044: How to introduce your child to music (even if you can’t play or sing)

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  Transcript Jen: [00:38] Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Today I’d like to welcome my guest, Wendell Hanna, who is Professor of Music Education at San Francisco State University. Professor Hanna’s academic background includes a BA from the University of South Florida and a Master’s in music from Yale University in orchestral bassoon performance. After several years of teaching and performing in San Francisco Bay Area orchestras as a freelance musician, Professor Hanna then obtained her public school and teaching credential and taught elementary music in the Oregon public schools. Before obtaining a Ph.D At the University of Oregon. It was there that she shifted our attention to younger children and began researching and working musically with infants, toddlers, and preschool aged children. In 2002, she was offered a professorship at San Francisco State University where she researches and also teaches, early childhood musical development and local preschools. It was through teaching in a local corporate preschool that she encountered emergent learning and the Reggio approach. Now I discovered professor Hanna’s work not long after I heard a piece on NPR about the links between listening to music and learning grammar, so I was already looking for someone to talk with about the connections between music and child development, but today, dear listeners, we’re going to get so much more than that. Jen: [01:49] Professor Hanna has just published a new book called The Children’s Music Studio, a Reggio inspired approach and as soon as I read it, I knew that I had to ask her to do an interview with us because their interests coincides so neatly with my own. She brings a really rigorous evidence based view on the impact of music on a child’s development and she has also studied early childhood education in Reggio Emilia, Italy as I have done as well, and wants to bring that evidence-based view of music to Reggio inspired classrooms. Welcome Dr. Hanna. New Speaker:  [02:17] Thank you, Jen. Thank you for inviting me. New Speaker: [02:20] So I wonder if we can start kind of probably where parents already have had some exposure to information about music and related to child development. Can you tell us what is the Mozart Effect and how does what parents might have heard about it differ from what the study actually found? Dr. Hanna: [02:38] Sure, so the Mozart Effect was a research study and there have been many more research studies since the original one which was in 1993 in southern California, Rauscher and Associates and they, they looked at the effect of listening to a Mozart music and how that affected learning and their results were published in Nature magazine and they said that especially on spatial reasoning and a little bit on memory that listening to Mozart had positive effects on your ability to concentrate and learn. Fortunately, people got very excited about things, especially in my field of music education, we were like, Hallelujah. This is what we’ve been looking for. Scientific evidence of what we’ve always known to be true, and here it is. However, researchers, we were like, wow, let me look into this research, and then we discovered, wow, they listened to some Mozart for 15 minutes and then they became smarter. Hm, let’s replicate this just to make sure. And so it was replicated many, many, many times and the same results were not found and that’s a problem with research; it needs to be replicated in their same results, need to be found each time or most of the times it is replicated. Dr. Hanna: [04:02] So that was a problem. Many people have really jumped on. The idea of Mozart makes you smarter because it feels true. It just feels so right. New Speaker: [04:14] It’s so esoteric, isn’t it? It must be making me smarter. Dr. Hanna:    [04:19] So it’s actually fascinating from a researcher’s point of view that something that you know is right, you just haven’t been able to prove yet. And so that’s really what the Mozart Effect was about is just pure listening. And so there’s been a ton of research…neurological research and other types of research about this and so I would say the take-home point is that the Mozart effect is really likely to be an artifact of just arousal because you’re listening to the music and it makes you feel better. It heightens your mood. So that’s probably what the Mozart Effect is. You feel happier when you listen to Mozart and you feel a little more alert in your brain is a little more stimulated. Dr. Hanna:  [05:07] So those effects that were tested are likely because of that and have nothing to do with our dear friend, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the many other types of light and happy music that would have that same effect on your short term effect. Jen: [05:26] And so this study was also done with college students, right? Dr. Hanna: [05:30] It was done many, many times; people have been replicating it many different ways since 1993. Sometimes it comes out positive and but most of the time it doesn’t get strong statistical results because it just has to do with listening. And the real research is more when you’re doing active music making, especially playing instruments. Jen: [05:55] Alright, so let us all be warned about the dangers of reading one study and basing our entire approach to parenting on that. So okay. So if I’m a failure as a parent and I have not had my child listening to Baby Mozart for the last couple of years, I’m curious about how children approached music. If nobody’s teaching them about it, do they have some kind of innate sense of rhythm and a desire to produce music or are these things more culturally learned? Dr. Hanna:  [06:19] Well, yes. Children have an innate ability in music, just exactly the way that they have an innate ability to learn language. So there’s a really interesting study that came out of the Child Study Movement in the early 20th century called the Morehead and Pond study was done between 1937 and 1948. And it’s fascinating because it’s more of a longitudinal – not that long, but pretty long for a study. And they had children go into a room with beautiful musical instruments and by themselves with other children. And they videotaped, I guess they videotaped… Did they have that then? Anyway, they observed and they analyzed what the children did and they found that these children were understanding music without any adult supervision. They were creating music, they were understanding form. They were interacting, they were improvising, they were singing, creating their own original compositions and some pretty amazing stuff. So I would say that’s a real seminal study and there’ve been many others that have shown that children left to their own devices are extremely musically naturally musical. Jen: [07:34] Mmhmm. And where do you think that comes from? Dr. Hanna: [07:37] Well, it’s evolution. Jen: [07:39] And what what purpose does it serve? Dr. Hanna:   [07:42] Well, there’s a lot of theories on that. There’s definitely…. Music is definitely kind of brings the tribe together. It makes you feel more secure and protected. It gives you…and this answers your, your second part of the question which is about cultural learned. Whether music is culturally learned, but it. It helps you identify with your culture and children. They have an innate nature to respond to music, but there is a natural development that is occurring and that natural development can be further enhanced with exposure; parents exposing them to wide variety of music as well as direct instruction, so it’s kind of there’s an innate ability and children can do it on their own, but if adults give a very rich environment and exposure to music and some direct instruction, then that is really, really heightened because there’s so many neuronal connections in the brain for all kinds of learning and as we’ll talk a little bit more, language learning and music learning really out as one in the same in a baby, and then it splits later on. So if you’re encouraging language development, you’re also encouraging musical development and if you’re encouraging music development, you’re also encouraging some language development. Jen: [09:12] Okay. I’m wondering what my daughter is learning from the Maroon Five music that she has a preference for at the moment. Dr. Hanna: [09:22] I’m sure she’s learning a lot! Jen:  [09:22] I am sure she is. I hesitate to imagine what. So you mentioned a couple of times as you were explaining that, that if parents provide direct instruction as well as exposure to different kinds of music, what do you mean by direct instruction in that Dr. Hanna: [09:35] format? Well, purposeful interaction for music’s sake, if you take them to a, a child parent class and the Music Together classes are very popular here in the bay area and I think all over the country now. And those are wonderful classes, but there’s a variety of music. The children are playing instruments, you know, it’s tactile; it’s locomotor… They’re jumping up and down and they’re moving and they’re, they’re singing and they’re just participating in music with others and with adults and not passive, not just listening to music in the background. Jen:  [10:11] Okay. Okay. Alright. So now really starting to dig into the research here. I want to try and untangle what some of the research says on the benefits to children of being involved in music because I read through a bunch of abstracts of papers on this topic and you kind of get the impression that music is absolutely incredible at promoting children’s cognitive development. But then when you dig into the methodology and the results, you find things like children who attend music classes are able to look at a pattern of beads and replicate it from memory more effectively than children who didn’t attend classes and that kind of skill does have good implications, visual memory and chunking of information, both of which are very important in reading, but there was also no difference between the two groups on the other five subtests of a well known intelligence test. But the abstract to that study says “this study suggests a significant correspondence between early music instruction on spatial temporal reasoning abilities”. So I’m wondering, based on what you know of kind of the totality of the literature and not just honing in on one study’s results, is there a benefit to a child’s development from making music and what kind of music does the child have to do to gain this benefit? Dr. Hanna:  [11:22] Well, I would really recommend this wonderful book. It’s very easy to read by Daniel Levinson. He’s a neurologist up in Canada and it’s called This...