Top 10 Scientifically-Proven Benefits of Music Education!
Jan 26, 2023
If you teach music, you have probably had to defend it. A parent wonders if choir is worth an elective slot. An administrator asks what students really get out of band. A student asks why they have to learn to read notes at all. I have had those conversations many times, so here are the 10 benefits of music education I point to most, with links to the actual research where it exists and plain talk where it doesn't.
Whether you are a student, a parent, or a music teacher, use this list to see what music class builds and to explain it to the people around you.
The 10 benefits of music education at a glance
- Sharper listening skills
- Stronger reading and language skills
- Better verbal memory
- Higher grades in other subjects
- Finer motor skills and coordination
- Focus and discipline
- Teamwork and belonging
- Confidence
- Creativity, self-expression and emotional awareness
- Cultural awareness
1. Sharper listening skills
Music class trains students to hear tiny differences in pitch, rhythm, and tone, and that careful listening shows up in how the brain handles speech. In a 2014 study in the Journal of Neuroscience, Nina Kraus and her team followed children in the Harmony Project, a free community music program in Los Angeles. Children who completed two years of music lessons showed a stronger brain response telling apart similar speech sounds, a skill linked to reading and language. One year was not enough to see the change, which is a good reminder that these benefits build over time.
šµ For teachers: short, daily ear training adds up. My free note-naming game listens as students sing or play and names each pitch, so listening practice feels like a game.
2. Stronger reading and language skills
Music and reading have a lot in common. Both ask students to break sound into small pieces and connect symbols to sounds. A 2015 meta-analysis in Frontiers in Psychology combined 13 training studies with 901 children and found that music training led to small but real gains in phonological awareness, the ability to hear and play with the sounds inside words. It did not find a clear effect on reading fluency, so think of music as a helpful partner to reading instruction, not a replacement for it.
šµ For parents: singing songs, clapping the syllables of words, and making up silly rhymes at home all practice these same sound skills.
3. Better verbal memory
Music students spend a lot of time remembering lyrics, melodies, and patterns. Researchers at the Chinese University of Hong Kong found that children with music training had better verbal memory (remembering words they hear) than children without it. When the researchers checked in a year later, children who had started or continued lessons improved further, while those who stopped did not. Visual memory did not show the same difference.
šµ For students: learning your lyrics and parts is real memory practice. Break a song into short phrases and learn one at a time, the same way you might study vocabulary.
4. Higher grades in other subjects
This is the benefit people ask about most. A 2020 study of more than 112,000 students in British Columbia, published in the Journal of Educational Psychology, found that students who took school music, especially instrumental music over several years, scored higher on math, science, and English exams. That held even after the researchers accounted for earlier grades, background, and neighborhood income. Highly engaged instrumental students were, on average, about a year ahead of their peers. It is a strong link, but it is not proof that music causes the higher scores. More on that in the research note below.
šµ For parents: in this study, sticking with music for several years was linked to bigger differences than a single course.
5. Finer motor skills and coordination
Playing an instrument asks fingers, hands, breath, and eyes to work together. In a 2009 study in the Journal of Neuroscience, young children who took 15 months of weekly keyboard lessons improved more on a finger coordination task than children who did not, and brain scans showed changes in areas tied to movement and hearing. In choir, the same kind of coordination shows up in breath control, vowel shapes, and Kodaly hand signs.
šµ Try this: add hand signs or body percussion to a warm-up. It gets bodies moving and makes the pattern easier to remember.
6. Focus and discipline
Nobody learns a hard passage by accident. Music asks students to follow directions, practice in small steps, and stay locked in for a whole rehearsal. I can't point to a single study that proves music makes students more focused in everything else, but in my experience, the student who learns to fix one measure at a time often brings that same patience to other work.
šµ For teachers: routine is your friend. A consistent warm-up, like the self-guided choir vocal warm-up videos I use, gets the whole room focused in the first five minutes.
7. Teamwork and belonging
An ensemble only works when everyone listens to everyone else. Choir, band, and orchestra students learn to blend, follow a conductor, cover for each other, and share credit for the final result. For a lot of students, especially in middle school, the music room is also the place where they feel they belong. That is hard to measure, but music teachers and parents see it all the time.
8. Confidence
Singing a solo, playing a first concert, or finally nailing a tricky rhythm gives students a real sense of accomplishment. Performing in front of other people is a skill, and music class lets students practice it little by little in a supportive room. Most music teachers can name a student who barely spoke up in September and was singing a solo by spring.
šµ For parents: go to the concerts. Knowing someone is in the audience for them matters more than you might think.
9. Creativity, self-expression and emotional awareness
Music gives students a way to say things they can't always put into words. Improvising, writing a short melody, or deciding how a phrase should feel all push students to make their own choices. Talking about the mood of a piece, and how the composer created it, also helps students build the words to name emotions in themselves and in other people.
šµ Try this: have students sing or play the same phrase three ways (happy, nervous, proud) and talk about what changed.
10. Cultural awareness
Music is one of the oldest ways people pass down their history. In music class, students sing and play pieces from many countries and traditions, learn where styles like spirituals, blues, jazz, and hip-hop came from, and hear instruments from around the world. That exposure helps students understand and respect people whose lives look different from their own.
A quick, honest note on the research
Not every study agrees. A 2020 meta-analysis in Memory and Cognition looked at 54 studies with nearly 7,000 children and found that when studies used stronger designs, such as random assignment and active comparison groups, music training showed little to no effect on general thinking skills or academic achievement. So I would not tell anyone that music lessons will raise IQ or guarantee better test scores.
What the evidence does support is more specific: better listening and sound processing, some gains in early reading skills, better verbal memory, and a strong link between long-term music participation and school success. The rest of the benefits on this list come from what music class is every day: a team, a creative outlet, and a skill you build through practice.
Putting these benefits to work in your classroom
If you want quick, low-prep ways to bring more of these benefits into your music class, here are a few tools I built:
šµ ThreeMinuteTheory.com: press play and teach a music theory lesson in about 3 minutes, with no student login needed to project it.
šµ SightReadQuest: students sing into the mic and get graded on pitch and rhythm automatically, which builds both listening and reading skills.
šµ Music class resources: a Beethoven escape room, solfege bingo, ready-to-go sub plans, and professional development for music teachers.
The bottom line
Music education is not a nice extra. It trains students to listen closely, supports early reading skills, strengthens verbal memory, and is linked with stronger grades, while also giving students a team, a creative outlet, and the confidence that comes from performing. The research is clearest on listening and language, and much more mixed on big claims about IQ, so lean on what is solid. If you are a parent, encourage your child to stick with music for more than a semester. If you are a teacher, keep this list handy for the next time someone asks why music matters.
FAQ: Benefits of music education
Why is music education important?
Music education is important because it builds skills students use everywhere: careful listening, memory, focus, teamwork, and the confidence to share their work in front of others. It also gives every student a creative outlet and a connection to cultures and traditions beyond their own.
What are the benefits of music education for students?
The 10 benefits of music education for students are sharper listening skills, stronger reading and language skills, better verbal memory, higher grades in other subjects, finer motor skills, focus and discipline, teamwork and belonging, confidence, creativity and self-expression, and cultural awareness.
Does music education make students smarter?
Not in the simple way it is often described. The best evidence points to specific gains, like listening, phonological awareness, and verbal memory, rather than a general boost to IQ. Students who stay in school music for several years do tend to earn higher grades, but researchers have not proven that music is the cause.
How long does it take to see the benefits of music education?
It depends on the skill, but longer is better. In the Harmony Project study, the changes in how the brain processed speech showed up after two years of lessons, not one. Confidence and teamwork can grow much sooner, often within a single concert cycle.
How can parents support music education at home?
Ask your child to teach you what they learned, listen to them practice without correcting every mistake, go to their concerts, and sing together in the car. Most of all, encourage them to stick with it through the tricky middle stretch, because that is where many of the benefits start to show.
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