This innovative new series explores musical training from conception to grave. Learn how music you heard in-utero affected your musical tastes today. Encourage musical creativity in your child or students with easy music tech tools and exercises. Discover how cultures around the globe use music in the classroom. Find ways to reach special needs children with the joys of sound.

The Music & Life series will help teachers, parents, musicians, and medical professionals understand how music affects the different stages of life. Practical advice and easy technology tools and musical exercises will help you apply contemporary science. Written by a music educator with over a decade’s experience, and a specialization in at-risk education and multicultural arts, the Music & Life Series will give you the tools you need to make the most of music in everyday life.

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Before you breathed fresh air, felt your first embrace, or saw your mother’s face, you existed in a symphonic amniotic cocoon. Alone in watery darkness, your tiny ears took in the steady pulsing of your mother’s heart, the slow rush of fluid about your head, and the muffled external noises of a world you had not yet seen.

The womb was your first concert hall.

Hearing develops quickly in the uterus. At first the fetus “hears” through vibrations [1]. If you have ever sat in the movie theater and felt the rumble of an onscreen explosion in your stomach, then you understand how sound can send vibrations through the body. Ears form within the first ten weeks of pregnancy, and the unborn baby can hear in the traditional sense by four months [2].

Early Musical Influences

Can you influence your child to love Tchaikovsky, Charlie Parker or even Shakira before the big Birth Day? Is exposing a child to music in the womb helpful or harmful? Can music heard pre-birth affect intelligence, increase music appreciation, and encourage later creativity?

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Did you jam on the keys at age five? Sing since you wore diapers? Or did you just pick up music a year ago?

The amount of music in your life directly affects your ability to understand language. The longer you have played, the better your language skills[4]. How is this possible? What are the hidden connections between music and language? Is it too late to improve your language skills through music?

Understanding the distinct sounds of language begins at infancy[4]. As a child, you listened to lullabies, invented your own songs, and played toy instruments. Each time you heard a familiar tune or hit a wooden spoon against a metal pot, you increased your brain’s ability to understand the rhythms, syllables, and distinct sounds of language[5]. Simple songs helped you learn how to communicate with words and learn new vocabulary[4, 8].

While musical activities can help children learn language, musical training in an instrument or voice increases language learning in both children and adults[4]. Why? Click to read the rest…