In recent years, music learning has captured the attention to both researchers and the public. And though there are relatively few completed studies in the field, researchers say their findings are promising. The following are selected studies published over the past five years.
| Study | Researchers | Date | Results |
| Music and Spatial Task Performance | Frances H. Rauscher, Gordon L. Shaw, and colleagues University of California, Irvine | Published in 1993 in Nature | Listening to 10 minutes of a Mozart piano sonata improved the spatial-reasoning skills of a group of college students |
| Learning Improved by Arts Training | Martin F. Gardner, Alan Fox, and colleagues Brown University and the Music School, Providence, R.I. | Published in 1996 in Nature | First and 2nd graders given singing and art lessons that were sequenced in difficulty performed better in math and reading than students who received standard arts instruction. |
| Music Training Causes Long-Term Enhancement of Preschool Children’s Spatial Temporal Reasoning | Frances H. Rauscher, Gordon L. Shaw, and colleagues University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, and University of California, Irvine | Published in 1997 in Neurological Research | Weekly keyboard lessons helped preschoolers improve their performance on tests designed to measure spatial-temporal skills. Those children performed 34 percent better than children who had taken either computer lessons or group singing instead. |
| Increased Corpus Callosum Size in Musicians, Hand Skill Asymmetry in Professional Musicians, and In Vivo Evidence of Structural Brain Asymmetry in Musicians | Gottfried Schlaug and colleagues Harvard Medical School, Cambridge, Mass. | Published, respectively, in 1995 in Neuropsychologia, in 1997 in Brain and Cognition, and in 1995 in Nature | Certain regions of the brain are larger in musicians who started their musical training before age 7. |
Object Assembly
Children were asked to put together puzzles pieces as part of a study on how music learning affects performance on other tasks. The children who received music training assembled the puzzle faster than those with no training.
