Music:

• builds self-esteem and confidence
• provides needed structure for students with ADHD
• provides opportunity to increase social skills for those with anxiety or social phobia -serves as an outlet to relieve stress
• improves fine motor skills -improves memory and concentration
• increases satisfaction in life and instills a sense of knowledge
• teaches self-discipline

Studies Show That:

1. The real-world effects of musical training on intellectual abilities are (a) larger with longer periods of training, (b) long lasting, (c) not attributable to obvious confounding variables, and (d) distinct from those nonmusical out-of-school activities.
2. Music improves spatial perception and abstract reasoning.
3. Students who combine music lessons with special computer program score significantly higher in math skills.
4. Music training causes long-term enhancement of pre-school children's spatial-temporal reasoning.
5. Students with four or more years of music study outscore, by 82 points on the SAT, students with six months or less of music instruction.
6. Student reading and math scores rise significantly as a result of music enhanced curricula.
7. Students who study music make better grades than students who do not study music.
8. Music students have a lower school drop-out rate than non-music students.
9. Students participating in music study have better school attendance than students who do not participate.
10. Students involved in music have lower discipline referrals than students not involved in music.
11. College music majors who apply to medical school have the highest acceptance rate of any other field (66.7% acceptance rate).
12. Music has beneficial effects in attention capacity and memory, and distractibility.
13. Teaching elderly people to play musical instruments decreases anxiety, loneliness, and depression; and is critical in coping with stress, stimulating the immune system, and improving overall health.
14. Music provides a healthy release from damaging, pent-up emotions.
15. Youth involvement in arts programs significantly decreases frequency of delinquent behavior and court referrals, and increases communication skills and ability to stick to tasks from beginning to end.
16. Patients who have lost part of their visual awareness following a stroke can show an improved ability to see when they are listening to music they like.
17. Listening to music can reduce chronic pain by up to 21% and depression by up to 25%.
18. Listening to any music that is personally enjoyable has positive effects on cognition. The use of music to enhance memory suggests that musical recitation enhances the coding of information by activating neural networks in a more united and thus more optimal fashion.
19. Listening to music may benefit patients who suffer severe stress and anxiety. A Cochrane Systematic Review found that listening to music could decrease blood pressure, heart rate, and levels of anxiety in heart patients. Listening to music provided some relief for coronary heart disease patients suffering from anxiety, buy reducing heart rate and blood pressure. Music listening also improved moods.
20. Musical training might be good for the heart. They suggest that this could therefore be helpful in heart disease and stroke. Other research has shown that music can cut stress, improve athletic performance, improve movement in neurologically impaired patients.
21. Music training, with its pervasive effects on the nervous system's ability to process sight and sound, may be more important for enhancing verbal communication skills than learning phonics. Since training is inherently more accessible to children than phonics, the new research suggests, music training may have considerable benefits for engendering literacy skills.
22. The study of music promotes intellectual development according to a study conducted out of the University of Toronto. The study revealed that increases in IQ from pre- to post-test were larger in the music groups.
23. Music lessons taken in or out of school has a positive effect on reading and mathematic achievement in early childhood and adolescence. Music is positively associated with academic achievement, especially during the high school years.
24. Music education can help children improve reading skills according to a study published in the journal Psychology of Music.
25. A Harvard-based study has found that children who study a musical instrument for at least three years out perfrom children with no instrumental training-not only in tests of auditory discrimination and finger dexterity, but also on test measuring verbal ability and visual pattern completion.
26. Children motivated in the arts develop attention skills and strategies for memory retrieval that also apply to other subject areas. There appear to be specific links between the practice of music and skills in geometrical representation. One of the central predictors of early literacy, phonological awareness, is correlated with both music training and the development of a specific brain pathway.
27. Playing a musical instrument significantly enhances the brainstem's sensitivity to speech sounds. Increasing music experience appears to benefit all children -- whether musically exceptional or not -- in a wide range of learning activities.
28. Researchers have found the first evidence that young children who take music lessons show different brain development and improved memory over the course of a year compared to children who do not receive musical training.