Albertson School of Music

The Importance of Childhood Music
	The effects of music study on the development of a child have long been apparent. The noted Swiss psychologist, Jean Piaget, argued that a child's early years are the optimum period for intellectual development. Between the ages of 2 and 7, children learn through symbols. Music concepts and notation are very symbolic in nature, and thus this age range has been shown to be the optimal time to start the study of music. The Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner suggests that younger children have the ability to understand music intuitively through performance. They appear to have a genetic predisposition to hear, remember, and produce musical patterns. In 1999, Governor Zell Miller showed evidence to the state legislature that early exposure to classical music can increase an infant's native intelligence. As a result, the state of Georgia placed in its budget enough money to buy every new infant a cassette tape or compact disc of classical music. In addition, several studies show improved spatial, temporal, and pattern recognition scores for children who have studied music when compared with a group of children who have not studied music. These studies also show that music instruction is far superior to computer instruction in building the abstract reasoning skills necessary for learning science and math.