Does Music Matter? A Look at the Issues and the Evidence

ABSTRACT

Does music matter? Judging from the ever-diminishing support for music education in public funding, the message is that it is just a frill to be cast aside for more pressing needs. The pleasure of listening to music is worthy in itself and reason enough for support, but what happens when people are more deeply engaged, such as when they learn to read music and play an instrument? Can more material rewards follow for cognition, language, and emotion, and for social and physical well-being? This essay presents an overview of issues and evidence from a broad range of disciplines and age groups.

Acknowledgments

Some of the material in this essay was presented at the Educational Neuroscience Conference at The University of Nebraska, Lincoln, October 15–16, 2015. I am grateful to Dennis Molfese and Eric Buhs for inviting my participation, to Edward Hubbard and David Kraemer for inviting my contribution to this special issue of the journal, and to David Z. Hambrick, Alex Burgoyne, and the three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions. I alone, however, am responsible for the contents along with any and all errors of commission, omission, judgment, or interpretation.

Notes

^1. The figures are especially stark for college-educated adults; between 1982 and 2008, their attendance at events in nearly all art forms dropped by 39%, the largest decline for performing arts and museums. In that same period, the percentage of college-educated adults attending opera declined 35%, musicals 19%, art museums just under 5% (League of American Orchestras, 2009).

^2. According to the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies, the last figure represented just 0.012% (about one one-hundreth of 1%) of federal discretionary spending for 2013 (NEA, 2013; NEA, n.d.). By contrast, appropriations for the National Science Foundation (NSF) over the same period ranged from $5.47 to $7.46 billion (NSF, n.d.).

^3. The Commission was created in 1965 to track policy, translate research, provided “unbiased advice,” and create “opportunities for state policymakers to learn from one another.” Each state had its own focus. In Georgia, in 1997–1998, during Miller’s administration, it was “investing in student achievement” (Education Commission of the States, n.d.).

^4. Campbell (1997), more than anyone, was probably responsible for popularizing the term “The Mozart effect.” He himself evidently was inspired not just by the Nature report but by the work of the French physician Alfred A. Tomatis (1991). In what can only be seen as a remarkable coincidence, Tomatis described how, in a series of studies starting in the 1960s, he used Mozart’s music to “stimulate the rich interconnections between the ear and the nervous system” and thereby to “retrain” the ear and to promote healing and brain development. The words quoted are those of Billie Thompson, a former student, and Susan Andrews (Thompson & Andrews, 2000, p. 174) in their historical review of Tomatis’ work and whose findings they refer to as the “Tomatis Effect” (p. 176).

^5. To the quotation, one of 44 maxims from Twilight of the Idols (1889), Nietzsche added, “The German imagines that even God sings songs.”

^6. “And it came to pass, when the evil spirit from God was upon Saul, that David took an harp, and played with his hand: so Saul was refreshed, and was well, and the evil spirit departed from him” (1 Samuel 16:23; The Bible, King James Version, 1611).

^7. It is easy to see why the quotation is so popular, but, alas, Plato probably never said it. At least a source is never given, and thus far, I have not found one. Neither has the author of the post, “They didn’t say it,” on the aptly-named website Fauxtations (2014).

^8. Along with Fitch (2005), David Huron (2001) and Geoffrey Miller (2001) have written thoughtful and stimulating reviews and analyses of the origins and functions of music from a Darwinian perspective.

^9. Some people, as Panksepp (1995) found, call them “thrills.” He also offered a more detailed description: A “bodily rush” commonly described as a “spreading gooseflesh, hair-on-end feeling that is common on the back of the neck and head and often moves down the spine, at times spreading across much of the rest of the body” (p. 173).

^10. The subjects were musicians, all with at least 8 years of music training. Musicians were chosen on the premise that they were more likely to experience strong emotional responses, but the authors noted that music training was not necessary for the response to occur (Blood & Zatorre, 2001, p. 11818)

^11. Because none of the studies reported effect sizes, Hetland used data in the reports or from personal communication with authors to compute d-equivalents for mean r’s, which, “roughly doubled,“ approximates the equivalent d (2000b, pp. 119, 123). To avoid “publication bias,” she also included unpublished along with published reports (2000b, p. 109). Comparisons revealed no differences (2000b, p. 135). There was, however, a large heterogeneity in effect sizes across studies, including larger effects from certain laboratories, namely Rauscher’s and Rideout’s (Hetland, 2000b, p. 134). Hetland suggested that the reason may be that both researchers (as reported by Rauscher in a personal communication to Hetland, note # 94, p. 145, and by Rideout in his published articles) emphasized that their subjects should pay attention to the music, which may have increased its enhancing effect by increasing arousal or by “allowing the music to “activate more completely the neural networks that process music and prime spatial performance” (p. 135).

^12. Ivanov and Geake (2003) did not treat the classroom “background noise” as an independent variable. Others have, or rather have studied the effects of background music. Susan Hallam and colleagues (2002) have shown that in primary grade children, music perceived as calming and relaxing leads to better performance in arithmetic and memory tasks compared to a non-music condition, whereas music perceived as arousing, aggressive, and unpleasant disrupts performance. The seeming inconsistency between the negative effects of high arousal in this study and the positive effects found by Thompson et al. (2001) perhaps reflects the difference in valence: pleasantly stimulating in one case, unpleasantly stimulating in the other.

^13. Among the many first-person accounts of Mozart’s prodigious abilities, one that stands out is by Daines Barrington (1770), a British lawyer and historian. In 1764, during the then 8-year-old Mozart’s year-long visit to London where he gave public performances, Barrington was invited by Leopold Mozart to see the boy at their apartment. Barrington brought a manuscript of a new opera in five parts, making it “absolutely impossible that he could have ever seen the music before” (p. 57). “The score was no sooner put upon his desk, than he began to play [the harpsichord] … in a most masterly manner, as well as in the time and stile which corresponded with the intentions of the composer” (p. 57). Later, asked to improvise a love song, Mozart composed a complete piece showing ”most extraordinary readiness of invention” (p. 60). Even as a small child, then, Mozart epitomized what Seashore (1920) said of the musical genius: someone who “finds in music a dominant interest, is driven to it by an impulse, burns to express himself in music … driven by an instinctive impulse or craving for music which results in supreme devotion to its realization” (p. 589).

^14. The 5% estimate comes from a study of 1,029 college students in Barcelona (Mas-Herrero et al., 2014), who expressed their strength of agreement or disagreement to questions such as “I can’t help humming or singing along to music that I like,” “music comforts me,” and “I get emotional listening to certain piece of music” (all from the Barcelona Music Reward Questionnaire; Mas-Herrero, Marco-Pallares, Lorenzo-Seva, Zatorre, & Rodriguez-Fornells, 2013). From the sample, 30 were selected, 10 each with high, medium, and low scores. While listening to music ranging from pop to classical, their heart rate and skin conductance were recorded. High and medium scorers showed increases in both; low-scorers did not change, suggesting their classification as anhedonic (see also Clark, Downey, & Warren, 2014). Mas-Herrero et al. (2013, p. 131) add that it remains to be seen whether the anhedonia is specific to music or reflects perceptual difficulties of the kind found in congenital amusia (Ayotte, Peretz, & Hyde, 2002). Musical anhedonia also should be distinguished from “acquired amusia,” similar to a case to be described later.

^15. Not counting studies designed to compare the sexes, like most of those previously cited, for the topics covered in this review, the sex of the subject, by my count, was not identified in 44 and identified in 42 but compared in only 8. (I will mention these studies when I come to them.) In some cases, comparisons probably were not made either because overall numbers were too small or because of large disparities in numbers; in four cases, they were precluded because only one sex was tested.

^16. The authors cited studies showing, for middle-school children, a “continuum of instruments in terms of their femininity/masculinity,” with flute, violin, and clarinet anchoring the feminine end, while drums, trombone, and trumpet are the masculine anchors, which, they noted, pose difficulties for music education, including beginners’ decisions on continuing their musical training. Their own study found no changes in the trends, and they called the stereotypes “entrenched” (Wrape et al., 2016, p. 45).

^17. The phenomenon is known as genetic pleiotropy, when a single gene influences two or more seemingly unrelated phenotypic traits, in other words, when distinct traits are inherited together.

^18. In the transfer studies I examined, only a few note that practice was monitored; for others, it was not always clear whether practice was monitored or whether, for classroom instruction, it was built into the program. Schellenberg (2004), did monitor practice, and what he found, as described later (Schellenberg, 2011, p. 286), raises a question. In most correlational studies of children, parents pay for the lessons (one exception might be where subjects are drawn from schools that provide lessons and those that do not), whereas in training studies, lessons are free. If the strength of the effect is related, at least in part, to the amount and quality of practice and to the parents’ level of involvement, could free lessons be a disincentive for some parents to be involved? Schellenberg found that the children in his study practiced only 10–15 minutes per week (perhaps, then, the practice mostly came in the lessons themselves), and he suggested that the parents, having made no personal financial investment, may have had little reason to encourage their children to practice. Thus far, it appears that Schellenberg is the only one to raise this potentially critical issue.

^19. I am not referring to music’s ability to characterize; it clearly has that, and some composers do it very well, Mozart for one. For examples of his ability to “suit the music to the character,” see Luke Howard’s (2013) program notes on the music for the characters in The Magic Flute.

^20. Leo Kanner (1943) described these interests and abilities in three of the 11 autistic children in his classic study: Donald at 1 year “could hum and sing many tunes accurately” (p. 217), Paul at 3 years knew the words of “thirty-seven poems and songs” (p. 226), and, most impressively, Charles at 18 months “could discriminate between eighteen symphonies” and “recognized the composer as soon as the first movement started. He would say ‘Beethoven’” (p. 236).

^21. The phonograph was invented in 1877 by Thomas Edison, and by 1914, it had been refined many times and a very large variety of music recordings would have been available, including many by stars of grand opera. Enrico Caruso began recording for Victor in 1904 and by 1914 had made over 100 10- and 12-inch discs (DAHR, n.d.).

^22. Hindemith (1952) was speaking to college students and teachers about the benefits of reviving the musical life of the family and the community—a “singing and playing Community”—and, quoting the German proverb, Böse Menschen haben keiner Lieder (bad men don’t sing), said, “It is not impossible that out of a tremendous movement of amateur community music a peace movement could spread over the world” (p. 163).

^23. In Eliot’s novel (1860), the words are spoken by Maggie Tulliver, the central character. Thoreau’s words, recorded in his journal in 1857, came after singing a favorite song while taking shelter from a storm (Kurp, 2009).