The Affects Of Music On Children

9 Pages 2215 Words

Music is no longer simply a way to relax and express your self anymore. Rather, it is a way to expand the brain’s faculties. From the beginning of life as a fetus until death music affects everyone’s lives. Indeed, it has been shown, that music has a profound effect on a child’s physical, intellectual and social development. To a great extent, through the early stages of childhood one can truly understand how worthwhile music is in a growing child’s life.
The interest on how music affects young children began toward the latter part of the 19th century. Studies were taken up to determine an infant’s musical abilities. It appears that until the middle of the twentieth century, scientists failed to appreciate the capabilities of infants. They presumed that because infants lack speech and spend so much time eating and sleeping that not much cognition was going on inside an infant’s head. That view was largely displaced with the fact that infants have considerable musical abilities. For example, infants can perceive and distinctly remember not only the contour, but also the pattern of rising and falling pitches in a piece of music. They can also recognize a melody as the same when it is played at a very different tempo. Infant perception and cognition have been found to be similar to the ways in which adult listeners process music.
Through the scientific discovery of musical abilities in infants there is never the less, a question that arises. To address this issue, at what age, do these types of abilities first appear? To answer this question, scientists must focus on the issue of whether or not infants remember their birth or even the experiences that go along with it. To do this they primarily rely on anecdotes, which claim that people have detailed memories of birth or even in utero experiences. Chiefly, the reliability of these stories have been claimed on the basis either of hypothetical reasoning or that...