If you’ve always wanted to learn piano, but thought you were too old to learn, think again. Not only can you pick up a new tune after a few lessons, but a new study showed that just an hour of piano lessons per week makes it easier to process combinations of audio and visual cues.
Just one hour of piano lessons per week makes it easier to process combinations of audio and visual … [+]
There have been a lot of research studies over the years that pointed to positive effects of music learning. For example, high school students who take music lessons also perform better in other subjects.
But in many cases, such studies looked at people who had been taking music lessons for years. Learning music for such a long time might be beneficial for learning and other brain functions, but that doesn’t necessarily help you today. Or does it? In a new study, researchers from the University of Bath took a different approach and specifically studied what would happen after just a few weeks of music lessons to see if there is an immediate benefit to learning to play an instrument.
Over the course of eleven weeks, volunteers in this study took weekly hour-long music lessons where they learned to play the piano. Every week they met one-on-one with a music teacher, did some warm-up finger exercises and practiced basic piano pieces. Even after just a few weeks, this started to have an effect. The new piano students quickly became better able to process sounds and visual cues at the same time. That type of information processing is very useful in many situations, from navigating traffic to watching a film.
To make sure that the improvement in processing combined audio and visual signals wasn’t just the result of having a new weekly distraction, some of the volunteers were placed in control groups. Instead of learning music, one group just listened to music (the same piano pieces as the music learning group was studying) and the other group spent the time just studying or reading. Of the three groups, only the people who spent their weekly hour learning how to play the piano got better at audio-visual processing.
Something else happened to this group of volunteers as well. After eleven weeks of piano lessons, they showed lower levels of depression, anxiety and stress. Even though this was an interesting discovery, it wasn’t the main goal of the research study, but it could be a starting point for other studies in the future. Especially since this study only involved 31 volunteers (split into three groups) it would be worth exploring this further with a larger group.
However, the main focus was the improvement in audio-visual processing – particularly after such a short time.
“Learning to play an instrument like the piano is a complex task: it requires a musician to read a score, generate movements and monitor the auditory and tactile feedback to adjust their further actions,” Karin Petrini, one of the researchers involved in the study, told the University of Bath. “The findings from our study suggest that this has a significant, positive impact on how the brain processes audio-visual information even in adulthood when brain plasticity is reduced.”
That’s exciting news for adults who think they’ve missed the boat on music lessons. You don’t need to have been a child prodigy to take advantage of the positive effects of music on the brain. Even if you start piano lessons now, you can still benefit.
