Music And Academic Achievement In Vanishing Voices, By Russ Rymer

Music and Academic Achievement

Introduction

“Music is universally and uniquely human” (Patel). Unlike English, Mandarin, or Spanish, which are rapidly proliferating and taking the place of native tongues, music is something that can be communicated and understood on a global scale. After reading the stimulus material, Vanishing Voices, by Russ Rymer, it became essential to examine the question of dying languages: “One language dies every 14 days. By the next century, half of the roughly 7,000 languages spoken on Earth will likely disappear, as communities abandon native tongues...What is lost when a language goes silent?” It is important to first understand music’s qualifications in being a language. Like language, music has syntax and ordered

One such benefit can be seen through the work of Harmony Project in Los Angeles. Harmony project is a nonprofit after-school program that teaches music to children in low-income communities. Two nights a week, neuroscience and musical learning meet at Harmony's headquarters, where two-dozen children arrive to learn how to play flutes, oboes, trombones and trumpets. Researchers with the project claim that the data shows “Musical training doesn't just improve your ear for music — it also helps your ear for speech” ("This Is Your Brain..."). Margaret Martin, the woman in charge of the project explained that despite dropout rates of 50 percent or more in the neighborhoods where students live and where Harmony Project intentionally sites its programs, since 2008, 93 percent of the high school seniors have graduated in four years and have gone on to colleges like Dartmouth, Tulane, and NYU ("This Is Your Brain..."). In order to prove that music education promoted in schools was causing this upward trend in the children’s future, Martin asked Nina Kraus, who runs the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern University to complete a study and produce some quantitative evaluations of the music program. Using scalp electrodes, Kraus looked at brainwaves of the students playing music to understand how they processed both music and speech over a 2 year period. The results showed that the growth had “three common denominators”; these were pitch, timing, and timbre, and the brain uses the same circuitry for all three. Kraus then took into account the fact that the children were raised in poverty. “These children often hear fewer words by age 5 than other kids do and that's a problem: in the absence of stimulation, the nervous system ... hungry for stimulation ... will make things up.” In addition, the children had poor