“Music makes kids more creative.” You have probably heard this claim from a teacher, a brochure, or a well-meaning relative. It often comes with a picture attached: music uses the “right brain,” the creative side, so training it should unlock creativity elsewhere too. This is a companion piece to our articles on music and brain development, school performance, self-discipline, and parent-child bonding. Those covered IQ, grades, conscientiousness, and attachment. This one asks a narrower question. Does music training build measurable creativity, specifically divergent thinking? Or do already-creative, already-curious children simply gravitate toward music lessons in the first place? We checked the primary source for every claim below. For the full set of data behind our program decisions, see our full Music Education Research hub.
What Divergent Thinking Actually Measures
Creativity is hard to test directly. Researchers usually break it into two pieces. One is idea generation: producing many different, unusual ideas. The other is idea evaluation: judging which of those ideas is 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 produces. Flexibility counts how many different categories those ideas span. Originality measures how rare an idea is compared to everyone else’s answers. The Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking, first published in 1966, remain one of the most widely used versions of this kind of test. Other researchers use closely related tasks, such as the Alternate Uses Task, which asks for unusual uses of a common object.
None of these tests measure creativity the way most people picture it, like writing a novel or composing a symphony. They measure one specific, testable ingredient of creative thought. That distinction matters for everything that follows.
Musicians Score Higher on Divergent Thinking. The Question Is Why.
In a 2009 study published in Brain and Cognition, researchers Crystal Gibson, Bradley Folley, and Sohee Park at Vanderbilt University compared trained musicians to non-musician controls. Everyone completed divergent and convergent thinking tasks. Musicians scored higher on the divergent thinking measures. That part of the finding is a straightforward correlation. People who already have years of music training score differently on a creativity test than people who do not.
The more interesting part of the study used near-infrared spectroscopy. This technique tracks blood flow in the brain’s outer layers while someone works through a task. During the divergent thinking task, musicians showed greater activity across both sides of the frontal cortex, not concentrated on one side. That result is worth pausing on. It cuts directly against a popular idea.
You have probably heard that creativity is a “right brain” skill, separate from a logical, linear “left brain.” A large 2013 study in PLOS ONE, led by Jared Nielsen and colleagues, tested this idea directly. Researchers scanned the resting brains of 1,011 people, ages 7 to 29. They looked for evidence that some people run a more “left-brained” network overall and others a more “right-brained” one. They found real, specific left- and right-lateralized networks for particular functions, such as language. They found no evidence of an overall left-brain or right-brain personality type across the whole brain. Their own conclusion was direct. The data “are not consistent with a whole-brain phenotype of greater ‘left-brained’ or greater ‘right-brained’ network strength across individuals.” The Gibson study fits that same picture. Musicians showed bilateral frontal activity during a creative task, not right-side-only activity. Musicians in that study did show a real behavioral difference on divergent thinking. Their brains were not simply running a more active “right side.”
Formal Training Helps Verbal Creativity. It Does Not Touch Every Kind.
A 2020 study in Acta Psychologica dug into a more specific version of this question. Researchers Massimiliano Palmiero, Paola Guariglia, Rosalia Crivello, and Laura Piccardi compared three groups: musicians with formal training, self-taught musicians, and non-musicians. Everyone completed three tasks. One was musical: inventing new short pieces from the opening of “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 divergent thinking. They also scored higher than non-musicians on verbal divergent thinking specifically. No group showed a real difference on visual divergent thinking. The researchers proposed a specific mechanism. Formal training builds verbal working memory and semantic association skills, the mental habit of connecting one idea to a distant, related one. Those are skills formal music instruction leans on heavily.
Two things about this study are worth flagging directly. First, it is correlational. Nobody was randomly assigned to formal training. Second, and this is stated explicitly by the researchers themselves, this study looked at musical expertise “not involving improvisation training.” That exclusion sets up a real, separate question. Does learning to improvise, rather than simply learning to play from notation, 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 a 2014 study in Personality and Individual Differences by Mathias Benedek, Barbara Borovnjak, Aljoscha Neubauer, and Silke Kruse-Weber. The researchers compared classical musicians, jazz musicians, and folk musicians. These groups differ mainly in how much of their training centers on improvisation. Using divergent thinking tasks from the Verbaler-Kreativitatstest, including alternate-uses and instance-generation tasks, jazz musicians scored higher on ideational creativity than folk musicians on both tasks. They scored higher than classical musicians on one of them. On the instances task, jazz musicians averaged 1.57, compared with 1.36 for classical musicians and 1.34 for folk musicians. That gap was statistically real. Jazz musicians also reported more independent creative musical achievements. They scored higher on openness to experience, a personality trait linked to creative thinking generally. Classical musicians, by contrast, reported more hours of practice and more competition wins. This is a real, useful comparison. It is still correlational. 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. A 2014 paper in PLOS ONE, by Oded Kleinmintz, Pavel Goldstein, Naama Mayseless, Donna Abecasis, and Simone Shamay-Tsoory, compared three groups directly. There were 36 musicians trained specifically in improvisation, 40 musicians with no improvisation training, and 39 non-musicians. Everyone completed the Alternate Uses Task and the circles task from the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking. The improvisation-trained group scored higher on fluency than the non-improvisation group. They scored dramatically higher on originality than both other groups, a difference the researchers found to be statistically strong. There was no real difference between groups on flexibility.
The researchers’ explanation is specific. Creativity depends on both generating ideas and evaluating them. Strict, careful evaluation can get in the way of generating unusual ideas in the first place. They proposed that improvisation training works by loosening that evaluative brake. Improvisers must make instant creative decisions without time to second-guess them. This is the most direct evidence we found that improvisation training, specifically, differs from general music training in how it relates to divergent thinking. It is still a comparison of existing groups, not a randomized trial. Musicians who seek out improvisation training were not assigned to it at random. A self-selection explanation 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 of them randomly assigned children to years of music lessons, or to improvisation training specifically, and then measured divergent thinking afterward. That gap matters. It is not a small technicality.
Our companion article on music and self-discipline covered a 2013 study by Kathleen Corrigall, E. Glenn Schellenberg, and Nicole Misura, published in Frontiers in Psychology. It tested personality and music training in university students and in children ages 10 to 12. Across both age groups, personality predicted how much music training a person had, sometimes as well as measured cognitive ability did. The single strongest personality predictor of music involvement among the children was openness to experience.
Openness to experience is not a minor detail here. Researcher Robert McCrae, in a 1987 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, found this trait consistently linked to divergent thinking test scores, more consistently than any other of the Big Five traits. Put these two findings together and a specific, testable concern falls out. The same trait that predicts who takes music lessons and sticks with them is also the trait that independently predicts who scores well on divergent thinking tests. A child high in openness to experience may score well on a creativity test and also be the kind of child 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 directly: assign children to music lessons or to a different, equally engaging activity, then measure divergent thinking before and after in both groups. We could not find one. We also looked for an existing meta-analysis pooling music-and-creativity studies specifically. We could not find one either. The closest available large-scale analysis is a 2020 meta-analysis in Memory and Cognition by Giovanni Sala and Fernand Gobet. It pooled 254 effect sizes from 54 studies and nearly 7,000 participants, looking at music training and cognitive or academic outcomes broadly, not creativity specifically. Its finding is still useful background. Once the researchers controlled for study design quality, comparing only studies that used random assignment and an active control group, the overall benefit of music training on cognitive outcomes dropped to zero. Benefits showed up almost entirely in the weaker studies, the ones without random assignment. That is not a study of creativity. It is a clear demonstration, in a closely related body of research, of the same gap between correlational and experimental design that the creativity studies above have not yet closed.
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 multiple 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 evidence of an overall right-brain or left-brain personality type. The one study that scanned musicians during a divergent thinking task found bilateral, not one-sided, frontal activity. Within music training, improvisation stands out. Two separate studies, using different comparison groups and different divergent thinking tests, both found that musicians trained specifically in improvisation outperformed musicians without that training, not just non-musicians.
What remains genuinely open is the causal question. Every one of these studies compares people who already differ in their music background, not people randomly assigned to receive training. Separate, well-documented research shows that openness to experience, the same trait linked to divergent thinking scores generally, is also the strongest personality predictor of who takes music lessons and sticks with them. We could not find a randomized trial isolating music training’s effect on divergent thinking. We could not find a meta-analysis 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 and adults 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.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does learning an instrument make a child more creative?
The honest answer is that we do not know, in a strict cause-and-effect sense. Musicians consistently score higher than non-musicians on divergent thinking tests. That is a real, repeated finding. But no study we found randomly assigned children to music lessons and then measured creativity against a control group. Separate research shows that openness to experience, a personality trait linked to creativity generally, is also the strongest predictor of which children take up music lessons in the first place. That leaves real room for self-selection.
Is the “music uses your right brain, so it boosts creativity” idea actually true?
No, at least not as it is usually told. A 2013 study in PLOS ONE scanned the resting brains of 1,011 people. It found no evidence that anyone runs an overall “right-brained” or “left-brained” pattern across their whole brain. A separate study that scanned musicians during an actual divergent thinking task found activity across both sides of the frontal cortex, not concentrated on the right.
Does learning to improvise matter more than just learning to play music?
The available evidence says yes. A 2014 study in Personality and Individual Differences found jazz musicians, whose training centers on improvisation, scored higher on divergent thinking than classical or folk musicians. A separate 2014 study in PLOS ONE compared improvisation-trained musicians, non-improvisation musicians, and non-musicians directly. The improvisation-trained group scored highest on originality by a wide, statistically strong margin. Neither study randomly assigned people to improvisation training, so a self-selection explanation cannot be fully ruled out.
Is there a big, definitive study that proves music training causes higher creativity?
No. We could not find a randomized controlled trial testing this specific question. We could not find a meta-analysis pooling multiple studies on music training and creativity specifically either. The closest related analysis, a 2020 meta-analysis of 54 studies on music training and general cognitive or academic outcomes, found that benefits disappeared once only well-designed, randomized studies were counted. That is a caution about the broader field, not proof about creativity specifically, but it points in the same direction.
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 between music training, especially training that includes improvisation, and stronger performance on genuine tests of creative thinking. If you want your child to experience real, structured music instruction from trained teachers, including opportunities to improvise and explore, browse our class schedule to find the right age group and instrument. Visit our rates and payment page for current pricing, or contact us with any questions about getting started at one of our Toronto-area studios.
SOURCES:
- Gibson, C., Folley, B.S., and Park, S., “Enhanced Divergent Thinking and Creativity in Musicians: A Behavioral and Near-Infrared Spectroscopy Study,” Brain and Cognition, vol. 69, no. 1, 2009, pp. 162-169, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bandc.2008.07.009
- Nielsen, J.A., Zielinski, B.A., Ferguson, M.A., Lainhart, J.E., and Anderson, J.S., “An Evaluation of the Left-Brain vs. Right-Brain Hypothesis with Resting State Functional Connectivity Magnetic Resonance Imaging,” PLOS ONE, vol. 8, no. 8, 2013, e71275, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0071275
- Palmiero, M., Guariglia, P., Crivello, R., and Piccardi, L., “The Relationships Between Musical Expertise and Divergent Thinking,” Acta Psychologica, vol. 203, 2020, article 102990, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2019.102990
- Benedek, M., Borovnjak, B., Neubauer, A.C., and Kruse-Weber, S., “Creativity and Personality in Classical, Jazz and Folk Musicians,” Personality and Individual Differences, vol. 63, 2014, pp. 117-121, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2014.01.064
- Kleinmintz, O.M., Goldstein, P., Mayseless, N., Abecasis, D., and Shamay-Tsoory, S.G., “Expertise in Musical Improvisation and Creativity: The Mediation of Idea Evaluation,” PLOS ONE, vol. 9, no. 7, 2014, e101568, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0101568
- Corrigall, K.A., Schellenberg, E.G., and Misura, N.M., “Music Training, Cognition, and Personality,” Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 4, 2013, article 222, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00222
- McCrae, R.R., “Creativity, Divergent Thinking, and Openness to Experience,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 52, no. 6, 1987, pp. 1258-1265, https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.52.6.1258
- Sala, G., and Gobet, F., “Cognitive and Academic Benefits of Music Training with Children: A Multilevel Meta-Analysis,” Memory and Cognition, vol. 48, 2020, pp. 1429-1441, https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-020-01060-2