Hello, everyone. Today, I would like to talk about music education. Many of you learned to play a musical instrument at a young age. Some of you may be familiar with the violin; some, clarinet; others, like me, the piano. However, many of you probably studied these outside of school. I believe that schools should put more focus on music education starting from elementary school.

Now, a lot of you may think learning music in your childhood did nothing for you. Nothing you do in the future will need your skills on the alto sax; nothing you study in college will have to do with you playing trumpet in the middle school band; nothing you write on resumes will involve your knowledge of the anatomy of a cello. You may think all this music training will have amounted to nothing. Well, I just want to assure you, “don’t worry, be happy,” because the time you spent learning scales and arpeggios has not been wasted, as music actually does a lot for your brain.

TED speaker Anita Collins discusses an experiment where neuroscientists put participants through FMRI machines and told them to do many different tasks, like reading and math. The active areas of the brain would light up. But what happened when they had participants listen to music? Collins uses one word to describe it: “Fireworks.” Almost every part of the brain lit up like the night sky on the Fourth of July. This isn’t even when they are playing an instrument. It was the simple activity of listening to music that caused so many areas of the brain to light up at once. Imagine what people’s brains would look like while they actually played music. It’d be like watching a supernova explosion.

So, why does musical education help? As Collins explains, playing a musical instrument engages the auditory, visual, and motor cortices of the brain all at once. In fact, playing an instrument is the equivalent of a full body workout for the brain.

Learning music would, however, be most effective from young ages, which is why it is so necessary for schools to provide more music education. In one study, several pre-school kids were given six months of lessons on the keyboard. When presented with a game to test their spatial-temporal reasoning, these kids scored more than 30% better than kids that had no music experience. More than 30%! The reason spatial-temporal skills are so important is because they help you visualize elements that go together, and are often used when solving multistep problems, especially in math, which researchers find to also be something music students excel at more than others do.

Spatial-temporal skills are not the only benefit of music. PBS finds that learning music can also increase children’s IQ’s, augment their social capabilities, help them achieve higher scores on standardized tests, improve their language skills… speaking of language, language development is especially important for kids of ages 2 through 9, so it is crucial that kids between these ages be given the chance to learn music.

So, we need to provide them with the education they need. We need to start implementing more music into school systems. We need to integrate music programs into children’s lives early on so that they can develop intellectually superior minds. Because everyone deserves exposure to a learning tool as stimulating as music. Thank you.