Music Effects On Children Essay

However, some people may feel that music would not prove an effective means for improving the lives of children and may encourage parents and teachers to refrain from implementing music into everyday activities and music lessons. Certain forms of music can negatively affect the performance of a child as they could serve as a distraction and cause negative emotional impact. An example of this would be an experiment involving mice that were exposed to rock music. The mice were exposed to rock music while trying to travel through a maze; the mice that were exposed to rock music performed poorly compared to mice not exposed to rock music (Morris). Various studies have found that music lesson have no real impact on intelligence of children. Rauscher and Hilton reported that children, who took forty eight music lessons over a period of two years, showed no differences in IQ test scores when compared to children, who did not partake in music lessons (Costa-Giomi 3). …show more content…
In cases where students, who took music lessons, showed better general intelligence than non-music students, Farnsworth proposed that these cases may be explained by underlying factors such as brighter students are more inclined to take music lessons and families with higher standards of living are to afford music lessons (Costa-Giomi 1). While these tests support the theory that music would not benefit the lives of children, they do not consider many confounding variables that could obscure results. These confounding variables include the quality of music lessons taught and the type of music taught. If proper music instruction is implemented and the proper type of music is used, then the resulting side effects of music on a child’s life can prove very