4 reasons why music is good for you
Music influences us even before birth and we can feel its benefits at all levels:
1. Physiological benefits:
- Music can speed up or slow down your main bodily functions: blood pressure, breathing, muscle response, brain response
- Music develops your hearing sense, allowing you to classify and organize a world full of sounds
- Music acts directly on your central and peripheral nervous system
2. Psychological benefits:
- Music has calming and stimulating effects
- Music awakes, causes and helps you educate emotions and feelings
- Music is a daily source of pleasure
3. Intellectual benefits:
- Music improves your ability of sustained attention
- Music enhances your short and long-term memory
- Music develops a sense of order and analysis
- Music makes learning much easier
- Music stimulates imagination and creativity
- Music develops your artistic sensibility
4. Social benefits:
- Playing music facilitates self-expression
- Playing music boosts your self-esteem, self-confidence and self-awareness
- Playing together unites us as a group, giving us a sense of belonging
- Playing together prepares us for Teamwork and collaboration
- Music teaches us how to share and how to respect others
Extract from the Manifesto “Music Makes People” (European Music School Union):
“Music promotes the free development of the personality. It provides a foundation of values and orientation in an often chaotic and superficial world.”
“Playing music trains important secondary abilities in a person – abilities, which are also of benefit in other life contexts, for example in professional life. These include concentration, stamina and motivation, creativity, communication and expression skills, social role behaviour and teamwork.”
“The ability to feel music and to express it expands a person’s ability to experience themselves and the world around them. Playing music cultivates a person’s ability to communicate and trains individuals in social behaviour. “