Music’s Power to Affect Social Change
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Music may not only make for healthier bodies and minds in children, it may also increase grades and lower dropout rates.
So said Harmony Project founder Margaret Martin during the University of Miami Global Business Forum, held Jan. 12–14, 2011. Martin began studying the relationship between music and at-risk youth in 1999, while a doctorate student at UCLA. During a trip to a street market in Los Angeles, she encountered a group of gang members who stopped in front of a child playing Brahms on the violin. After listening silently for five minutes, they tossed money in the child’s violin case and left.
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Nina Kraus, Hugh Knowles Professor, Neurobiology
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That experience led Martin to start the Harmony Project, a nonprofit that organizes after-school music classes and youth orchestras for at-risk children in impoverished urban areas. “Dropout rates in Los Angeles gang zones where we build Harmony Project programs exceed 70 percent,” Martin said, adding that her organization requires its students to remain in school. “And they all do,” she emphasized during the panel session titled “Achieving Social Change Through Music.”
Reducing dropout rates can have broad positive affects: Martin cited a 2009 study by the University of California-Santa Barbara Graduate School of Education that estimated cutting dropout rates could reduce the number of murders and aggravated assaults in Los Angeles County by more than 3,600 per year and save a billion tax dollars. She contrasted that figure with the low cost of her programs. “We spend about $1,200 to $1,500 per year on each student in the Harmony Project,” she said.
And it’s not just about money. As a matter of public health, Martin said, opportunities to study and practice music after school reduce a child’s exposure to street drugs, gangs, violent sexual predation — in general, “pressure to do bad stuff.” Harmony Project kids avoid such pressure, she added, because “music is cool.”
In its first year, the Harmony Project attracted 36 students; today it has 1,000 kids, 12 staff members and about 80 professional musicians. Since 2001, the project has built 10 full-time youth orchestras, one of which performed at the Hollywood Bowl last October during the debut performance of the L.A. Philharmonic’s new 28-year-old conductor, Gustavo Dudamel.
Practicing music also keeps kids out of academic trouble, Martin asserted. She noted the example of a sixth-grader who was stuck in English as a Second Language classes before studying violin through the Harmony Project. He was an honors student by the time he hit seventh grade.
One reason musical children become better students is because their brains are biologically altered from practicing music, said Nina Kraus, a professor of neurobiology, physiology and otolaryngology at Northwestern University’s School of Communication.
“Musical training changes sound processes in the brain,” she said. “When you are actively engaged in music, you are making sound-meaning connections constantly. And this complex of what you hear and what you’re playing and the meaning that it has is very, very important for the wiring of your nervous system.”
Kraus and her colleagues at Northwestern’s Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory have produced data confirming that musical experiences refine the brain’s ability to “encode” sound. This improves the brain’s capacity to process not only music but also other phenomena on the ear-to-brain pathway, particularly speech and reading. One study shows that schoolchildren who received musical training underwent greater increases in reading scores than art students.
“Reading is quintessentially multi-sensory, as is music,” Kraus said. Her research also shows that kids who are musicians have better perception of speech in noise, which correlates with better learning outcomes.
Martin, for one, sees the effects on a daily basis.
“You can’t learn an instrument by practicing once a week. You have to practice every day, and then you learn and get better,” she said. “[The Harmony Students] tell us, ‘I started studying my regular classes the way I was studying music. And now my grades are out the roof.’ It’s the concept of concerted cultivation.”
Last year, all of the Harmony Project students who graduated from high school were admitted to college, Martin noted.
By Kirk Nielsen
