From religion to entertainment to swooning over girls, artists have used music as a way to express their emotions towards a specific subject. Throughout time, the effects music has on the mind has been overlooked; that music has the ability to do so much more than just be a form of entertainment. Due to recent experiments, music has been shown to change the behavior of an individual by stimulating the brain and increasing neural connections. Music can not only entertain, but it can also advance learning in the sense it promotes memory, concentration and attention of students in a learning environment.
Uses of music have drastically changed over time, ranging from being used in the church to being used as a way to express one’s inner emotions. From early Egypt music has been used as a way to worship a higher spirit than humans themselves. Music was played through an array of instruments, as well as male and female voices being used to carry the tempo and rhythm of songs. It is no surprise that there were known to be gods that were associated with music, for music playing a huge part in ancient Egypt.
Fast forward a few hundred years and civilians were introduced to music being used as a way to express emotions. During the Renaissance era, a time of free will and self expression ranging outside of the church, groups of men and women, known as madrigals, would go around, often singing romantic songs or reciting poems to other citizens of the town. Most of the time multiple melodies could be heard throughout the songs. Today’s generation, offers a variety of genres to appeal to all age groups. Music is used to sit in your room alone and cry, to do homework with, and to even socialize as well as ncorporating the past uses of music in individuals daily lives.
Music permeates the world–no matter where you are: the store, bathrooms, even elevators; it’s everywhere. The only place we can see it is in our mind. It’s crazy to think that our minds know at birth what music is. Chills are caused, people cry over it, it’s something we can all use in our lives and our brains are the reason why we have such strong opinions about it. The mind and body communicates by neurons sending messages throughout the body to tell the body how to react to specific situations.
Neurons communicate with each other by sending a chemical messenger, a neurotransmitter, through the synaptic clefts of the neuron itself. A neuron has three main parts; dendrites, which receive messages from other neurons, the Cell Body which contains the nucleus and the axon which sends the messages out to other neurons. Neuron activity changes depending on the activity the individual is doing. “It is my intuition that one reason for this stickiness is our inability to conjure up one musical moment and leave it; if our brain flits over any part of music, we are captured by it, and must play it forth to a point of rest. (Margulis 49). By being able to apply repetition in our daily lives, it allows our brain to make connections to outside factors. Activities such as improving memory, changing our daily routines, such as trying to write with your non-dominant hand, and language and word games help speed up neural communications, yet music is seen to promote neural communications the most as seen in multiple studies done across the world, such as Gabriel Kreiman’s research to find a way to control one’s own self known as the “free will” neuron.
Music helps stimulate brain activity which eventually promotes memory, attention and concentration. Concentration in the classroom is critical due to the fact it affects the student’s grades and behavior in the classroom. It makes for students to ask questions more frequently, as well as teachers and parents being able to see a shift in their behavior, not only in the classroom but also on the playground or at home. Concentration will increase the memory of the lecture each student holds.
Memory plays a large part in intelligence, the quality we attribute to the importance of decision-making and abstract thinking, since it allows us to recall facts to help contribute to important choices, we as humans have to make. In the classroom, by providing information to process and obtain, it gives students a chance to exceed on tests and assignments, yet it also gives them the option to fail. Attention can be enhanced due to an increased amount of activity in the brain. Music allows for the brain to become very active, providing a baseline for students to succeed in specific situations.
Attention, memory, and concentration caused by music, can all be incorporated into the classroom to benefit the students’ mood, success rate, and patience. Music will influence learning, but the genre of the music has a big impact on how students react to the music and how they will behave. Throughout a number of experiments, including “The Effect of Music Tempo on Memory Retention” conducted by The University of Wisconsin, faster tempos are seen to raise an individual’s heart rate while slower tempos decreased the individual’s heart rate.
Similarly, another study contained a memory-recall experiment in which the participant was exposed to both the same or varied music tempos while attempting to memorize certain words. The study found that listening to music with a constant tempo while memorizing words triggered a mood-dependent effect that caused the participant to experience heightened memory retention (Balch, William R. et al. 1996)”(The Effect of… 2) The conclusion of the test was that the faster the tempo the poorer students will memorize items while a slower tempo helped increase the chance of memorization occurring.
Music, such as rap and hip hop will put students in a negative environment due to the high tempo and occasional vulgar language, while music such as classical or calm instrumental pieces will increase the student’s concentration allowing for memorization to take place, as stated earlier in the argument. Classical has the ability to place children into a positive mindset due to the brain synchronizing with the beat, producing alpha brain waves, allowing the brain to go into a relaxed, conscious mindset.
Across the world, it is known that no one is the same. All parents will raise their children differently, different cultures eat different foods, and all students learn at a different pace. Over a span of students you are likely to see the students fit into either an intrinsic or an extrinsic group. Music can affect different students in different ways. “The results showed a significant interaction between personality and music on the reading comprehension test; extraverts’ performance suffered less from the music than did performance of the introverts. (Scholz 15). Over a number of experiments, researchers have found that depending on the situation, music can help benefit both introverts and extroverts. In reading comprehension tests extroverts’ scores were less damaged, however when it comes to memory, introverts scored higher, when exposed to music while given the specific information they were required to learn. It’s can’t be said that only one type of person benefits from music, due to the fact we all are born with the ability to recognize music.
Although, music being beneficial to learning, has had a number of experiments to clearly back up the idea that it does, there are also experiments and research projects that prove differently. “Based on both the increase in narrative reading time and the general decrease in reading comprehension scores in the with-music reading section of the student examinations, it is reasonable to conclude that students splitting their attention between reading/studying and preferential music are unable to effectively control their cognitive coordination. (Knight 27).
Music had been seen to decrease the positive behavior of the children, therefore arguing that music puts a negative impact on test scores. However, when listening to the brain, the brain’s neural connections are relatively high in comparison to other activities. The music stimulation on the brain increases memory rates and allows for easier concentration. In conclusion, research has come to show that students receive positive benefits from listening to music in a learning environment, whether it’s testing or reading.
Music has been seen all throughout time, to influence the behavior of individuals in religion as well as in entertainment purposes, yet the learning community has yet to see what music can do to adolescents. Across an arrangement of activities, music has seen to increase neural activity, which then leads to the students mind releasing endorphins, causing the students mood to be lifted, promoting learning to take place.
