Music training, begun as late as high school, may help enhance skills that are critical for academic success, scientists have found.
Researchers from Northwestern University found that music training may help improve the teenage brain's responses to sound and sharpen hearing and language skills.
The gains were seen during group music classes included in the schools' curriculum, suggesting in-school training accelerates neurodevelopment.
"While music programmes are often the first to be cut when the school budget is tight, these results highlight music's place in the high school curriculum," said Nina Kraus, senior study author and director of Northwestern's Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at the School of Communication.
"Although learning to play music does not teach skills that seem directly relevant to most careers, the results suggest that music may engender what educators refer to as 'learning to learn,'" Kraus added.
Kraus and colleagues recruited 40 Chicago-area high school freshmen in a study that began shortly before school started. They followed these children longitudinally until their senior year.
Nearly half the students had enrolled in band classes, which involved two to three hours a week of instrumental group music instruction in school.
The rest had enrolled in junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC), which emphasised fitness exercises during a comparable period. Both groups attended the same schools in low-income neighbourhoods.
Electrode recordings at the start of the study and three years later showed that the music group had more rapid maturation in the brain's response to sound. Moreover, they demonstrated prolonged heightened brain sensitivity to sound details.
All participants improved in language skills tied to sound-structure awareness, but the improvement was greater for those in music classes, compared with the ROTC group.
According to the researchers, high school music training might hone brain development and improve language skills.
The stable processing of sound details, important for language skills, is known to be diminished in children raised in poverty, raising the possibility that music education may offset this negative influence on sound processing, researchers said.
The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
