 years. Interestingly, the level of intelligence in childhood is a determining factor in longevity, including reducing the chances of cancer and cardiac disease in older age, even after accounting for individual differences in socio-economic status.
It is believed that practicing music more often correlated with language skills, which was confirmed by many experimental parameters. Between music and language activities there is a link at the level of information processing methods, which are largely the same in both activities, i.e. the component abilities, which are speaking, music is nonspecific, and therefore it can also occur on the verbal level. However, some scientists about the impact of musical ability to speak the language and are questioning indirectly. In our view, note the similarity of verbal and musical language, which is especially evident in classical music. The presence of the music preset intonation, inherent in every kind of epic intonation vocabulary hierarchy of musical language, which is associated with the musical syntax expressions and sentences verbal language, the existence of a system of rules that govern the ratio of elements like - these and other similarities music and languages allow highlight the importance of linguistic approach to teaching music. Along with the language since ancient times known similarity music and mathematics. The cosmopolitan music theory of the ancient Greeks, treating the musical art of music as the earthly reflection areas numerical magic medieval European musical theories based on mathematical calculations, the ancient Chinese music system "Lu" and return to the exact calculations in some styles of modern music, and finally, beautiful musical idea that is expressed in the ordering and harmony of composition, and an abstract that is unique in the nature of reality music - all to look deep connections between music lessons and mathematical ability.
Works Cited
Armstrong, Thomas. 7 Kinds of Smart. New York, N.Y.: Plume, 1993. Print.
Zdenek, Marilee. The Right-Brain Experience. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1983. Print.
Changizi, Mark. “Why does Music make us feel?” Scientific American 2009. Web.
Hannon, Erin E., and Laurel J. Trainor. 'Music Acquisition: Effects Of Enculturation And Formal Training On Development'. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 11.11 (2007): 466-472. Web.
Ho, Yim-Chi, Mei-Chun Cheung, and Agnes S. Chan. 'Music Training Improves Verbal But Not Visual Memory: Cross-Sectional And Longitudinal Explorations In Children.'. Neuropsychology 17.3 (2003): 439-450. Web.
Kvet, Edward J. 'Excusing Elementary School Students From Regular Classroom Activities For The Study Of Instrumental Music: The Effect On Sixth-Grade Reading, Language, And Mathematics Achievement'. Journal of Research in Music Education 33.1 (1985): 45. Web.
Plomin, R. et al. 'Nature, Nurture, And Cognitive Development From 1 To 16 Years: A Parent-Offspring Adoption Study'. Psychological Science 8.6 (1997): 442-447. Web.