Does Music Training Really Make Kids More Creative?

By ABC Academy of Music teaching team · Updated August 2026

“Music makes kids more creative.” You have probably heard this claim. Maybe from a teacher, a brochure, or a well-meaning relative. Music uses the “right brain,” the creative side. Train it, the idea goes, and it unlocks creativity elsewhere too. This piece is part of a series. See also our pieces on brain development, school performance, self-discipline, and parent-child bonding. Parents ask us often: “Does learning an instrument actually make my child more creative?” Does training build measurable creativity? Or do already-creative kids simply gravitate toward music lessons in the first place? We checked the original source for every claim below. See our full Music Education Research hub for every study behind our program.

What “Divergent Thinking” Actually Measures

Creativity is hard to test directly. Researchers usually break it into two pieces. One is coming up with ideas: many different, unusual ones. The other is judging ideas: picking which ones are actually good. The first piece has a name in psychology. It is called divergent thinking.

Divergent thinking tests ask something simple. Name unusual uses for a brick. Finish a set of half-drawn circles into pictures. List things that are round. Researchers score the answers three ways. Fluency counts how many ideas a person gives. Flexibility counts how many categories those ideas span. Originality measures how rare an idea is. A widely used US test for this, first published in 1966, remains common today. Other researchers use closely related tasks, like naming unusual uses for a common object.

None of these tests measure creativity the way most people picture it, like writing a novel. They measure one specific, testable piece of creative thought. That difference matters for everything that follows.

Musicians Score Higher on Divergent Thinking. The Question Is Why.

A US study (2009) compared trained musicians to non-musicians. Everyone completed creativity tasks. Musicians scored higher on the divergent-thinking measures. That part is a straightforward link. People who already have years of music training score differently than people who do not.

The more interesting part used a brain scan. It tracks blood flow near the brain’s surface during a task. Musicians showed more activity on both sides of the front of the brain, not just one side. That result is worth pausing on. It cuts against a popular idea.

You have probably heard that creativity is a “right brain” skill. A large US study (2013) tested this claim directly. It scanned the resting brains of 1,011 people, ages 7 to 29. The team was led by Jared Nielsen and colleagues. Researchers looked for proof that some people run a more “left-brained” network overall, and others a more “right-brained” one. They found specific left- and right-sided networks for particular jobs, like language. They found no proof of an overall left-brain or right-brain personality type. Their own words were direct: the data “are not consistent with a whole-brain phenotype” of one side being stronger. The earlier musician study fits that same picture. Musicians showed activity on both sides during a creative task, not right-side-only. Their brains were not simply running a more active “right side.”

Formal Training Helps Verbal Creativity. It Does Not Touch Every Kind.

An Italian study (2020) dug into a more specific version of this question. Researchers compared three groups: musicians with formal training, self-taught musicians, and non-musicians. Everyone did three tasks. One was musical. Inventing new short pieces from “Happy Birthday.” One was verbal. Listing unusual uses for a cardboard box. One was visual: completing partial drawings.

Formally trained musicians scored higher than self-taught musicians on musical and verbal tasks. They also scored higher than non-musicians on the verbal task specifically. No group showed a real difference on the visual task. The researchers think formal training builds two skills. Verbal memory. And word-association, the habit of linking one idea to a far-off, related one. Formal music instruction leans on both.

Two things about this study matter. First, it only shows a link. Nobody was randomly assigned to formal training. Second, the researchers say plainly this study skipped musicians who improvise. That leaves a real question. Does learning to improvise, not just learning to read music, matter for creativity in a different way?

Improvisation Is Where the Evidence Gets Genuinely Interesting

Two separate studies tested this question directly. Both point the same direction.

The first is an Austrian study (2014). Researchers compared classical musicians, jazz musicians, and folk musicians. These groups differ mainly in how much of their training centers on improvising. Jazz musicians scored highest on a standard creativity measure:

Musician type	Creativity score
Jazz	1.57
Classical	1.36
Folk	1.34

That gap was real. Jazz musicians also reported more creative achievements of their own. They scored higher on openness too, a trait linked to creative thinking. Classical musicians, by contrast, reported more practice hours and more competition wins. This is a useful comparison. It still only shows a link. Jazz musicians chose an improvisation-heavy path. Something about the kind of person who makes that choice may explain part of the gap.

The second study gets closer to isolating improvisation training itself. An Israeli study (2014) compared three groups. 36 musicians trained in improvisation. 40 musicians with no such training. 39 non-musicians. Everyone did two standard creativity tasks. The improvisation-trained group scored higher on fluency than the non-improvisation group. They scored much higher on originality than both other groups, by a strong margin. There was no real difference between groups on flexibility.

The researchers’ explanation is specific. Creativity depends on both coming up with ideas and judging them. Strict, careful judging can get in the way of unusual ideas. They believe improvisation training works by loosening that judging brake. Improvisers must make instant creative choices, with no time to second-guess. This is the most direct evidence we found that improvisation training, specifically, differs from general music training. It is still a comparison of existing groups, not a randomized trial. Musicians who seek out improvisation were not assigned to it at random. Self-selection cannot be fully ruled out here either.

The Real Problem: Does Training Cause This, or Do Creative Kids Pick Music?

Every study above compares people who already differ in their music background. None randomly assigned children to years of lessons, or to improvisation training, and then measured creativity afterward. That gap matters. It is not a small technicality.

Our companion article on music and self-discipline covered a Canadian study (2013). It tested personality and music training in university students. It also tested children ages 10 to 12. In both groups, personality predicted how much training a person had, sometimes as well as measured thinking ability did. The single strongest predictor among the children was openness.

Openness is not a minor detail here. A US study (1987) found this trait consistently linked to divergent-thinking scores. More than any other personality trait. Put these two findings together, and a real concern falls out. The same trait predicts both things. Who takes music lessons. And who scores well on creativity tests. A child high in openness may score well on a creativity test. That same child is also likely to end up with years of violin lessons. The lessons themselves may not be doing any of the causal work.

We looked for a randomized trial that could cut through this. One that assigns children to music lessons, or an equally engaging activity, then measures creativity in both groups. We could not find one. We also looked for a large review pooling music-and-creativity studies specifically. We could not find that either. The closest related work is a UK review (2020). It pooled 254 effect sizes from 54 studies and nearly 7,000 people. It covered music training and thinking outcomes broadly. Not creativity specifically. Its finding is still useful background. Researchers controlled for study quality, keeping only randomized trials with a real control group. Once they did, the overall benefit of music training on thinking outcomes dropped to zero. Benefits showed up almost entirely in the weaker studies. That is not a study of creativity. But it is a clear example of the same gap. A gap between a link and a cause, this time in closely related research. The creativity studies above have not yet closed that gap.

What This All Adds Up To

Some things here are real and well documented. Musicians consistently score higher than non-musicians on divergent-thinking tasks. That pattern shows up across many independent studies, using different tests. The “right brain creativity” story, at least as popularly told, does not hold up. A large brain-imaging study found no proof of an overall right-brain or left-brain type. The one study that scanned musicians during a creativity task found activity on both sides, not one side. Within music training, improvisation stands out. Two separate studies used different groups and tests. Both found that trained improvisers beat other musicians on creativity tests, not just non-musicians.

What remains genuinely open is the cause-and-effect question. Every one of these studies compares people who already differ in music background, not people randomly assigned to training. Separate research shows that openness is also the strongest predictor of who takes music lessons and sticks with them. It is the same trait linked to creativity generally. We could not find a randomized trial isolating music training’s effect on creativity. We could not find a review specific to music and creativity either. The honest summary is not “music lessons make kids more creative,” stated as settled fact. It is that creative, open-minded children are more likely to end up trained in music, especially in improvisation. Once there, the training itself may sharpen a real, measurable form of creative thinking. How much of the pattern is which is not something the current evidence can fully settle. See our companion article on music lessons and discipline for more on the personality traits behind these patterns. Read what music lessons do to a child’s brain for more on the brain science involved.

Music Lessons at ABC Academy of Music

We think families deserve the real research, not a slogan about right brains and left brains. The evidence does not prove that music lessons manufacture creativity from nothing. It does show a real, repeated link. Training, especially training that includes improvisation, ties to stronger scores on genuine creativity tests. We offer real, structured instruction from trained teachers, with chances to improvise and explore on piano, guitar, or drums. Browse our class schedule to find the right fit. Visit our rates and payment page for current pricing. Or contact us with any questions about our Toronto-area studios.