Music Matters is a partnership between CBS4, Mountain States Toyota and Swallow Hill Music to create awareness about the importance of music education. You can help enrich children’s lives with music by learning more about Swallow Hill Music – their Little Swallows program, concerts, and music classes.
● Music education sharpens student attentiveness, equips students to be creative and supports better study habits and self-esteem. (Arts Education Partnership, 2011)
● Research reveals strong connections between rhythm skills and pre-reading abilities in toddlers. Woodruff Carr K, W.-S.T., Tierney A, Strait D, Kraus N. , Beat synchronization and speech encoding in preschoolers: A neural synchrony framework for language development. (… in Association for Research in Otolaryngology Symposium. 2014: San Diego, CA).
● Researchers found that after two years, children who not only regularly attended music classes, but also actively participated in the class, showed larger improvements in how the brain processes speech and reading scores than their less-involved peers. Nina Kraus, director of Northwestern’s Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory, quoted in Melissa Locker, “This Is How Music Can Change Your Brain,” Time, December 16, 2014.
● Playing a musical instrument impacts multiple areas of the brain, especially enhancing our executive functions, and researchers note it is comparable to a full-body workout. “Intellectual nourishment and the brain,” by Dawn Davis, Illinois State University, Oct. 18, 2017
https://denver.cbslocal.com/musicmatters/