If you've ever conducted or played in an ensemble, you’ve likely felt it—that moment when everything clicks, the music soars, and your group performs at a level beyond anything you thought possible.

Music learning is the most effective way, both in terms of time and impact, to prime the brain for language learning.

New research challenges traditional theories of infant language acquisition, suggesting that babies primarily learn language through rhythmic rather than phonetic information in their initial months.

This video contains excerpts from an ARTSpeaks event held on November 8, 2021. In this video, neurobiologist Nina Kraus explores the impact that music learning has on young students in the areas of reading skills, sound processing, language abilities, and more.

A great article from Dr Nina Kraus, one of the leading researchers in the neural encoding of speech and music.

This study has compared musical training with the visual aspect of reading languages. The most interesting thing about the study design is that they have compared Chinese language reading and English language reading.

This study is important because it is trying to get to the bottom of the neural development of the auditory and motor networks. It is, however, building on the research from musically trained children and reading.

10 minutes of music learning a week for 10 weeks can improve reading skills for poor readers.

This brand new study with beginner readers (aged 5-7) found a whole swag of connections, concluding that “rhythm skills and literacy call on overlapping neural mechanisms, supporting the idea that rhythm training may boost literacy in part by engaging sensory‐motor systems”.

Here is a fascinating new theoretical paper about the relationship between rhythm and language abilities. A theoretical study is one that brings together all the relevant current research and puts forward a theory of, in this case, how two concepts may be connected.

In this study at the University of Montreal, 51 children with ASD ages 6 to 12 were randomly assigned to participate in a clinical trial involving three months of either a music-based, or a play therapy intervention.

Do you know someone who struggles to hear the emotions in speech? The skills of “hearing” prosody in speech are fundamentally musical. It is the melody and rhythm of speech, mixed in with the facial and physical expressions that went along with the speech, that our brains use to interpret emotions in speech.