Wanderlust: Expat Life & Style in Thailand Aug / Sept 2017: The Kids & Family Issue | Page 22

Especially at young
ages, when the brain is
still developing, music
can have far-reaching
impacts on overall
development.
MUSIC INSTRUCTION
IN BANGKOK
With a wealth of rigorous schools in
Bangkok offering music instruction,
parents can boost their child’s cogni-
tion and learning through academic
music instruction.
Christopher Johnson, Director of
Music at Harrow International School,
sees first-hand how his students
grasp music concepts and increase
their learning power. The act of trans-
lating a written page of music to a
played tune is itself an act of learning
of how to learn, Johnson said.
“By learning to read music, the
students become independent learn-
ers, which enables them to learn by
themselves,” he said.
In other words, music helps stu-
dents grasp concepts more quickly
and with more understanding, which
often translates to higher academic
achievement overall.
For a student to successfully under-
stand music, he or she must adopt a
range of new linguistic and mathemat-
ical skills. For example, Johnson says
that children who learn to play music
must know how to read music nota-
tion, which is an exercise of linguistic
skill. They must also understand differ-
ent keys; know the structure of a piece
22 WANDERLUST
of music; and understand melody, har-
mony and rhythm and how they work
together, which are exercises in mathe-
matical skill.
A study published in Psychology
of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts
found that children who took part
in orchestra lessons had increased
achievement on standardized tests,
better grades in English and math
courses, and performed better on
working memory tasks in general.
Achieving higher grades in the
classroom may relate to the ‘soft’ skills
musicians learn as well: Students who
trained musically were better at pay-
ing attention and persevering in a
task, according to “Music Matters.”
Improvements didn’t end with
classroom grades, either: Students’
SAT scores, or college entrance exam
scores for those in the U.S., were
higher for student musicians when
compared to a control group.
LISTENI NG AND
LANGUAGE
Music is inherently complex — not
unlike a language. In fact, listening to
language and music are both audito-
ry experiences processed in some of
the same parts of the brain.
It’s not surprising, then, that a good
ear for music means a good ear for
language. As kids pick up the ability
to distinguish musical sounds, they
increase the brain’s ability to make
those connections and distinctions
with non-music sounds. Students
fluent in musical language are more
equipped to hear slight phonetic dif-
ferences in a second spoken language.
This is something especially bene-
ficial for kids growing up in an inter-
national community, learning mul-
tiple languages, or exposed to tonal
languages like Thai. The ability to un-
derstand varying tones of language
will help students fare better in the
music classroom and vice versa.
In one study from the University of
California, kids who spoke Mandarin
or Vietnamese, both tonal languag-
es, were more likely to have perfect
pitch, or the ability to identify a tone
with no context or benchmark to
compare it to, than their monolingual
English-speaking counterparts. In
both groups, however, perfect pitch
was less likely the later students start-
ed musical instruction — all the more
reason to start music instruction ear-
lier rather than later.
Processing heard language also
translates to the written word. The
improved language skills from music
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