The Benefits of Music Lessons: What the Research Shows, and What We’ve Seen in 15 Years

We get a version of the same question every week. A child’s schedule is already full. Does music actually do anything for them, or is it one more thing?

The short answer is yes, and the evidence is better than most people realize. Students who learn an instrument do measurably better in mathematics and science, they read more readily, their hands and ears develop in ways that show up on tests, and one randomized trial found a gain in IQ. Here is what the research shows, and what we have seen ourselves across fifteen years of teaching.

Music students do better in math and science

The largest study on this followed 112,916 students through high school. Those who took instrumental music scored significantly higher in Grade 10 mathematics and science, and in English.

What makes the study unusual is how hard the researchers worked to rule out the obvious objection. The association held after the researchers accounted for earlier academic performance, language and cultural background, and neighborhood socioeconomic status. Those controls make the finding more persuasive, though an observational study cannot prove that the lessons caused the higher scores.

The effect was strongest for students who played an instrument rather than sang, and it grew with how long and how seriously they were involved.

A separate analysis using data from the large American ABCD Study found that children consistently engaged in music training for two years scored higher on several cognitive and language tasks, with the clearest gain over time appearing in picture vocabulary.

What a randomized trial found about IQ

Correlations are one thing. The stronger test is to assign children to lessons at random, and that has been done.

Researchers at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto took 144 six-year-olds and randomly assigned them to keyboard lessons, voice lessons, drama, or no lessons at all, for 36 weeks. Every group gained IQ over the year, since all of them had started school. But the children who received music lessons gained about three points more than those who did not.

It is a modest number and the study is one of its kind, so we would not want to oversell it. But it is a properly randomized trial published in a leading journal, and it points the same direction as everything else here.

Reading starts with the ear

Before a child can read a word, they have to hear that it is made of separate sounds. That skill, phonological awareness, is one of the strongest predictors of how easily a child learns to read, and music training improves it.

A meta-analysis of thirteen studies found a small but statistically reliable gain. Its model suggested roughly forty hours of training might be needed before a reliable effect appeared in rhyming skills, though the authors urged caution about that figure. It did not find a statistically reliable overall improvement in reading fluency. For children with dyslexia specifically, a randomized trial with a proper comparison group, though a relatively small one, found that rhythm-focused music training improved phonological awareness and reading accuracy. The proportion of children still classified as very poor text readers was roughly half that of the comparison group.

Hands and ears, measured

These are the least-discussed benefits and the best evidenced.

Manual dexterity and two-handed coordination. Children who learn an instrument improve on standard tests of fine motor skill. In one study, which used group-based music training rather than private lessons, the gains were still present four months after the training ended. A separate two-year randomized school trial also found improvements in fine motor skill and auditory memory, though it did not produce broad gains across every outcome it measured.

Hearing. Trained musicians discriminate pitch far more finely than untrained listeners, and performed better on one study’s attentive sound-tracking task, with the groups matched for IQ. Worth knowing: the same study found no advantage in understanding speech against competing talkers or background noise.

Fine motor control and careful listening are valuable in their own right, whatever a child eventually chooses to do.

What fifteen years has shown us

Research can tell you what happens on average. It cannot tell you what a Tuesday afternoon looks like. This part is ours.

Five minutes is enough to start. Parents rarely believe this. A young beginner practicing five careful minutes a day will get further than one practicing thirty distracted ones. We say practice makes permanence, not practice makes perfect, because whatever a student repeats is what they learn, mistakes included. The research agrees here: when practice is measured properly rather than self-reported, sheer quantity barely predicts the quality of the playing.

Showing up matters more than the length of the session. We run practice challenges for exactly that reason. Thirty days earns a ribbon and a certificate, fifty earns a medal, and a hundred days earns a trophy and a name on our Wall of Fame.

Progress rarely looks like progress. The signs parents tend to watch for, playing faster and louder and moving through the book, are the ones teachers trust least. The real markers are quieter. A child who stops at a mistake and works on that one measure instead of restarting the whole piece is practicing well, even though it sounds worse from the next room. A child who has become fussier about their own playing has not got worse. They have started hearing things they could not hear a year ago.

Milestones do not run on a schedule. Parents often arrive wanting to know when their child should be reading music, or playing with both hands, or performing from memory. We understand the impulse, but the honest answer is that every child arrives at these things on their own timeline, and a child who is slower to one is frequently quicker to the next. What we can say with confidence is that time spent early on posture and technique is the best investment available. Students who are set up properly at the beginning learn faster for years afterward, and students who are rushed spend that time later undoing habits instead.

What makes a beginner take off is remarkably consistent. Practice happens daily, even briefly. Lessons happen every week rather than when the calendar allows. Home is encouraging about it. And in the early years, a parent sits in on the lesson and helps at home during the week, which does more than almost anything else we could ask for.

Where it can lead

Our students have won the Guitar Foundation of America’s Junior, Senior and International competitions, and the Parkening Competition. They have performed on NPR’s From the Top and Tiny Desk, been recognized by YoungArts, and have organized their own fundraisers raising thousands of dollars for charity.

We mention this not because we expect any of it from a beginner, but because it is the honest ceiling of what a music education can become when a young person and a good teacher stay with it.

What students take with them

The ones who stay through high school tend to leave with four things.

Music becomes part of their college application, and in an admissions process where thousands of strong students look interchangeable on paper, years of serious musical work is a genuine differentiator. They keep a relationship with their teacher that often outlasts the lessons themselves. They take the instrument with them when they go. And they find their people, because musicians tend to locate each other quickly wherever they land.

None of that shows up in a study. It is simply what we have watched happen.

Common questions

Do music lessons help with math?

The largest study on the question, following 112,916 students, found that those who took instrumental music scored higher in Grade 10 mathematics and science, with the advantage holding after family background and prior achievement were taken into account.

Do music lessons make children smarter?

A randomized trial of 144 six-year-olds found that a year of music lessons produced a gain of about three IQ points over children who did not take them. Researchers continue to debate how much of the wider academic advantage is caused by lessons and how much reflects who chooses them, but the association itself is consistent and large.

What age should a child start?

Earlier is not automatically better, and the evidence for a hard cutoff is much weaker than it is usually presented. Professional musicians in one large study had started anywhere between the ages of two and eighteen. In practice the right moment is when a child is curious and can sit with an adult for a few minutes at a time. We teach students from age four.

How long should my child practice each day?

Less than you think, especially at the start. Five minutes of careful work is genuinely enough for a young beginner. Their teacher will tell you when it should grow.

Which instrument should we start with?

The one your child is drawn to. Interest predicts whether they keep playing better than almost anything else we can measure. We teach guitar, piano, violin and voice, and we are happy to talk it through before you commit to anything.

Is it too late for my child to start?

Almost certainly not. Adults learn instruments successfully all the time, and so do teenagers who have never touched one.

Coming to see us

The California Conservatory of Music has taught guitar, piano, violin and voice for fifteen years, in Sunnyvale, Fremont and Redwood City, to students from age four through to adults picking up an instrument for the first time.

The research above is encouraging, but it is not really why families stay. They stay because a child who could not play anything in September plays something in June, and because standing up in front of a room and doing it well changes how a young person carries themselves.

If you would like to see what that looks like, we offer a free introductory lesson.

Where this comes from

Claims about research should be checkable, so here is what the above rests on.

• Guhn, Emerson & Gouzouasis, “A Population-Level Analysis of Associations Between School Music Participation and Academic Achievement,” Journal of Educational Psychology, 2020. The 112,916-student study.
• Schellenberg, “Music Lessons Enhance IQ,” Psychological Science, 2004. The randomized trial.
• Habibi et al., Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 2025. The ABCD Study analysis, nearly 12,000 children.
• Gordon, Fehd & McCandliss, Frontiers in Psychology, 2015. Phonological awareness meta-analysis.
• Flaugnacco et al., PLoS ONE, 2015. The randomized trial in children with dyslexia.
• Martins et al., Frontiers in Psychology, 2018, and Neves et al., Cognition, 2025. Motor skill and auditory memory.
• Madsen, Marschall, Dau & Oxenham, Scientific Reports, 2019. Pitch discrimination.
• Duke, Simmons & Cash, Journal of Research in Music Education, 2009. What effective practice actually looks like.

Sign up for a FREE introductory lesson at The California Conservatory of Music today!