What Music Lessons Do to a Child's Brain

By ABC Academy of Music teaching team · Updated August 2026

“Music makes kids smarter.” You have probably heard some version of that claim. It shows up in ads and parenting blogs. Parents ask us almost every week: “Does music training really change my child’s brain?” The real science is more careful than the slogan. Some effects are well proven. Others are small or not proven at all. This article covers what real studies show, and what they do not show. See our full Music Education Research hub for every study behind our program.

The Myth: What the “Mozart Effect” Actually Showed

A small US study (1993) tested 36 college students, not children. Each one listened to 10 minutes of Mozart, spoken relaxation instructions, or silence. Then each took a spatial test, the kind that asks you to fold paper shapes in your head. The Mozart group scored higher on that one task. The boost faded within 15 minutes. That is the whole finding. No children were tested. No IQ was measured. No lasting effect was found. The lead researcher later said plainly, “We made no such claim” about intelligence.

The story spread anyway. A 1994 newspaper column claimed Mozart “makes you smarter.” Georgia’s governor even proposed sending classical CDs home with every newborn. Neither claim came from the real study.

Later tries to repeat the finding got mixed results. A US study (1999) found no real change in general reasoning. A larger US analysis (2010), pooling 39 studies and about 3,000 people, found only a small, short bump on one task. No lasting boost to intelligence showed up. Most researchers now agree the effect, when it appears, comes from mood and alertness. Upbeat music helps on almost any short test. A dull recording of spoken words does not. None of this involves children, music lessons, or IQ.

A Real Randomized Study: The Schellenberg IQ Trial

The closest thing to a true test of “do music lessons raise a child’s IQ” is a Canadian study (2004) by psychologist E. Glenn Schellenberg, at the University of Toronto. It used random assignment, the gold standard for proving cause and effect.

Schellenberg found 144 six-year-olds through a newspaper ad for free arts lessons. Each child was randomly placed in one of four groups: keyboard lessons, voice lessons, drama lessons, or no lessons. Music and drama ran once a week for 36 weeks, at Toronto’s Royal Conservatory of Music. Every child took a full IQ test before lessons started, and again a year later.

All four groups gained IQ points. That is normal; starting first grade raises most scores anyway. But the two music groups gained more, and the gap was real, though modest.

Group	Average IQ gain over one year
Keyboard and voice lessons	7.0 points
Drama lessons and no-lessons group	4.3 points

The gain showed up across many parts of the test, not just one skill. The drama group got a different benefit the music groups did not: real gains in social behavior at home.

Schellenberg was honest about the limits. Every child studied at Canada’s top conservatory, with highly trained teachers. Whether typical community lessons would do the same is still untested. Whether the gain lasts is untested too. He also noted that most other research linking music to intelligence only shows a link, not a cause. That is the next problem.

The Link-Versus-Cause Problem

Most studies on music and child development only show a link. Researchers compare kids who already take lessons to kids who do not. They look for differences in memory, attention, or scores. They often find differences. But a difference is not proof that lessons caused it.

Families who pay for private music lessons tend to differ from families who do not. On average, they have higher incomes and more education. A child already doing well in school is also more likely to stick with lessons for years. A struggling child quits sooner. Researchers call this pattern “niche-picking.” The kids who end up with years of training were never a random slice of all kids.

Schellenberg reviewed this exact problem in a Canadian paper (2020), covering 114 published studies. His conclusion was blunt: the field has a real problem telling a link apart from a cause. Most studies cannot rule out other causes, like family income or a child’s starting ability. A link alone cannot tell you whether music lessons caused a difference, whether some other family factor did, or both.

A US study (2013) makes the stakes clear. Harvard researchers, led by Samuel Mehr, ran two randomized trials of short preschool music classes. One trial compared music classes to art classes. The other compared music classes to no classes at all. Four-year-olds were tested on spatial skills, visual skills, numbers, and vocabulary. Results did not hold up. Against a true no-class group, there was no real difference on any test. The researchers wrote plainly that their two trials found “no consistent evidence for nonmusical cognitive benefits of brief preschool music enrichment.”

Where the Evidence Gets Stronger: The Hearing Brain

Not every finding here is shaky. One area has been studied more carefully, with steadier results, than most: how music training shapes the way the brain processes sound.

Nina Kraus runs a US lab at Northwestern University that studies this exact signal: how precisely the brain encodes sound. In one US study (2012), Kraus and a co-author tested 45 adults, grouped by years of childhood music training: none, one to five years, or six to eleven years. Adults who trained as kids, even briefly, showed sharper brain responses to complex sounds than adults with no training. The strength of the response tracked how recently their training had ended. This suggests the brain changes from childhood training stick around.

A second US study from the same lab (2013) looked at over 770 people, ages three months to 72 years. Musicians showed clearer differences from non-musicians during certain ages, with a stronger effect in the school years than in young adulthood. This study compares musicians to non-musicians. It does not randomly assign kids to train. So it cannot fully rule out that people with a natural ear for sound are simply more likely to keep training. Still, taken with the other studies, it points to something believable. Music training seems to fine-tune how the brain hears complex sound. Childhood is a time when that system is unusually open to practice.

Structural Brain Changes: What a Long-Term Study Found

The strongest way to answer “does training change a child’s brain” is a long-term study. Follow the same kids over time. Compare a music group to matched kids doing something else. Check whether their brains looked the same before training started.

Researchers at the University of Southern California, led by Assal Habibi, ran exactly this kind of US study. Before anything began, they checked three groups of six- and seven-year-olds against each other: one about to start music, one about to start sports, and one with no after-school activity. A first paper (2014) confirmed there were no real differences among the groups, in thinking, social skills, or brain scans, before training started. That baseline check matters. It rules out the chance that kids who were already different somehow ended up in the music group.

The team then followed 56 of these children for about two years, rescanning their brains at the end. A second paper (2018) found real structural differences had shown up, in the music group only. One hearing-related brain region thinned at a different pace in the music group. A bundle of fibers connecting the two halves of the brain, tied to coordination, also grew stronger. Because the groups started out equal, and only diverged after training began, this offers some of the most direct evidence available that training itself drove the changes, not some trait the kids already had. The researchers were honest that families chose their child’s activity; nobody was randomly assigned. That leaves a small chance some other factor played a role.

What This All Adds Up To

A few things can be said with real confidence. The Mozart Effect, as most people understand it, is not real. The original study never tested children or measured IQ. It found only a brief adult effect tied to mood. One well-designed randomized trial did show music lessons producing a modest IQ gain in six-year-olds, though its own author flagged the limits. Hearing-brain research, some of the most solid evidence here, links childhood music training to sharper sound processing, an effect that seems to last into adulthood. A long-term study with a baseline check found real structural brain changes. They appeared only after training began. That builds a real case for what structured lessons, like the piano and voice programs we teach in Toronto, can offer a growing brain.

Plenty stays uncertain too. Most research linking lessons to broader thinking or school benefits only shows a link, a gap researchers in the field, including Schellenberg himself, have flagged directly. When better-designed trials tested short programs against real control groups, results sometimes showed no effect at all. No study we found backs the sweeping claim that lessons broadly raise intelligence or guarantee school success. The honest summary is not “music makes kids smarter.” It is that careful studies show small, real effects in specific areas, mainly hearing, plus one trial showing a small IQ gain. Bigger claims go further than the evidence. See our companion article on music lessons and school performance for how this connects to real classroom results, and our piece on the lifelong brain benefits of music for how these changes may carry forward.

Music Lessons at ABC Academy of Music

We think families deserve the real research, not a slogan. The evidence does not back “music makes kids smarter” as a blanket claim. It does back real, well-documented effects, plus a solid trial showing a modest IQ benefit from a full year of structured lessons, whether on piano, another instrument, or in our Music Together® program for younger children. See our article on the best age to start music lessons if you want to know when to begin. 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.