Nina Kraus, director of the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern University and research collaborator on the Harmony Project, has always wondered how musical training can harness the brain’s natural plasticity, or adaptiveness, to help students become better overall students and readers. So she and her colleagues took students at an inner-city Chicago high school and placed half of them in a training course and the other half in a music training course.
According to Magazine.good, she found the kids who were trained in music were able to show faster responses to a speech-in-noise stimulus.
“Music and language skills rely upon auditory processing. Although reading may not be thought of as a primarily auditory activity, its foundation rests on a child making sense of incoming auditory input in order to map speech sounds correctly on to orthographic representations. Many of the same aspects of sound processing that are deficient in children with language and learning impairments have been found to be strengthened in those who receive music training, and music-based interventions have demonstrated some success in the remediation of reading problems, too.”
So educators, if you're reading this: stop fucking cutting funding for the arts. You're making kids worse readers! We also suggest you hook students up with some killer instruments and teach them how to play Dream Theater. You know… because it'll help them read good and also make kickass music at some point.
