Pianist Josh Nemith wrote a recent post highlighting a study done by Northwestern University (my alma mater) on the positive effects of musical study on the auditory system and the brain stem’s ability to track and analyze certain sounds:

A new study by Northwestern University researchers suggests that Mom was right when she insisted that you continue music lessons — even after it was clear that a professional music career was not in your future.

The study, which will appear in the April issue of Nature Neuroscience, is the first to provide concrete evidence that playing a musical instrument significantly enhances the brainstem’s sensitivity to speech sounds. This finding has broad implications because it applies to sound encoding skills involved not only in music but also in language.

The findings indicate that experience with music at a young age in effect can “fine-tune” the brain’s auditory system. “Increasing music experience appears to benefit all children — whether musically exceptional or not — in a wide range of learning activities,” says Nina Kraus, director of Northwestern’s Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory and senior author of the study.

“Our findings underscore the pervasive impact of musical training on neurological development. Yet music classes are often among the first to be cut when school budgets get tight. That’s a mistake,” says Kraus, Hugh Knowles Professor of Neurobiology and Physiology and professor of communication sciences.

“Our study is the first to ask whether enhancing the sound environment — in this case with musical training — will positively affect the way an individual encodes sound even at a level as basic as the brainstem,” says Patrick Wong, primary author of “Musical Experience Shapes Human Brainstem Encoding of Linguistic Pitch Patterns.” An old structure from an evolutionary standpoint, the brainstem once was thought to only play a passive role in auditory processing.

Read the complete post from Northwestern University here, and check out Josh’s comments here.

Studies like this are always interesting, and they can serve as useful evidence to emphasize the importance of keeping music in the academic curriculum. Administrators like seeing research and evidence, and even though anyone who has studied music in the past already knows the holistic benefits, research that backs up this view is useful in keeping music alive in the schools.