Music: The Benefits of Playing Instruments

Perspectivesmedical opinion
Written By Ibis Torres Santos

Playing a musical instrument is one of the best hobbies you can have. Musical classes engage a high audio-motor co-activation, which causes brain structural changes in the gray matter due to the constant musical interaction. Not only does it enhance physical health by strengthening the lungs and practicing proper posture, but it also aids mental health. In addition, it enhances your well-being and redefines your character by making you a more confident, patient, and dedicated person. Moreover, it has been proven that music can help individuals to identify emotions as young as 15 months old. The benefits of playing a musical instrument as a hobby are that it will enhance your brain capabilities, make you physically healthier, instill great personality traits, and enable you to be emotionally smarter.

Neuroscientific studies (utilizing fMRI and PET) have confirmed that musical disciplines enhance brain capabilities. According to the United States NCBI 2013, individuals who started early were found to have larger volumes in the arcuate fasciculus, affecting our motor and auditory regions. A high audio-motor co-activation causes brain structural changes due to constant musical interaction. Unlike the listener, the musician engages in motor skills, which control both hemispheres. While playing the instrument, the brain combines the linguistic and mathematical precisions (left hemisphere) in conjunction with the novel and creative content (the right hemisphere), excelling within. In another study conducted by the United States, NCBI found that playing a musical instrument simultaneously engages many aspects of the brain, including the motor cortices and visual and auditory senses. This explains why musicians have a larger volume and activity of the corpus callosum, like the bridge between both hemispheres; it allows their brains to make connections or travel faster and through more diverse routes. Making music involves both crafting and understanding its emotional content and message, which explains why musicians often have higher levels of executive function. In other words, it interlinks tasks that include planning, strategizing, and attention to detail. Since this ability requires simultaneous analyses of both cognitive and emotional aspects, it also impacts how the memory system works. A musician uses their highly connected brains to give each memory multiple categories of tags (conceptual, emotional, audio, and contextual tabs) like a good internet search engine.

Playing a musical instrument can be helpful for our physical health. According to Bottom Line INC (2015), playing the harmonica to strengthen your lungs is a technique utilized in hospitals’ pulmonary rehabilitation programs. Dr. Schaman helped develop the Seydel Medical Harmonica, which uses chords rather than single notes, making learning more accessible for patients in recovery. In an article published by Live Science (2013), Ms. Suzzane Hanser from Berklee College of Music’s therapy department affirmed that making music can lower blood pressure, decrease heart rate, reduce stress, and lessen anxiety and depression. There is also increasing evidence that making music enhances the immunological response, which enables us to fight viruses. In another article published by Live Science (2018), researcher Chung-Hey Chen postulated that listening to soothing music for 30 minutes daily significantly reduced stress, anxiety, and depression.

Furthermore, to help decrease the abnormal wearing of joint surfaces in our bodies, we would need to practice proper posture. Proper posture is a rarely mentioned quality of playing a musical instrument, regardless of whether that is woodwind, brass, or even your very own vocal cords, as singers do. In an interview published by CS Music (2009), the well-known singing instructor Judith E. Carman stated, “The Oxford Universal Dictionary defines posture as the disposition and carriage of the limbs and body as a whole.” In other words, posture is the way the body is aligned in any position. In the same interview, the voice teacher and certified Alexander technique instructor, Donna S. Reid, asserted, “Correct alignment assists the muscles involved in singing so that the breath and the vocal mechanism can respond more efficiently. A slump in posture can interrupt this and cause your body to work more ineffectually.” The musical disciplines are not the only beneficiaries of our physical health; they also add valuable personality traits.

A musical instrument as a hobby can induce or enhance individual personality traits. According to the five-factor model of personality (FFM) developed by Robert McCrae and Paul Costa, our attributes are classified as extraversion (vs. introversion), agreeableness (vs. antagonism), conscientiousness (vs. lack of direction), neuroticism (vs. emotional stability), and openness (vs. closeness). This model helps to outline how music improves individuals with poor social skills and strengthens social bonds. Music classes for extended amounts of time induce self-confidence and create a common interest among the musicians, notwithstanding the nature of the musical group where those with introversion learn to be more extroverted. Regardless of age, taking a music class or joining a marching band or orchestra will encourage the individual to develop relationships with diverse types of people. A University of Toronto team did research called Group Music Training and Children’s Prosocial Skills, where they found that children with poor social skills in the music group showed increased sympathy and prosocial behavior. Furthermore, Sync Project published an article with the theory found in studies done with 15-18-month-old toddlers and their caretakers, suggesting that the music synchronization in action and movements between individuals shared intention and the perception not as ‘me’ but ‘we.’ A musical instrument enables us to have self-confidence and be more open with one another by strengthening the bonds we form and helps us understand human emotions more easily.
When playing a musical piece, we are not only concentrating on its logical sense but on its emotional side as well, and that helps the individual to identify and understand different types of emotions. A study published by Sync Project found that toddlers around 6 months old can identify emotional expressions after training when associating those with music pieces (e.g., happy or sad songs) more effectively. Being emotionally intelligent is essential because it helps us to identify and manage stress while promoting or instilling a positive aspect of the situation. Not addressing stress can lead to mental health deterioration. The Heart-Mind Online website published a study done by Yale University about how adults identifying emotions in musical performance and emotional intelligence correlate with one another. The results of this study suggest that the ability to identify, understand, reason, and manage emotions in life uses the exact mechanisms as being sensitive to emotions in music.

Playing a musical instrument as a hobby is proven to enhance your brain capabilities, make you physically healthier, instill great personality traits, and enable you to be emotionally smarter. All the benefits musicians acquire are unique to their constant practice of this hobby. Studies have shown that learning to play an instrument is not only different from any other activity (sports or painting) or merely being smarter. This is because it allows the individual to solve academic and social setting problems more creatively and effectively. An efficient audio motor is a skill that will enable them to perform and translate to other tasks, such as the ability to pronounce foreign languages or have superior spatial tactile acuity. The benefits exhibit enhanced memory functions, creating, storing, and retrieving those more quickly and systematically. Playing an instrument not only helps patients’ pulmonary lung recovery or mental health issues such as stress, anxiety, and depression but also helps to maintain good posture, which can help to prevent back issues such as abnormal wearing of joint surfaces. Music also helps people to be emotionally smarter so that they can manage stress or assist those with it while at the same time instilling great personality traits in individuals. Thus, if you wonder what’s behind the glare of the stars as you stare at the starry night sky, I challenge you to find out why music is my beyond.

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Ibis Torres Santos
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