Music in learning and relearning: The life-span approach.

Thanks to advances in neuroscience and music psychology, we are now in a better position to understand the secrets and possibilities of music to improve the quality of human life. In my SysMus, 2016 keynote, I used a life span framework to illustrate the outcome of these studies in the newly established field of neurosciences of music. Of particular importance in this context were the findings on learning and rehabilitation (relearning). In this framework, we can start observations about the auditory learning already preceding the birth: music learning was recently empirically shown to start already at the fetal stage. This was evidenced when pregnant mothers-to-be were committed to listen to researcher-selected auditory material during late pregnancy. The sounds were presented with loudspeakers so that they were audible also in the womb. After the babies were born, their sound-related brain responses were compared with the babies whose mothers had not listened to this material. Right after their birth and even at the age of four months, the babies' brain responses reflected the existence or lack of music exposure (Partanen, Kujala, Tervaniemi, & Huotilainen, 2013): brain responses of music-exposed babies were stronger than the responses of naive babies. Here, "Twinkle twinkle" was used both during the exposure and also during the brain recordings. In a similar vein, linguistic material was used during the exposure and during the recording. It was found that pseudoword "tatata," and its modifications with a pitch change resembling a prosodic change, evoked larger brain responses in the babies whose mothers had been listening to the sounds, whereas the brain responses to different kinds of pseudowords were indiscriminable in babies who had not been exposed prior to birth (Partanen, Kujala, Naatanen, et al., 2013). In toddlers and school-age children, music listening gives joyful moments and can also help them soothe and relax. Learning to play an instrument or joining a choir gives a special possibility to shared music moments and feelings of cohesion. Since pioneering findings of Hyde et al. (2009) and Shahin, Roberts, Chau, Trainor, and Miller (2008), there are tens of findings indicating various effects which music has on the developing brain. In a similar vein, there is now empirical evidence about the possibilities of music to enhance children's neurocognitive development as well. The most robust effects are with regard to phonological skills which carry importance for learning to read (Dege & Schwarzer, 2011; Kraus et al., 2014; Slater et al., 2014): children involved in musical training have more sensitive encoding of the phonemic information when compared with their nontrained peers. With regard to general cognitive processes (attention, working memory, and executive functions), there are plenty of positive findings that music training enhances these higher-order functions as well (Benz et al., 2016). However, such effects are quite sensitive to the testing paradigms and thus more research on this domain is needed (see critical review by Jaschke, Eggermont, Honing, & Scherder, 2013). Importantly, even casual family-oriented music activities taking place at home are found to be beneficial for the child's cognitive development. Voluntary and self-initiated dancing, singing, and listening to music at home were associated with advanced attentional neural functions (Putkinen, Saarikivi, & Tervaniemi, 2013; Putkinen, Tervaniemi, Saarikivi, & Huotilainen, 2015). Although this original finding was obtained with toddlers with intact hearing abilities, these casual music activities were also highly beneficial in deaf-born children who learnt to hear after receiving a cochlear implant (an electric hearing aid; Torppa et al., 2014). In them, the frequency of music activities was positively associated with improved linguistic skills.In adult musicians, we find evidence of a multitude of perceptual, cognitive, and motor benefits of music expertise in brain functions and structure when compared with musically untrained individuals. …