As students worldwide are having educational experiences that are a little or a lot different to their “normal”, teachers are looking for ways to maintain students’ engagement in a similar way to when they are attending “normal” school. Remote or a combination of online and face to face learning is not standard, so maybe we […]

Have you ever noticed when you are driving with music playing, or your children are chatting in the back as you drive to a new place, you quickly turn the music down or ask the kids to be quiet? Why do we need quiet to do new things and, conversely, why do we find having […]

Age-related hearing loss, it doesn’t sound very good. However, it is something that almost every person as they age will begin to experience. With hearing loss comes not only the lowering of our ability to hear the nuances in sound and some specific sounds altogether, but it can also lead to a withdrawal from conversations […]

Did you know there are many types of sharing? When you stop and think about it, there are many ways we can share a toy or food, but most of the time, as parents or educators, we would say something like “let’s just be nice and share.” There is a whole field of research known […]

We all love a good news story where something, whether it be a spoken word competition, visual art display, or a music program has transformed a school. It makes us believe in the power of music and arts to transform a community. If you are a music or arts educator reading this, it may also […]

Research into music learning has found that, while it is a great activity for physical, cognitive, emotional and social development during childhood, it can be just as impactful to learn a musical instrument when we are adults. But what gets in our way? For anyone who has tried to do it – many, many things. […]

When we listen to music, we can experience many levels of engagement – from very intense emotions to no identifiable emotions at all. Researchers have looked very closely at this phenomenon to understand if it is certain characteristics of music that elicit an emotional response, if it is a totally individual experience, or if it […]

“Musical training can improve attention and working memory, which are executive functions that are important for daily life and are correlated with general better outcomes during lifespan. [In our study, we found there were] two different mechanisms [that] seem to underlie the better performance of musically trained children in our task. One that supports more […]

Here is a bright light in 2020. This study is one of the first randomised studies that compares an instrumental music program during class (in this case, a string-based program) with a music appreciation type of classroom program. The study followed the students for two years and measured how the different types of music learning […]

It may seem strange to think of a childcare centre that does not use music in some way. This could be passive background music or a song to sing and move along to on Youtube. We know about the many cognitive skills that interaction with music can create for your children, but why do we […]

Ever wondered what that tingling sensation in your brain or on your scalp is called when you listen to music? We hadn’t wondered, but we feel better now that we know. It is called the Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR). We probably won’t remember that long name or the acronym but “head orgasm” is a […]

Pitch pattern recognition is vital for both music comprehension and understanding the prosody of speech, which signals emotion and intent. But what happens when you can’t hear pitch patterns – do you enjoy music less and hear less emotion in speech? It is very hard to assess the enjoyment of music or speech, but it […]