Yes! Many are just beginning to understand this. When we finally begin to BELIEVE it, our schools will be transformed.

Not sure if you have referenced this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyZQf0p73QM

Stephen

I thought the overview of the Cambridge study lacked some specific information regarding what sort of actual teacher/student interaction was being executed during their so-called MGI.  What we get is this:

[The MGI consisted of activities which encouraged] entrainment (co-ordination of attentional and motoric processes between participants), opportunities for overtly mimetic behaviour as well as implicit imitation, and the experience of a non-conflictual context for interaction.

So, what does this look like?  I imagined a teacher playing some of Beethoven’s 5th, third movement and getting the kids to stomp around like goblins. Or maybe dropping the needle on the B minor part of Grieg’s Peer Gynt suite # 1, opus 46 and telling the youngsters, ” Can you imagine the Troll King in his hall beneath the ground when you hear this? “

Isn’t this just training kids to have an emotional response to auditory stimuli?  Minor tonality makes us sad or evil feeling, major elicits the opposite?  If we can be trained to hear beauty in a phrase like Strauss’ “Wie sch?n ist die Prinzessin Salome heute Nacht!”, (a phrase that hangs but barely onto tonality, but nonetheless effectively translates Narraboth’s rapture and adoration of a beautiful young girl), then there is no implicit power of music to affect one’s feelings of empathy. 

  We must be taught to hear the beauty in Narraboth’s phrase in the opera.. it doesn’t sound very nice to the untrained ear.  After lengthy instruction, we begin to become entrained to respond to Richard Strauss’ appreciation for atonality.  It isn’t a natural response, it is a logical response to training the ear to listen to note combinations in ways that we are not used to.

  Consider this, Mozart would find the above phrase, or other tonal music of the 19th/ early 20th Century (Debussy, Wagner, Saint-Sa?ns and many others) unbelievably dissonant to hear, although their music is in no-way as atonal as music such as that of Webern or Schoenberg.  His reaction would be similar to the way that you or I might react to Death Metal music (if you can call it music)  like Cradle of Filth. 

The experience must be trained into the brain.  The empathy the kids are displaying is a result of their coaching.  I don’t believe that there is an inherent qualitative effect that music can produce on an organism, outside of a logic-based association that is front loaded into the recipient through direct instruction (training the ear to hear different sounds not usually presented in the aural spectrum) or association (mama crooning a gentle tune while rocking and nursing a baby) .

Gotta go.

Great post!  I’ve always know music is magical, but it’s nice to see more and more research to back it up!

Sally from ElementaryMatters

Definitely not enough to go on yet in the Cambridge study, but madteacher’s advance reviews made me smile!