At the Keyboard
May 14, 2007 by Kristina Chew, PhD
Filed under Health
Knowing how to play a musical instrument—-and especially the piano, or a instrument with keys (flute, clarinet, oboe) —-makes it easier to learn how to type, and can generally increase one’s typing ability, a May 11th post in Cognitive Daily suggests. I more than agree: I have played the piano since I was six years old; I typed my way through some of graduate school not because I was typing my dissertation, but because I had my foot on the pedal of a dictaphone and transcribed hours of doctors’ and lawyers’ recordings (I also helped type up a report to bring the International Special Olympics to New Haven, Connecticut—little do we know how significant things we did in the past can be for our lives today).
Charlie has started to learn to type using a software program at school. His signature on the Mother’s Day card he gave me yesterday contained a fine C; then h, a, r, l that all looked more or less alike; then a large i and e. He is making great strides in playing the piano: he can play with both his left and right hands, can read and play two-ote chords, and is learning to vary his tempo (slow and fast). His repertoire includes “Ode to Joy,” “Clementine,” “This Old Man,” and Bingo.”
Notes Cognitive Daily:
We can’t say for sure that the music training caused better typing — perhaps people who choose to play instruments with keys are just naturally predisposed to be better typists, but I’ve got a hunch that the training itself is what helps.
I am hoping that his hunch is more than half-right!
I think that’s true in my case. (clarinet,then recorder) I was able to learn touch-typing fairly quickly.
I also think that playing a wind instrument can make one a better shot in general, and a better pistol shot in particular. The breath control is very important for the rifle, while an ability to move just one finger, keeping others still, avoids a lot of common handgun faults.
I played piano and became a very fast typist. Not sure if they are directly correlated, but it can’t hurt!
Not so sure about Charlie becoming a better shot—-am wondering about a wind instrument besides piano….
Hmm, breath control and fingers at the same time- Well, there’s the bugle, or the bagpipes…. Snork. No, seriously one doesn’t use fingers, the other uses only fingers, except to keep the bag full. They are, both of them, good and loud, though.
Charlie has heard bagpipes a few times and been alarmed! My first thought is actually another stringed instrument—-maybe cello.
Not sure that follows in reverse,
Lets see .. my first musical instrument was a trombone ..
Anyway I lernt to type before I could play the flute, and learning to type has never made it any easier to play a piano.
Just cos I can play a flute or a trombone, doesn’t follow that I can play an instrument like a piano.
I don’t know if I should comment as an autism mom, a former music teacher, or a pianist and darn-good typist. Research involving piano training at an early age also found correlations between brain development and early music training. (Think Rauscher and Shaw)
On a simpler note, Amigo played violin for three of his young years and later took up cello. The music of it was easy; the physical harder.
Answering in regard to all regards would be more than welcome——I enjoyed those days in grad school typing up doctors’ dictations about kidney patients and some manuscripts—
Hmm… Motor skills, like playing an instrument, or typewriting, or drawing from a shoulder holster without shooting yerself in the brachial artery, are best learned by constant repetition and cetera, (ABA, anybody?) for NTs and Auties alike. I think I’ve read somewhere that it takes about a thousand repetitions to imbed a motor skill in so-called “muscle” memory.
With social skills, I dunno, especially when working with somebody who’s socially weird to start with.
In other words, I think classic ABA,as used by the USMC, works great on semi-civilizing rowdy normal folks, but not quite so well on the weird annoyingly earnest folks.
I think this is why some auties complain about that ABA thing; to them it seems that social relations are taught as if they were motor skills. Kinda like training a robot, or something
Having studied piano for sixteen years, I do feel it served me well in learning to type. It did not, however, serve me well in learning to play the flute in college. (That whole “here-to-here-is-an-octave-on-the-piano” vs. “how-you-blow-into-the-flute-changes-the-octave”…um, huh?)
I would only advise you to make sure that, should Charlie start learning a different instrument, it’s when he’s still young. Trying to learn flute as a college sophomore gave me the vapors.