“Music makes kids smarter.” You have probably heard some version of that claim. It shows up in ads, parenting blogs, and even school board presentations. The real science is more careful than the slogan. Some effects of music training on the brain are well documented. Others are small, narrow, or unproven. This article covers what peer-reviewed research actually shows, what it does not show, and where researchers still disagree. For the full set of data behind our program decisions, see our full Music Education Research hub.
Start With the Myth: What the “Mozart Effect” Actually Showed
In 1993, psychologists Frances Rauscher, Gordon Shaw, and Katherine Ky published a short study in Nature. They tested 36 college students, not children. Each listened to 10 minutes of a Mozart piano sonata, spoken relaxation instructions, or silence, then took a spatial reasoning test from the Stanford-Binet IQ test, the kind that asks you to fold paper shapes in your head. Students who had just heard Mozart scored higher on that one narrow task. The boost faded within about 10 to 15 minutes. That is the entire finding: no children tested, no general IQ measured, no lasting effect claimed. Rauscher herself later said, “We made no such claim” about intelligence.
The finding spread and grew in the retelling anyway. A 1994 newspaper column claimed listening to Mozart “makes you smarter.” Georgia’s governor proposed sending classical music CDs home with every newborn, at public expense. Neither claim came from the actual study.
Later attempts to replicate the finding got mixed results. A 1999 study found the effect inconsistent, with no real change in general reasoning. A 2010 analysis pooling 39 studies and about 3,000 people found a small, real bump on one spatial task right after Mozart, but no broader or lasting intelligence effect. Researchers now generally agree the effect, when it appears, comes from mood and alertness, not anything specific to Mozart: pleasant, energizing music helps on almost any short test, while a dull recording of spoken text does not. That has nothing to do with children, music lessons, or IQ.
A Real Randomized Study: Schellenberg’s IQ Trial
The closest thing to a true test of “do music lessons raise a child’s IQ” comes from a 2004 study by psychologist E. Glenn Schellenberg at the University of Toronto. It is one of the few studies in this field to use random assignment, the gold standard for showing cause and effect.
Schellenberg recruited 144 six-year-olds through a newspaper ad offering free arts lessons. Each child was randomly placed into keyboard lessons, Kodaly-method voice lessons, drama lessons, or no lessons. Music and drama lessons ran weekly for 36 weeks at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto. Every child took a full IQ test before the lessons started and again a year later.
All four groups gained IQ points, which is expected since starting first grade raises most children’s scores regardless of activity. But the two music groups gained more: an average of 7.0 points, versus 4.3 in the control groups. That gap was statistically real, though modest, and it showed up across many subtests rather than one narrow skill. The drama group showed a different benefit the music groups did not: a real improvement in social behavior at home.
Schellenberg was careful about the limits. Every child took lessons at Canada’s most prestigious conservatory, with highly trained instructors, so whether typical community lessons would do the same, or whether the gain lasts into later childhood, remains untested. He also noted that most other research linking music to intelligence is correlational, not experimental, which brings us to the next problem.
The Correlation Problem: Why Most Music-and-Brain Research Cannot Prove Cause and Effect
Most studies on music training and child development are correlational. Researchers compare children who already take lessons to children who do not, and look for differences in memory, attention, or test scores. These studies often find differences. A difference is not proof that music lessons caused it, though.
Families who enroll a child in private music lessons tend to differ from families who do not, on average with higher incomes, more education, and more money for enrichment generally. A child already doing well in school may also be more likely to stick with lessons for years, while a struggling child quits sooner. Researchers call this self-sorting “niche-picking.” The children who end up with years of music training were never a random slice of all children to begin with.
Schellenberg published a formal review of this problem in 2020, examining 114 published studies linking music training to behavior or brain measurements. His conclusion was blunt: the field has a systematic problem separating correlation from causation, and most studies cannot rule out confounds like family income or prior ability. A correlation alone cannot tell you whether music lessons caused a difference, whether some other family factor caused both the lessons and the difference, or both.
A 2013 study makes the stakes concrete. Researchers at Harvard, led by Samuel Mehr, ran two randomized trials of brief preschool music classes: six weekly 45-minute parent-child sessions. One trial compared music classes to visual arts classes; the other compared music classes to no classes at all. Four-year-olds were tested on spatial navigation, visual analysis, number skills, and vocabulary. Results did not hold up consistently, and against a true no-treatment group there was no significant difference on any measure. The authors concluded their two trials found “no consistent evidence for nonmusical cognitive benefits of brief preschool music enrichment.”
Where the Evidence Gets Stronger: The Auditory Brain
Not every finding in this field is shaky. One area has been studied more rigorously, with more consistent results, than most others: how musical training shapes the way the brain processes sound.
Nina Kraus and her lab at Northwestern University study the auditory brainstem response, a measurable signal showing how precisely the brain encodes sound. In a 2012 study, Kraus and co-author Erika Skoe tested 45 adults grouped by years of childhood music training: none, one to five years, or six to eleven years. Adults who had musical training as children, even just a few years, showed more precise brainstem responses to complex sounds than adults with none. The strength of the response tracked how recently their training had ended, suggesting the brain changes from childhood training persist into adulthood.
A separate 2013 study from the same lab looked at how this effect shifts across ages, using data from more than 770 people from three months to 72 years old. Musicians showed more distinct differences from non-musicians during specific developmental windows, including a stronger effect during the school-age years than in young adulthood. This compares musicians against non-musicians at different ages rather than randomly assigning children to train, so it cannot fully rule out that people with a natural ear for sound are also more likely to keep up training. Paired with the other studies, it points to something plausible: music training appears to fine-tune how the brain’s hearing pathways process complex sound, and childhood is a period when that system is unusually responsive to practice.
Structural Brain Changes: What a Real Longitudinal Study Found
The strongest design for answering “does music training change a child’s brain” is a longitudinal study: follow the same children over time, compare a music group to matched children doing something else, and 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 study. Before anything began, they checked three groups of children, average age six to seven, against each other: one about to start music training, one about to start sports training, and one with no structured after-school training. A 2014 paper confirmed there were no meaningful differences among the groups in cognitive, social, or brain measures before training started. That baseline check matters. It rules out the possibility that children who were already different somehow ended up sorted into the music group.
The researchers then followed 56 of these children for about two years, rescanning their brains at the end. A 2018 study on the results found real structural differences had emerged in the music group compared to both other groups. One region of the auditory cortex thinned at a different pace in the music group: the right side thinned more slowly than the left, the reverse of the pattern in both control groups. And a bundle of fibers connecting the two halves of the brain, involved in coordinating movement and sensation, showed increased structural integrity. Because the groups started out equivalent and only diverged after training began, this study offers some of the more direct evidence available that music training itself, not a pre-existing trait, drove the changes. The researchers were candid that this was not a true randomized trial. Families chose their child’s activity, even though the groups looked alike at the start, leaving a narrow chance that some other factor behind that choice played a role.
What This All Adds Up To
A few things can be said with real confidence. The Mozart Effect, as popularly understood, is not real: the original study never tested children, never measured IQ, and found only a brief adult effect tied to mood and alertness. 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. Auditory brain research, some of the most consistent evidence in the field, shows childhood music training is linked to more precise brain encoding of sound, an effect that appears to persist into adulthood. A longitudinal study with a baseline check found real structural brain changes emerging specifically after training began.
Plenty remains uncertain, too. Most research linking music lessons to broader cognitive or academic benefits is correlational, a weakness researchers in the field, including Schellenberg himself, have flagged directly. When better-controlled randomized trials tested brief music programs against real control groups, results sometimes came back null. No study we found supports the sweeping claim that music lessons broadly raise intelligence or guarantee academic success. The honest summary is not “music makes kids smarter.” It is that specific, well-designed studies show specific, modest effects in specific areas, mainly auditory processing and, in one trial, a small IQ gain, while broader claims outrun the evidence.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does the Mozart Effect mean my child will get smarter from listening to classical music?
No. The original 1993 study tested college students, not children, and found only a brief boost on one spatial task that faded within about 15 minutes. It never measured IQ. The effect, when it shows up at all, is tied to mood and alertness, not anything specific to Mozart.
Is there real proof that music lessons raise a child’s IQ?
One randomized study found this. Schellenberg’s 2004 trial assigned 144 six-year-olds to keyboard, voice, drama, or no lessons, and the music groups gained an average of 7.0 IQ points over a year versus 4.3 in the control groups. That is real but modest. It came from one study using conservatory-level instruction, and the author was explicit that broader generalization is untested.
Why do so many studies on music and the brain get criticized?
Because most are correlational. They compare children who already take lessons to children who do not, without randomly assigning who gets lessons. Families who enroll children in music training differ in income and education in ways that independently affect development. A 2020 review by Schellenberg examined 114 such studies and found the field has a systematic problem separating correlation from causation.
What part of the brain-and-music research is most solid?
Research on auditory processing. Nina Kraus’s lab at Northwestern has repeatedly found that childhood music training is linked to more precise brain encoding of complex sounds, with effects that persist into adulthood. A separate longitudinal study with a baseline brain check found structural changes in auditory and connective brain regions that emerged only after training began, not before.
Music Lessons at ABC Academy of Music
We think families deserve the real research, not a slogan. The evidence does not support “music makes kids smarter” as a blanket claim. It does support real, specific, well-documented effects, and a solid randomized trial showing a modest IQ benefit from a full year of structured lessons. If you want your child to experience real music instruction, taught by trained teachers, 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:
- Rauscher, F.H., Shaw, G.L., and Ky, K.N., “Music and Spatial Task Performance,” Nature, vol. 365, 1993, p. 611, https://www.nature.com/articles/365611a0
- Chabris, C.F., “Prelude or Requiem for the ‘Mozart Effect’?” Nature, vol. 400, 1999, pp. 826-827
- Pietschnig, J., Voracek, M., and Formann, A.K., “Mozart Effect-Shmozart Effect: A Meta-Analysis,” Intelligence, vol. 38, no. 3, 2010, pp. 314-323, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2010.03.001
- Schellenberg, E.G., “Music Lessons Enhance IQ,” Psychological Science, vol. 15, no. 8, 2004, pp. 511-514, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0956-7976.2004.00711.x
- Schellenberg, E.G., “Correlation = Causation? Music Training, Psychology, and Neuroscience,” Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, vol. 14, no. 4, 2020, pp. 475-480, https://doi.org/10.1037/aca0000263
- Mehr, S.A., Schachner, A., Katz, R.C., and Spelke, E.S., “Two Randomized Trials Provide No Consistent Evidence for Nonmusical Cognitive Benefits of Brief Preschool Music Enrichment,” PLOS ONE, vol. 8, no. 12, 2013, e82007, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0082007
- Skoe, E., and Kraus, N., “A Little Goes a Long Way: How the Adult Brain Is Shaped by Musical Training in Childhood,” Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 32, no. 34, 2012, pp. 11507-11510, https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1949-12.2012
- Skoe, E., and Kraus, N., “Musical Training Heightens Auditory Brainstem Function During Sensitive Periods in Development,” Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 4, 2013, article 622, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00622
- Habibi, A., Ilari, B., Crimi, K., Metke, M., Kaplan, J.T., Joshi, A.A., Leahy, R.M., Haldar, J.P., Varadarajan, D., Bhushan, C., Damasio, A., and Damasio, H., “An Equal Start: Absence of Group Differences in Cognitive, Social and Neural Measures Prior to Music or Sports Training in Children,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, vol. 8, article 690, 2014, pp. 1-11, https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00690
- Habibi, A., Damasio, A., Ilari, B., Elliott Sachs, M., and Damasio, H., “Childhood Music Training Induces Change in Micro and Macroscopic Brain Structure: Results from a Longitudinal Study,” Cerebral Cortex, vol. 28, no. 12, 2018, pp. 4336-4347, https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhx286