Plus, if you’ve ever read about Gardner’s 7 Intelligences (http://wilderdom.com/personality/L2-4GardenerMultipleIntelligences.html), the sheer physicality of moving my hands and feet to the meter of the music and figuring out where my hands and feet needed to be at any point in time further helped me learn. I’m a visual and physical learner and could learn pieces well through muscle memory, but can’t play by ear to save my life! Hubby has a great ear, played a few instruments and sings well, so music is a fact of life around here.

We would like to start Bobby on piano lessons soon, but he has to stop stimming on opening and closing the keyboard lid first…smashing fingers in a wooden lid would be a serious disincentive to practice!

And, as I have stated before, if you can present it to her in operatic or choral form, all the better.

I would love to have her start piano lessons soon…taking piano from age six to age eighteen was, I think, what gave me a head-start typing (and, thus, computing). My dad, who played piano by ear, could type 120 wpm.

Good for your son, by the by, if that works for him. I know I was immune to music for most of my life (because it takes way too much practice to not hear it as individual bits and pieces thrown together that annoy me), so he’ll have a good part of his childhood that I did manage to miss. It was only when I was 13 or so (ish?) that I began to appreciate any kind of music, when my Dad took me out to the Reno Philharmonic and then out to dinner. I went originally for the dinner, but I learned to like the music, too, quickly.

I took Latin for three years, and was fairly terrible at it, though I took it in stride. I couldn’t really associate the words to ideas without lots of help, though I was good at manipulating the grammar (and thus made it through, somehow). Right now I’m trying Chinese for my language credit, which has to be bordering on just nuts or way too optimistic, but I’m having fun even if I’m not quite as able (understatement) as my classmates.

Cliff

Study participants, who had varying amounts of musical training or none at all, wore scalp electrodes that measured their multi-sensory brain responses to audio and video of a cellist playing and a person speaking.
The data showed that the number of years that a person practiced music strongly correlated with enhanced basic sound encoding mechanisms that also are relevant for speech. Beyond revealing super-accurate pitch coding vital to recognizing a speaker’s identity and emotional intent, the study showed enhanced transcription of timbre and timing cues common to speech and music.

I’ll also note that one reason I was long ago drawn to Latin and ancient Greek is that these (being “dead” languages”) are languages that one primarily reads rather than speaking and writing. Years ago, I much appreciated not having to talk out loud, certainly not in a foreign language.

Also, it might be interested to supplement this by comparing currently musicians to non-musicians and comparing the command of language, to see the typical depth of difference.

What was the actual procedure for the study?

Cliff