Research on Music Teaching and Learning During Elementary School Years
Diane C. Persellin
Trinity University

Music is its own discipline and need not to be justified to strengthen other skills or understandings. The learning of music, however, may also have a broader effect, one beyond the aesthetic merit of music.
The effect of music instruction on spatial skills. Music instruction can supply intellectual, emotional, and physical components critical to children’s development. During the last ten years, investigators have suggested that music instruction may have an effect on spatial skills or the ability to visualize an object from different perspectives. Hetland (2000), in a meta-analysis, examined 15 studies relating music instruction and spatial skills. These studies were conducted by a variety of research teams using various treatments. Hetland found that active instruction in music appears to have a small but significant effect on spatial skills for preschool and elementary-aged children lasting as long as instruction continues up to two years. Effects of music training, however, did not persist for long after music instruction ceased. The testing instruments used in these assessments are imperfect; low reliability of the testing measures used in many of these studies continues to be a concern. More research in this area is needed.
The effect of piano instruction on self-esteem. A McGill University study (Costa-Giomi, 1999) found that children who had taken three years of piano instruction had significantly higher self-esteem than children who were not enrolled in piano lessons. These results were not related to family income, sex, family structure, or parental employment. In addition to piano lessons, students in this study owned a new piano, played in recitals, and received individual attention from a caring teacher. While these elements could also have had an impact on the improvement in self-esteem, the overall effect of piano instruction could not be disputed.
Conclusion. This is an exciting time to explore research on musical development and music instruction of children. Interest in how children learn and value music has increased dramatically in parents, educators, and the music industry in the past twenty years. As investigators continue to conduct new studies and to replicate current studies, a strong foundation of musical understanding will be developed which will strengthen music education for generations to come.

THE NEW YORK TIMES
June 3, 2003
Playing Music as a Toy, and a Toy as Music
By James Gorman

Tod Machover - composer, inventor, cellist and educator - has made it clear to me that I am a puritan. This has nothing to do with sex. It's about another sort of seduction, the lure of electronics and computer technology, the easy pleasure of video games, the ultimately hollow virtual world.
Mr. Machover, professor of music and media at the M.I.T. Media Lab, is devoting considerable energy to luring children into the electronic world. He has invented electronic instruments that allow anyone, skilled or not, to enjoy the kind of creativity and collaboration available only to the most advanced players of traditional instruments.
Mr. Machover has not ignored those advanced players. He has, in the past, helped develop instruments like the hypercello, which Yo-Yo Ma used to perform one of Mr. Machover's compositions. But now, Mr. Machover has turned his hand to musical toys, or instruments for children.
He recently came to New York for a performance of his Toy Symphony and to conduct workshops at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. Hyperscore, a composing tool he and his colleagues developed, is on display there as part of the National Design Triennial. The workshops allowed children to work with Hyperscore and play two electronic instruments called Beatbugs and Music Shapers.
I went to talk to him and to see and touch the two performance toys because of my curmudgeonly conviction that electronics, even in the service of creativity, could not be good for children, or anyone else for that matter.
I know a bit about electronic toys. I've had my hand in coverage of consumer technology. I have watched children (frequently mine) become completely absorbed in video games. I myself am easily addicted to them. Consequently, in my anti-technology moments, I have the moral fervor of a sinner.
I'm convinced that electronic entertainment can cast a sort of mist over the physical world human beings have bumped around in for so long, making it seem slow and out of focus, compared with the new flat screens.
Even if some game skills are transferable to life apart from the computer, including enhanced visual attention and peripheral vision, as reported in a study in Nature on Thursday by Dr. Daphne Bavelier and colleagues at the University of Rochester, the games create a world, as does television, which in some ways is more appealing than the physical one.
The games can even, it seems, put a veil between mind and body. The Cartesian mind/body division is no longer accepted by science, but video games are Descartes's revenge. The eyes and fingers are allowed in the game, but the rest of the body becomes dead weight - meat, as William Gibson described it in the science fiction novel "Neuromancer."
And yet, researchers in artificial intelligence and behavioral sciences often talk now about embodied intelligence. Dr. Antonio R. Damasio, a neurobiologist at the University of Iowa, who is the author of "Descartes's Error" and more recently "Looking for Spinoza," has argued that the mind contains a model of the human body and that the actions of the body inform the brain. "The mind exists," he writes in "Spinoza," "because there is a body to furnish it with contents."
In "The Hand," written several years ago, Dr. Frank R. Wilson, a clinical professor of neurology at Stanford, suggests that the hand has molded human language and consciousness during the course of evolution and that its activities are powerfully connected to the development of the individual.
To capture the essence of his argument, he quotes the Canadian novelist Robertson Davies, who wrote that "the hand speaks to the brain as surely as the brain speaks to the hand." You have to wonder, when the hand is clicking a mouse for a couple of hours, what does it have to say?
Not much of interest I would think. But music is something different. Learning to make music on traditional instruments, even in a limited, amateurish way, draws on body and mind together. They function in intimate communion, as they should. You can't make music without thinking and feeling and training your hands. The connection of muscle and motion to rhythm and melody is fundamental.
That's why I was predisposed to doubt the value - not for music, but for human development - of Mr. Machover's instruments. When asked whether there wasn't some value to the training in a traditional instrument in which motor skills, muscle memory, thinking, emotion and creativity all came into play, Mr. Machover said that he thought that traditional training for children gave very little room for creativity, which is what he was trying to provide.
"It's so difficult, physically to learn a traditional musical instrument," he said. "The smartest kids take a lot of time just to master the interface - to say nothing of creativity - before you're expressing something, and way before you're expressing something individual.
"I think that what I've tried to do in all this work is to emphasize creativity over virtuosity." Not that he is against traditional training. One of his daughters is learning the violin.

NEWSDAY
The Sounds of Play: Tod Machover is trying to revolutionize the way kids learn to make music with digital technology
Author: Justin Davidson

When he was a child, [Tod Machover]'s mother, a music teacher, would send the boy and his friends on scavenger hunts for objects with which to make interesting sounds, then organized chamber music sessions with their found instruments. Nine years ago, when he became a parent, Machover realized just how exceptional that sort of activity was. Struck by the paucity of organized, creative music- making for young children, Machover embarked on a three-year, $3 million international project he calls "Toy Symphony," which in New York culminates next Saturday with a free concert performed by professionals and kids in the Winter Garden of the World Financial Center. In the meantime, groups of New York City public school children are busily learning to use Machover's toys: an antennaed rhythm box called a "beatbug," a squishy "shaper" that produces a range of digital honks and rustles, and Hyperscore, the kid composer's first software.
"My goal," Machover said, "was to put together a suite of musical activities that children can do with other children and with grown- ups and that could end up in a concert." Some of the pieces that children produce in these weeks will be performed by a professional orchestra, along with Machover's own "Toy Symphony" for beatbugs, shapers and strings.