Children's Classical Music CDs for Kids|Orchestral CD Audio Books

Close your eyes and listen. How many sounds can you hear? The air-conditioner? The refrigerator? The lid of the cookie jar? The puppy chewing on the rung of a chair? The garage door opening? It is rather remarkable how many more sounds we hear when we remove the visual image and concentrate on the listening. But these are simple sounds. Think about how much harder the brain has to work when it is listening to the complex, patterned sounds that we call music. To identify a piece of music, pitch, rhythm, dynamics, and tempo, all have to be ordered in a very specific way for these sounds to be identified as a particular piece of music. A single note out of sequence can make a tune unrecognizable or turn it into a different melody. While people have understood for centuries that music was capable of eliciting emotional responses, like good food and wine or a beautiful painting, in the last decade neuroscience has discovered that music actually promotes brainpower. Offering children the opportunity to listen to classical music, we now know, is actually exercising or tuning up their brains.Believe it or not, music actually seems to improve the brain’s hardware!

The benefits of listening to music, after the last ten years of neurological study, are undeniable. The results of the ground-breaking ‘Mozart effect’ studies in the early 1990’s confirmed what many music teachers had long known: excellence in music was often linked to excellence in academics. In many ways, these experiments were the beginning of a field linking music and neurology. As parents and educators, there can be no doubt that listening to symphonic music, especially highly structured classical music is good for brain development. When research shows that listening to Mozart is more helpful than listening to other genres of music, or even silence, and that piano lessons improved test scores by significant magnitudes when the same amount of time on computer lessons produced no improvement in the standardized spatial-temporal reasoning tests at all, perhaps it is time for all parents and teachers to turn off the television, videos, and computers, take out the instruments, and turn on the music!

Neurologists now maintain that music actually can affect how young child may not only enhance spatial reasoning at an early age but may also affect his or her ability to excel in such fields as higher mathematics and engineering as they get older. Music, it appears, makes the brain fire in highly sophisticated ways, and the relationship between brain development and music have generated so much interest in the past decade that its study has become a specialty in neurobiology and has even led to the establishment of the MIND (Music Intelligence Neural Development) Institute at the University of California in Irvine. While empirically people have known that music had benefits – from the great American band movement (1850-1920) that maintained that playing in a band was good for both mind and body, and even democracy, to current music education programs – neurologists are providing explanations and proof of its importance in brain development.

In 1997 another study “Music Training Causes Long-Term Enhancement of Preschool Children's Reasoning,” was published. Seventy-eight preschool children were divided into two groups. One group was given piano lessons several times a week and the other was given computer lessons. At the end of six months, when the groups were retested, the piano group exhibited a “highly significant improvement of large magnitude” on spatial-temporal reasoning tests, as opposed to the computer class group who showed no improvement at all.1

In France in the 1950s, Dr. Alfred Tomasi began to study the effects of music on children with speech and communication disorders. In the US, the ‘Mozart effect,’ as it came to be known, was first documented in 1993 when experiments showed that college students scored significantly higher on spatial-temporal reasoning tests after listening to the first ten minutes of the Mozart Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major (K.448), compared to 20 minutes of silence, or 20 minutes of a relaxation tape, minimalist music, dance music, or a short story.2 The neural firings that happened when the brain was processing Mozart’s musical patterns were linked to subsequent spatial-temporal reasoning. It seemed that listening to Mozart was like doing very efficacious warm-up exercises before a track meet.

Why? Neurologists distinguish two types of reasoning: ST (spatial-temporal) and LA (language-analytic). Our brains bounce back and forth between the two regularly and this bouncing is crucial to the way we think, reason and create.3 A simple way to think about the two is that LA (language-analytical) reasoning is used, for example, for solving an equation and getting a quantitative result, whereas ST (spatial-temporal) would be used by the chess player who must think several steps ahead, envisioning his opponents responsive moves, and planning for various contingencies, or by the architect who must conceptualize a building before it is drawn. These spatial-temporal higher brain functions are employed when a person creates an idea, is able to remember it, transform it, and relate it to other things in the absence of external sensory input or feedback. The brain is creating patterns and remembering them. When listening to music, the listener needs to be able to remember what he has just heard, combine it with the music that he is hearing, and only then can he or she comprehend and appreciate the whole. Your brain is remembering complex patterns. In order to listen to music (comprehending, as opposed to just hearing it) you must be able to hold in your brain the patterns that you have just heard long enough to put them together with the ongoing music in order to comprehend and appreciate the whole. Music is not a snapshot; music is a prolonged series of patterned sounds that require spatial-temporal reasoning. Obviously, the more complex the music – a symphony, for example – the more complex the neural firings, and when you can remember the way that a song goes or a symphony sounds, you are actively engaging your brain in ST, or spatial-temporal, activity.

What is music doing to the brain? Simply put, music sets into motion patterned firings in the same way that spatial temporal reasoning does, namely, it enhances the ability to create, maintain, transform, and relate complex mental images even in the absence of external sensory input or feedback.4 Music and chess are two of the few ways that young children can be encouraged to develop spatial-temporal reasoning power, and spatial-temporal reasoning power is vital for math and science when it moves beyond rote learning. In international standardized tests, American students scores are below average in math that involves geometry and spatial reasoning, largely because, it has been posited, American instruction emphasizes LA or language-analytical reasoning in the teaching of mathematics rather than ST, or spatial-temporal reasoning.

Having discovered that it has been scientifically proven that all parents should have not only toys and books in their children’s rooms, but also have music, how do you make certain that your children have the benefits that music offers?

5. Watch videos with great music, such as The Nutcracker ballet and the French film The Red Balloon.

6. Listen to a wide range of music and be sure that it’s music that you also enjoy (Magic Maestro Music’s Stories in Music™ series, and Classical Kids series as well as Raffi and Tom Chapin.)

10. Ask yourself each day if your child has sung, played, or listened to some music; if not, sing a lullaby or play a CD softly as you say good night.

And remember, the best part about this brain-enhancing activity is that it is fun for the entire family. Children given the opportunity to listen to classical music, are actually exercising or tuning up their brains in very specific and unique ways.

In short, when you are listening or creating music, your spatial-temporal firing patterns are firing, and new patterns are being developed in your cortex.

The brain seems to have a large repertoire of inherent quasi-stable, periodic spatial-temporal firing patterns, which can be excited and used in memory and higher brain function.5

Children should be given the opportunity to listen to classical music.

* Bonnie Ward Simon, president and executive producer of Magic Maestro Music™, is a music educator and internationally published writer on musical topics specializing in introducing children to music. She was formerly the executive director of the Washington Chamber Symphony, the resident chamber orchestra at the Kennedy Center; co-creator of its Concerts for Young People and Family Concerts series; creator of the Viva Vivaldi! Competition for young female instrumentalists; a consultant to Scholastic Marketing Partners in the field of music education, and she also worked at Carnegie Hall. She is the female voice on the Stories in Music™ series.

1. F. H. Rauscher, G. L. Shaw, L. J. Levine, E. L. Wright, W. R. Dennis, and R. L. Newcomb, "Music Training Causes Long-Term Enhancement of Preschool Children's Reasoning," Neurological Research 19, no. 2 (1997)

2. F. H. Rauscher, G. L. Shaw, and K. N. Ky, "Listening to Mozart Enhances Spatial-Temporal Reasoning: Towards a Neurophysiological Basis," Neuroscience Letters 185, no. 44 (1995). Study conducted at University of Califormia, Irvine.
(1.) F. H. Rauscher, G. L. Shaw, and K. N. Ky, "Music and Spatial Task Performance," Nature 365, no. 611 (1993).

3. Grandin, Temple, Peterson, Matthew, Shaw, Gordon L, “Spatial-temporal versus language-analytic reasoning: the role of music training.” Arts Education Policy Review, July-August 1998, p.11f.

4. Leng and Shaw, "Toward a Neural Theory"; L. Brothers, G. L. Shaw, and E. L. Wright, "Durations of Extended Mental Rehearsals Are Remarkably Reproducible in Higher Level Human Performance," Neurological Research 15, no. 413 (1993); and W. G. Chase and H. A. Simon, "The Mind's Eye in Chess," in Visual Information Processing, ed. W. G. Chase (New York: Academic Press, 1973).

5. Leng and G. L. Shaw, "Toward a Neural Theory of Higher Brain Function Using Music as a Window, Concepts Neurosci. 2, no. 229 (1991).