I agree with Sam, Ian and others that the cognitive benefits of music tend to be overestimated, often for non-scientific reasons. Similar effects can be seen in the literature on benefits for health care. I have been critical in the public debate about these ’shouting ourselves in the foot claims' (mostly in Dutch, e.g. [1]).
Nevertheless, I believe that showing that music matters, is a good thing, while being appreciative of individual differences (btw fundamental to a phenomics and genetics of musicality [2]) and differences across cultures and societies [3]. Music is not just culture, and it is also not just biology.
Henkjan
[3] https://doi.org/10.1525/mp.2020.37.3.185
Hi AUDITORY, not that anyone asked, but I agree with Ian, and wrote to that effect in this Times op-ed https://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/22/opinion/sunday/music-and-success.htmlBut even if future studies fail to support the existence of music’s cognitive benefits, this should not deter parents from providing their children with music lessons. Our findings in no way diminish the intrinsic value of music education, which is so obvious that it needs no validation from empirical study. We’ve made literature, history, mathematics and science core elements of education. Why should music — a human activity older than the written word — be any different?
My colleagues and I urge parents, teachers, school administrators and policy makers to make music education a part of children’s lives for the musical skills it imparts, the cultural knowledge it conveys and, above all, the joy it brings. As Aristotle wrote, music “makes the hearts of men glad: so that on this ground alone we may assume that the young ought to be trained in it.”
Samuel Mehr Department of Psychology Harvard University
To play devil's advocate here, I'm not
sure that the question of whether or not musical training has
effects beyond
music in is worth asking, other than in the political attempt to
counter the
philistinism of a utilitarian capitalism that discounts any
investment in activities
that are not obviously of immediate economic value. One of the
persistent
problems with research into phenomena such as "effects of musical
training" or "genetics of musicality" is a failure to recognise
the culture-specificity of the concepts "musical training" and
"musicality". Even in what
might be construed as the fairly homogeneous musical culture of
contemporary Europe,
different skills are accorded different degrees of importance in
different national
music-educational traditions. "Musicality"
across Europe is something of a Frankenstein concept — and once
one moves
beyond Europe the diversity of what might count as "musicality"
only
increases. Hence one would
expect to
find quite different answers to the question that are highly
dependent on
cultural context — even if one could identify what one intends by
the term
"music" in the first place.
Best,
Ian Cross
On 15/08/2020 07:57, Colette McKAY
wrote:
note that papers comparing musicians
and non-musicians in cross-sectional studies cannot separate
effects of music training and innate (genetic based)
characteristics.
Similarly, in those studies, correlations of effects with
amount of music training or engagement in training cannot
separate effects of training and innate characteristics.
Longitudinal training studies with careful control of
expectation bias and innate characteristics are the only valid
way to see if the training itself is being transferred
to other cognitive or sensory domains. Unfortunately most of
those studies have low quality research designs and the chance
of finding an effect of music training is positively
correlated with poor design (inappropriate or no control, no
randomisation, wrong statistics). e.g. Sala, G., & Gobet, F. (2020).
Cognitive and academic benefits of music training with
children: A multilevel meta-analysis. Mem Cognit.
doi:10.3758/s13421-020-01060-2 found
null effect of music training on cognitive outcomes when
the correlation of effect size with quality of research
design was partialled out of the analysis.
There is also a growing literature of genetic studies and
twin studies that highlight the genetic differences between
people with musical aptitude or not. This link is largely
ignored in "music training" studies
best,
Colette McKay
University of Amsterdam Faculty of Humanities Faculty of Science Prof. dr Henkjan Honing Professor of Music Cognition .
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