Pat Melfi – K-12 music programs, K-12 art programs, K-12 classes, music, arts, STEM grants

JACKIE EVANCHO, “Behind My Eyes 2.0”

Pat Melfi — Fri, 01 Mar 2024 03:54:05 +0000

In September 2023, thirteen years and over half her life since entering our cultural consciousness as runner up on the fifth season of America’s Got Talent, Jackie Evancho wrote a heartfelt Facebook post announcing the release of the song and lyric video for her new single “Behind My Eyes.”

Written by Jackie and produced by founding Smash Mouth member Greg Camp, the hip, sultry and soulful, easy grooving track balanced the inviting lower register of the singer’s stunning four octave vocal range with her more familiar high notes while also showcasing her songwriting artistry as a young woman in her early 20s, steadily making her way past her years as a globally acclaimed child vocal prodigy.

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Mathematicians have finally proven that Bach was a great composer

Pat Melfi — Thu, 15 Feb 2024 17:52:19 +0000

Converting hundreds of compositions by Johann Sebastian Bach into mathematical networks reveals that they store lots of information and convey it very effectively

By Karmela Padavic-Callaghan

2 February 2024

Johann Sebastian Bach was a great composer – according to information theory

The Granger Collection / Alamy Stock Photo

Johann Sebastian Bach is considered one of the great composers of Western classical music. Now, researchers are trying to figure out why – by analysing his music with information theory.

Suman Kulkarni at the University of Pennsylvania and her colleagues wanted to understand how the ability to recall or anticipate a piece of music relates to its structure. They chose to analyse Bach’s opus because he produced an enormous number of pieces (Click Here to Read the Full Story)

Music Education at School: Too Little and Too Late? Evidence From a Longitudinal Study on Music Training in Preadolescents

Pat Melfi — Sun, 13 Mar 2022 15:57:34 +0000

It is widely believed that intensive music training can boost cognitive and visuo-motor skills. However, this evidence is primarily based on retrospective studies; this makes it difficult to determine whether a cognitive advantage is caused by the intensive music training, or it is instead a factor influencing the choice of starting a music curriculum. To address these issues in a highly ecological setting, we tested longitudinally 128 students of a Middle School in Milan, at the beginning of the first class and, 1 year later, at the beginning of the second class. 72 students belonged to a Music curriculum (30 with previous music experience and 42 without) and 56 belonged to a Standard curriculum (44 with prior music experience and 12 without). Using a Principal Component Analysis, all the cognitive measures were grouped in four high-order factors, reflecting (a) General Cognitive Abilities, (b) Speed of Linguistic Elaboration, (c) Accuracy in Reading and Memory tests, and (d) Visuospatial and numerical skills. The longitudinal comparison of the four groups of students revealed that students from the Music curriculum had better performance in tests tackling General Cognitive Abilities, Visuospatial skills, and Accuracy in Reading and Memory tests. However, there were no significant curriculum-by-time interactions. Finally, the decision to have a musical experience before entering middle school was more likely to occur when the cultural background of the families was a high one. We conclude that a combination of family-related variables, early music experience, and pre-existent cognitive make-up is a likely explanation for the decision to enter a music curriculum at middle school.

Introduction

Music training involves many neurocognitive systems, like audition, vision, motor control and their integration. Over the last 20 years, there has been a considerable increase of interest in the relationship between such training and the maturation of cognitive skills.

Effect of Music Learning on Cognitive Development in Children

There is also a wealth of studies suggesting that music training may have a sizeable effect on cognitive maturation during childhood; it remains to be established at what stage of the development this might be so, whether music affects cognition in a broad sense or whether the effect is specific for cognitive skills that one may readily associate with music (e.g., auditory processing).

Schellenberg (2004) investigated whether music training has an impact on the IQ in a wide sample of children randomly assigned to a music training group, to an art training group or to the control group: music training had a boosting effect on the IQ, while training in arts was more effective on social behavior. Two further studies by Schellenberg (2006, 2011) confirmed an association between IQ and the duration of music training.

The IQ is a lumped measure of several functions and the observation of superior IQs in musically trained subjects does not demonstrate per se a generalized cognitive boosting effect. Other studies have tried to pinpoint the cognitive domains on which music training might have an effect on cognitive development. Not surprisingly, positive effects were found on cognitive abilities that have a close relationship with music, for example auditory processing (Trainor et al., 2003), phonological awareness (Moreno et al., 2011b; Francois et al., 2013) prosody (Thompson et al., 2004). It has to be noted that phonological and prosodic skills represent higher order auditory skills.

However, as for adults, other studies have found effects of music training on domains that are not specifically “musical” in any obvious sense, like learning skills and memory: children trained with music lessons have better performance in verbal memory tasks (Ho et al., 2003; Roden et al., 2012), verbal intelligence (Moreno et al., 2011a), language processing (see Patel, 2003, 2011) visuo-spatial skills (Rauscher et al., 1997), arithmetic (see Vaughn, 2000) and reading skills (Corrigall and Trainor, 2011; Tierney and Kraus, 2013; Slater et al., 2014). Accordingly, these developmental results seem to support, like the data from adults, a generalized “boosting effect hypothesis” of music on cognition.

Yet, a few issues remain open with this literature. For example, it is still possible that some of the effects that music seems to have on non-music-related skills may still be mediated by cognitive functions that it is not too hard to associate with music. One obvious example is the one of music and reading. According to a recent meta-analysis (Gordon et al., 2015), music training would positively affect reading skills via its effects on phonological skills². A similar caveat is supported also by the results of musically-based treatments on children with learning difficulty and disabilities (Overy, 2003; Register et al., 2007; Cogo-Moreira et al., 2012; Flaugnacco et al., 2015) in which children with reading deficits showed a post-treatment improvement not only in reading tasks, but also in phonological tasks. The data on the visuospatial skills, and particularly on visual memory, are not clear either. As pointed out by Roden et al. (2012), the research performed in school contexts has provided non-conclusive or conflicting results: the visuospatial advantage reported by Gardiner et al. (1996), could be due to the fact that in that study children were trained both in music and visual arts making it impossible to distinguish whether any advantage was due to music training, to visual art training or to their combination. In the same vein, another study focused on music training at school (Rickard et al., 2010) reported an effect on verbal memory, even though this may not be a long-lasting one: on the other hand, the same study could not find a sizeable effects of music training on visual memory skills (Roden et al., 2012).

Longitudinal studies designed to document brain morphometry changes associated with music training (e.g., Hyde et al., 2009; Habibi et al., 2018) revealed signs of brain plasticity together with group specific changes in behavioral performance, yet only for domains strictly related to music training (e.g., audition, motor skills). A further evidence along these lines comes from brain morphometry studies that found a significantly larger corpus callosum, a marker of more efficient inter-hemispheric traffic, in people who started a music training before 7 years of age (see Schlaug, 2015 for a review).

However, as discussed below, all the considerations about the effects of music training, with the exception perhaps of those based on the few available longitudinal studies³, suffer of a major lingering limitation: the inability to distinguish causes and effects, to determine in a conclusive manner whether the cognitive advantage seen in musically-trained children or in adults is a genuine effect of the training, whether it is a specific one or whether it is a spurious effect due to the fact that a future musician may decide to join an educational program with intensive music training because of his predispositions. If the latter hypothesis were correct, it would be tempting to concur with Schellenberg and his statement that “music training is better suited for studying pre-existing differences in terms of brain and cognitive development rather than training specific plasticity” (Schellenberg, 2011, p. 297).

Aim of the Study

As mentioned, one main limitation of previous literature is that the empirical observations made and the implications inferred were based primarily on retrospective or cross-sectional studies. Yet, the same issues could be better addressed and discussed using carefully designed longitudinal prospective studies (Schellenberg, 2004, 2006, 2011; Corrigall and Trainor, 2011; Moreno et al., 2011a; Tierney and Kraus, 2014) where one takes into account both the family’s cultural/socioeconomic status, the cognitive skills of the kids under examination and the school teaching content. One such approach may better discriminate the contribution of natural and nurture related factors (Sameroff, 2010) in this area of cognitive developmental psychology.

This is what we tried to achieve with the present study. In the light of these considerations, and with the aim of making a further step toward a better understanding on whether music may have a specific boosting effect on cognitive functions, we designed a longitudinal quasi-experimental⁴ study based on the assessment of cognitive development in pre-adolescents with and without previous music experience who attended either a music or a standard curriculum.

The decision to concentrate our efforts on pre-adolescents over their attendance to the middle school was motivated by pragmatic reasons: the time of the middle school is the only occasion when the Italian education system offers any programed instrumental music training, i.e., 2 h per week in canonical curricula or 5 h per week, including 2 h of music in ensemble, for the music curricula in the middle school where our study was based⁵.

Participants in the experimental group were about to start a music curriculum in middle school and were compared to their classmates who attended a standard curriculum. This comparison allowed us to keep the possible confounders under control and to isolate, as much as possible, the effect of more intensive music training. Sampling the children by their choice to attend either the music or the standard curriculum and by their previous music training allowed us to assess their starting features and the effect of music training on a vast pool of cognitive dimensions in the same group of participants.

In what follows we report a longitudinal study based on cognitive tests on preadolescent students of the Negri-Calasanzio Middle School, located in the San Siro district of Milan (Italy). We assessed non-verbal reasoning, language, reading, memory, numerical, and visuo-spatial skills.

As some students had previous music experiences, i.e., private lessons or music laboratory in which they played an instrument during primary school for at least one continuative year, we also took into account this additional variable, grouping the sample by the school curriculum and by the presence or absence of previous music experience. Finally, in our results we also considered the possible influence of parents’ education.

In sum, in this longitudinal study we explored whether the kids who decided to attend the music curriculum show any cognitive advantage with respect to the standard group, on the one hand, and whether the intensive music training can moderate the developmental trajectories of these groups. We expected that the previous musical experience and perhaps the familial socio-cultural status could predict an overall better cognitive performance: yet, it remained a matter of empirical evaluation whether music training could have a further boosting effect in promoting cognitive maturation showing a group-by-time interaction effect and whether this was a generalized one or a specific one.

Materials and Methods

Participants

All the participants were recruited during the school years 2014/2015, 2015/2016, and 2016/2017 at the Negri-Calasanzio Middle School of San Siro, Milan.

Students were enrolled in the study after obtaining written informed consent from the parents.

During the 3 years of study, a total of 351 students belonging to all classes of the institute were tested. To avoid potential confounds, in the following analyses we included only participants who never failed their finals, who did not received a prior diagnosis of a learning disability, who underwent the first evaluation at 6^th grade, corresponding to the first year of middle school in Italy, and who participated in the study in both the 6^th and the 7^th grade (Table 1). None of the participants had a medical history of neurological, developmental or psychiatric disorders. After this selection, we obtained a sample of 128 students (56 males and 72 females, see Table 1 for more details).

WHY WE LOVE MUSIC

Pat Melfi — Thu, 03 Feb 2022 20:40:37 +0000

I still remember when I first heard the song by Peter Gabriel, “Solsbury Hill.” Something about that song—the lyrics, the melody, the unusual 7/4 time signature—gave me chills. Even now, years later, it still can make me cry.

Who among us doesn’t have a similar story about a song that touched us? Whether attending a concert, listening to the radio, or singing in the shower, there’s something about music that can fill us with emotion, from joy to sadness.

Music impacts us in ways that other sounds don’t, and for years now, scientists have been wondering why. Now they are finally beginning to find some answers. Using fMRI technology, they’re discovering why music can inspire such strong feelings and bind us so tightly to other people.

“Music affects deep emotional centers in the brain, “ says Valorie Salimpoor, a neuroscientist at McGill University who studies the brain on music. “A single sound tone is not really pleasurable in itself; but if these sounds are organized over time in some sort of arrangement, it’s amazingly powerful.”

How music makes the brain happy

How powerful? In one of her studies, she and her colleagues hooked up participants to an fMRI machine and recorded their brain activity as they listened to a favorite piece of music. During peak emotional moments in the songs identified by the listeners, dopamine was released in the nucleus accumbens, a structure deep within the older part of our human brain.

“That’s a big deal, because dopamine is released with biological rewards, like eating and sex, for example,” says Salimpoor. “It’s also released with drugs that are very powerful and addictive, like cocaine or amphetamines.”

There’s another part of the brain that seeps dopamine, specifically just before those peak emotional moments in a song: the caudate nucleus, which is involved in the anticipation of pleasure. Presumably, the anticipatory pleasure comes from familiarity with the song—you have a memory of the song you enjoyed in the past embedded in your brain, and you anticipate the high points that are coming. This pairing of anticipation and pleasure is a potent combination, one that suggests we are biologically-driven to listen to music we like.

But what happens in our brains when we like something we haven’t heard before? To find out, Salimpoor again hooked up people to fMRI machines. But this time she had participants listen to unfamiliar songs, and she gave them some money, instructing them to spend it on any music they liked.

When analyzing the brain scans of the participants, she found that when they enjoyed a new song enough to buy it, dopamine was again released in the nucleus accumbens. But, she also found increased interaction between the nucleus accumbens and higher, cortical structures of the brain involved in pattern recognition, musical memory, and emotional processing.

This finding suggested to her that when people listen to unfamiliar music, their brains process the sounds through memory circuits, searching for recognizable patterns to help them make predictions about where the song is heading. If music is too foreign-sounding, it will be hard to anticipate the song’s structure, and people won’t like it—meaning, no dopamine hit. But, if the music has some recognizable features—maybe a familiar beat or melodic structure—people will more likely be able to anticipate the song’s emotional peaks and enjoy it more. The dopamine hit comes from having their predictions confirmed—or violated slightly, in intriguing ways.

“It’s kind of like a roller coaster ride,” she says, “where you know what’s going to happen, but you can still be pleasantly surprised and enjoy it.”

Salimpoor believes this combination of anticipation and intense emotional release may explain why people love music so much, yet have such diverse tastes in music—one’s taste in music is dependent on the variety of musical sounds and patterns heard and stored in the brain over the course of a lifetime. It’s why pop songs are, well, popular—their melodic structures and rhythms are fairly predictable, even when the song is unfamiliar—and why jazz, with its complicated melodies and rhythms, is more an acquired taste. On the other hand, people tend to tire of pop music more readily than they do of jazz, for the same reason—it can become too predictable.

Her findings also explain why people can hear the same

song over and over again and still enjoy it. The emotional hit off of a familiar piece of music can be so intense, in fact, that it’s easily re-stimulated even years later.

“If I asked you to tell me a memory from high school, you would be able to tell me a memory,” says Salimpoor. “But, if you listened to a piece of music from high school, you would actually feel the emotions.”

How music synchronizes brains

Ed Large, a music psychologist at the University of Connecticut, agrees that music releases powerful emotions. His studies look at how variations in the dynamics of music—slowing down or speeding up of rhythm, or softer and louder sounds within a piece, for example—resonate in the brain, affecting one’s enjoyment and emotional response.

In one study, Large and colleagues had participants listen to one of two variations on a Chopin piece: In version one, the piece was played as it normally is, with dynamic variations, while in version two, the piece was played mechanically, without these variations. When the participants listened to the two versions while hooked up to an fMRI machine, their pleasure centers lit up during dynamic moments in the version one song, but didn’t light up in version two. It was as if the song had lost its emotional resonance when it lost its dynamics, even though the “melody” was the same.

“In fact, when we debriefed the listeners after the experiment was over, they didn’t even recognize that we were playing the same piece of music,” says Large.

When playing the more dynamic version, Large also observed activity in the listener’s mirror neurons —the neurons implicated in our ability to experience internally what we observe externally. The neurons fired more slowly with slower tempos, and faster with faster tempos, suggesting that mirror neurons may play an important role in processing musical dynamics and affecting how we experience music.

“Musical rhythms can directly affect your brain rhythms, and brain rhythms are responsible for how you feel at any given moment,” says Large.

That’s why when people get together and hear the same music—such as in a concert hall—it tends to make their brains synch up in rhythmic ways, inducing a shared emotional experience, he says. Music works in much the same way language works—using a combination of sound and dynamic variations to impart a certain understanding in the listener.

“If I’m a performer and you’re a listener, and what I’m playing really moves you, I’ve basically synchronized your brain rhythm with mine,” says Large. “That’s how I communicate with you.”

Different notes for different folks

Other research on music supports Large’s theories. In one study, neuroscientists introduced different styles of songs to people and monitored brain activity. They found that music impacts many centers of the brain simultaneously; but, somewhat surprisingly, each style of music made its own pattern, with uptempo songs creating one kind of pattern, slower songs creating another, lyrical songs creating another, and so on. Even if people didn’t like the songs or didn’t have a lot of musical expertise, their brains still looked surprisingly similar to the brains of people who did.

But if our brains all synch up when we hear the same basic dynamic differences in music, why don’t we all respond with the same pleasure?

Large, like Salimpoor, says that this difference in preference is due to how our neurons are wired together, which in turn is based on our own, personal history of listening to or performing music. Rhythm is all about predictability, he says, and our predictions about music start forming from a pretty early age onward. He points to the work of Erin Hannon at the University of Nevada who found that babies as young as 8 months old already tune into the rhythms of the music from their own cultural environment.