WHY MUSIC?

• Students of the arts continue to outperform their non-arts peers on the SAT, according to the College Entrance Examination Board. In 2000, SAT takers with coursework in music performance scored 55 points higher on the verbal portion of the test and 38 points higher on the math portion.
• The U.S. Department of Education lists the arts as subjects that college-bound middle and junior high school students should take, stating "Many colleges view participation in the arts and music as a valuable experience that broadens students’ understanding and appreciation of the world around them.
• The very best engineers and technical designers in the Silicon Valley industry are, nearly without exception, practicing musicians.
• Physician and biologist Lewis Thomas studied the undergraduate majors of medical school applicants. He found that 66% of music majors who applied to medical school were admitted, the highest percentage of any group. 44% of biochemistry majors were admitted.
• A research team exploring the link between music and intelligence reported that music training is far superior to computer instruction in dramatically enhancing children's abstract reasoning skills, the skills necessary for learning math and science.
• Researchers at the University of Montreal used various brain imaging techniques to investigate brain activity during musical tasks and found that sight-reading musical scores and playing music both activate regions in all four of the cortex's lobes; and that parts of the cerebellum are also activated during those tasks.
• Researchers in Leipzig found that brain scans of musicians showed larger planum temporale (a brain region related to some reading skills) than those of non-musicians. They also found that the musicians had a thicker corpus callosum (the bundle of nerve fibers that connects the two halves of the brain) than those of non-musicians, especially for those who had begun their training before the age of seven.
• In a comparison of female college students, half who were non-musicians and half musicians, the musicians out scored their counterparts by an average of 16% on several measures.

All Sources for above citations can be found at www.menc.org