Studio3Music Blog

Archive for the ‘Music and the brain’ Category

May
4

Alzheimer’s and The Power of Music

My mom has Alzheimer’s. I can no longer communicate with her. But every time I visit her dementia unit in Ohio, I sing to her.

Growing up, I remember mom singing all the time. In church, in the Gilbert & Sullivan Society, at home on our piano, going about her everyday life. And singing me to sleep every night. She was the reason I became a musician.

So, when I am with her now, I sing, I play ukulele, I lead music time in the recreation room, and we listen to old musicals and Handel’s Messiah, one of her favorites. And mom sings back. She hums all day. Her sentences begin rationally, turn to randomness, and end up as song.

The part of her brain (the left side) where language lives has been damaged, but mom still reacts, responds to and participates when there is music.

I am not an expert in Alzheimer’s research, but I know what I have experienced with my mother. On my last visit, a nurse’s aide was leading the dementia patients in a sing along of old favorites. One of the most lucid comments my mother made during this visit was, “She can’t carry a tune,” referring to the aide. And she said this three times!

I asked the aide if she had another song sheet so I could follow along, and she happily turned over the song-leading to me. (Just try to keep a Kindermusik teacher from singing!) The group joined me happily in song, most of them remembering every word of their old favorite tunes.

Afterwards, I asked mom if I was on pitch, to which she said, “most of the time.” Well, she always was a perfectionist! For the rest of the day, I heard her singing, “Take me Out to the Ballgame.” Those were some of my happiest moments in an otherwise difficult time.

-posted by Miss Judy, who says, “My mother’s name is Annabelle, and she has always had a beautiful voice.”

Here is an article from someone who is an expert, and the author of several wonderful books about the brain, and an amazing video of a man who is revitalized with music.

Dr. Oliver Sacks, Professor of Neurology & Psychiatry, Columbia University

Where I work at a hospital and at a number of old age homes, there are a lot of people who have Alzheimer’s or other dementias of one sort or another. Some of them are confused, some are agitated, some are lethargic, some have almost lost language. But all of them, without exception, respond to music. This is especially true of old songs and songs they once knew. Read more…

Tags: brain, Miss Judy, music

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Apr
30

More Music, Please!

Posted in Family, Music and the brain, Things to do

Asparagus may get a yucky face, but what if you offer extra servings of music? “More Please!” they shout. Good music just makes life better all-around. It is glue for early childhood memories, and developing brains thrive on it. Have you considered upping the minimum daily requirement of music in your children’s diet?

“The Itsy Bitsy Spider” song is one of my earliest favorites. Remember the giddy pride the first time your fingers cooperated to make the spider climb forefinger to thumb, up, up, up? I also remember standing in a circle on the multi-colored oval braided rug in our Sunday school room as we sang and played “The Farmer in the Dell.” What songs bring back your childhood scenes? Tub songs? Bedtime songs? Car trip songs? Consider adding those or a few new ones to your child’s daily routine. You’ll be providing happy memories that will stick with them for life.

Even more important than placing tunes in their musical scrapbook, daily music will help your kids’ brains develop. But if you come to Kindermusik, you already knew that! Kindermusik is based on the science of how music positively influences brain growth. More sensory stimulation equals more neural connections, which is how intelligence develops. To get the most out of your Kindermusik investment, do your musical homework with your kids. It’s fun that pays back.

Delight, pleasure, fun, joy….music adds all these to life. When we travelled, my parents sang their generation of pop songs. We enthusiastically learned them and sang along. (My mischievous father taught us his Navy drinking songs, too!) What silly fun, all the more memorable for its benign naughtiness and how quickly music made the miles whizz by.

When doing chores, “whistle while you work” turned drudgery to fun. In my teen years, cleaning up the kitchen was my nightly job. I put on my favorite music (turned up loud, of course), which made the task fun. Named “Music-To-Do-Dishes-By,” the practice became a memorable part our family tradition. How has music sprinkled happiness into chapters of your life? Consider passing those pleasures on to your children.

Quite simply, music makes life better. It creates happy memories and it’s good for us! Why not be more intentional about your child’s musical intake? Add more music into the nooks and crannies of your life. Sing, hum, whistle. Expose your kids to concerts in the park, classic CD’s–like Disney musicals, Tom Chapin, Farmer Jason, Putnamayo, and your own favorite playlist. The possibilities are endless.

Cook up some music at home, too. As a child, an old ice cream tub held my cymbals, a triangle, tambourine, bongo drums, maracas and recorder flute, which made for endless musical creativity. Buy a keyboard, or a piano, or guitar so they can experiment. Musical fun helps create a happy family life.

Make your house a place where your children can easily dish up all the music they want.

-posted by Donna Detweiler who is glad that through the library, radio, and community events, incorporating good music into her children’s lives can be very affordable!

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Apr
26

Music made me like math. (And I wasn’t even trying.)

Posted in Education, Music and the brain

I was a music major in college. I loved music. I didn’t love math. (Okay, I did rather like Geometry.) I always got A’s in math in high school, but it was hard. In my day, one only had to take 3 years of high school math to get into university. But once I got there, I was told I had to take two math courses to graduate. Ugh. The very last semester of my fifth year (my degree was a five year degree – it was supposed to be four, but explain to me how they expect you to fit 5 consecutive years of music theory into 4?), I enrolled in the required Algebra 103 class.

A week into class, I was thinking my SAT scores had put me in the wrong class. I double checked, but nope, I was where I was supposed to be. It had been SIX years since I had cracked a math textbook. And yet, this stuff called Algebra was easy! I finally understood math. It was all about patterns.

Halfway through the semester, my math professor called me into her office, and said that I really should be in a much higher level math, and had I considered a math minor? Uh, nope. I hated math. Well, wait a minute. I didn’t really hate math anymore. It made sense, and I actually liked being successful at it.

It didn’t take me long to figure out why. If you’ve ever spent time in the dungeons of a music department, you’ll soon discover that 95% of the double majors are music and some sort of math or math-heavy science. The french horn and bassoon players (being generally both the smartest and funniest and strangest of the music breeds) are the astrophysicists, the biochemists, and the aeronautical engineers. (Oh, please, don’t send me nasty emails if you are a clarinet player with a job in the field of quantum mechanics. I’m sure there are brilliant clarinetists out there, too!)

I realized that my 5 years of music theory was, like math, all about patterns. The music had somehow trained my brain to comprehend math.

Years later, when I started learning about how music helps develops the brain, I found a much more sophisticated answer. Imaging studies have shown that mathematical processing and musical training activate the same areas of the brain.

It appears that early musical training begins to build the same neural networks that will later be used to complete mathematical tasks. Although I played an instrument starting in 5^th grade, I didn’t really have any good musical training – theory, private lessons, Kindermusik, etc.

So, my years of music theory, ear training, piano, conducting, private lessons and singing in college really did help those neural networks to grow. How I wish I’d had music training when I was very young, all the way through high school. I might have liked math better.

Of all the academic subjects, music and math are the most closely related. Music and math both require lots of counting. Within that counting, there are musical intervals, (the difference in pitch between two notes), and the math counterpart, arithmetic and geometric sequences.

Playing music also requires an good understanding of fractions, including adding and subtracting them. Reading music notes is dependant on comprehension of ratios and proportions – how long is a half note compared to a quarter note? How do you play triplets against sixteenth notes? Geometry is used when remembering finger and slide positions.

My heart introduced my children to music for love, and joy, and pleasure. My head introduced music to my children so I could give them the very best start in life. Even if they don’t follow in my footsteps and become a music major, they’ll still reap the benefits their musical experiences.

-posted by Miss Analiisa, who is tickled when her violin playing 4^th grader asks his instructor to “teach him some theory”.

Tags: brain, kindermusik, learning, Miss Analiisa, music

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Mar
1

Zepplin tangles Tetris, but Brahms soothes the snappy.

Posted in Bits and Pieces, Music and the brain

According to the report on the radio (start here if you haven’t read the lead in story to the “report on the radio”) it seems that most people are affected just like I am. A study was done recently (and of course, they listed where and by whom at the beginning of the report, before I was interested, so I don’t remember, but it was on Morning Addition, NPR.)

The researchers gathered two groups of college students, gave them all an assignment to do, and put them in two separate rooms. In one room they played Bach and Dvorak – both classical composers. In the other room, they played hardcore techno rock. (I really don’t know what that means, but it does sound really awful.) When the music/homework time was over, a group of professors went into each room and harshly critiqued the students’ work.

Can't you just hear the irritating music?

Now the study got interesting. The students in the techno room and the students in the classical room reacted differently to the criticism. The techno students were much more likely to get angry than the classical students. Listening to the techno music increased their levels of aggression, and decreased their happiness levels. I’m sure the students who listened to the classical music weren’t happy about having their work reviewed so harshly, but they didn’t respond the same way as the other students.

I recently had a similar experience. Last summer, we took our teenage sons and two friends to the amusement park in Idaho. It’s a six hour drive, so we took turns choosing the music we would listen to. Nathaniel, my 15-year-old son, got the first pick. He chose Led Zepplin. I was playing Tetris, and after the first song my game started to fall apart.

After the third song, I couldn’t stack the square pieces on top of each other, let alone make the zig-zags, and the Ls, and that other shape go together properly. It was really irritating. I usually play a nice clean and tidy game of Tetris. I can “fix” a tower with multiple holes and get my stack back to solid square. I very seldom ever clear a single line – the game is Tetris, right? So I clear four lines at a time.

This was the worst game if Tetris I had played in years. And I was really irritated about it. We stopped for gas and I snapped at all four boys to clean up their snack mess, and not to wander off, and to be polite in the gas station. They stared at me, kinda shocked. I like these kids, all of them, and seldom snap at them, even when they track filthy mud in the house, and leave their backpacks in front of the door and I can’t even get in the house. (I do make them clean it up, but with a smile and a joke.)

Gotta be Brahms or the Beatles.

By the time all eleven songs in the playlist were done my shoulders were hunched up and my skin hurt, it was crawling all over the place trying to get out of the car and then, thankfully it was my turn to pick the music. We listened to Brahms, and I apologized for being snappy less than halfway through the first song. It was an instant fix for me.

As a footnote, Nathaniel does listen to some dreadful music, and he likes it really loud. But recently I’ve noticed that he plays the really awful music for a little while, and then it gets swapped for Glad and the Nylons and Straight No- Chaser and the soundtrack to Glee and some wacky song sung by a Russian Bass who only says OOOO…. And I hear the Beatles and the Monkees, and I hear hope… hope that Led Zeppelin may be on the train heading out of the front door of my house, along with the other stuff that makes me cranky, so cranky I don’t even want to know their names.

-posted by Miss Allison, who wants you to head over to Facebook right now to continue the conversation by telling her what music totally drives you up a wall, makes you completely cranky and irritated, and what music soothes your soul.

Tags: listening, Miss Allison, music

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Feb
19

Giddy up horsey… go, go, STOP!

Posted in Child Development, Music and the brain, Our Time, Things to do

We’ve been working on self-control in our Our Time classes. Can you do that with 2 year olds? Actually, yes! You can teach self-control, even to toddlers. Of course, the concept takes a while to master (I’ll be the first to admit I have limited self-control around Godiva sea salt dark chocolate, but I’m working on that.)

There are two parts to self-control. The first is inhibitory control, which is the ability to stop what you are doing and wait. (The other part is impulse control, which is the ability to stop an idea or thought from becoming an action.) But as inhibitory control develops first, we’ll begin there.

In class, we’ve been playing with a chant called Giddy Up Horsey. You can do this at home, too. Put your child on your lap on the floor, and say this chant and as you bounce:

Giddy up horsey, giddy up horsey, giddy up horsey, go, go, go! Bounce your child up and down.

Giddy, up horsey, giddy up horsey, giddy up horsey WHOA!! When you get to the whoa, stop bouncing, and lean back with your child and stop. Wait quietly for a moment. Keep repeating the whole thing until the giggles subside.

Then in class, we’ve been getting up and riding stick horses around to the same chant, stopping our ponies and waiting to be told to “go” again, (the inhibitory control part) after the whoa.

Miss Allison had an interesting observation this week. She said that because the grownups were in charge of the child’s body during the bounce, they were showing the children how to control their bodies (how to stop at the appropriate time). The grownups were teaching the children the pattern and the how of the going, stopping, and waiting.

When the children got up on the stick horses, they were more ready and able to control their own bodies. They were familiar with the pattern, and could anticipate the whoa. Miss Allison said that in classes that did the bounce first, before the pony riding, the children had a much higher success rate of demonstrating inhibitory control when in charge of their bodies during the pony ride, than the ones who just did the ride.

That fits with what we always say – You are your child’s first and best teacher.

So, do a little bouncing this week. And keep your eye on the blog. I’ve got an idea about how to make a really adorable stick pony to practice the riding and stopping and waiting (cleverly disguised inhibitory control practice). I just need to get the idea out of my head and take some pictures of the process. I promise – under $5 and NO sewing!

Oh, I almost forgot. For a fun stop and go game at home or in the car, check out this cute idea.

-posted by Miss Analiisa, who will practice some pony riding every time she’s having difficulty practicing either inhibitory or impulse control around that Godiva sea salt dark chocolate.