Music classes for babies and toddlers are everywhere now. Parents sing, shake bells, and bounce their little ones to a beat. One program shows up more than any other in this space: Music Together. It launched in 1987 and now runs in more than 2,000 locations across over 35 countries, according to its own program materials. But does research actually back up what these classes claim to do? Below is what we found after checking Music Together’s own cited studies against the original published research, plus what independent, peer-reviewed studies say about early music exposure more broadly. For the full set of data behind our program decisions, see our full Music Education Research hub.
Formal Lessons and Early Childhood Programs Are Not the Same Thing
Most published research on music education is about older children learning an instrument. ABRSM, the UK’s largest music exam board, surveys thousands of children, adults, and teachers every few years. Its 2025 Making Music report found that eight years old is the single most common age for a child to start learning an instrument. Three quarters of people who ever learned an instrument started before age 12. That data describes formal instrument lessons: piano, guitar, violin, and instruments like them. It says almost nothing about music for babies and toddlers, because formal instrument lessons rarely start that early.
Early childhood music programs are a different category entirely. They do not teach a child to read notes or play scales. They use singing, movement, and simple instruments like bells and shakers, with a parent or caregiver taking part alongside the child. Schools rarely offer anything for this age group at all. In ABRSM’s 2025 survey of UK music teachers, only 5 percent of schools offered an “infant music club” as an extracurricular activity, far behind orchestra at 46 percent or band at 41 percent. For children under five, this kind of structured music exposure mostly happens outside school, through private and community programs.
What Music Together Actually Is
Music Together is the best-known program built specifically for this age group. Kenneth Guilmartin, a composer, developed the approach starting in 1985, working with Lili Levinowitz, a music education researcher then completing her doctorate at Temple University. The program launched to the public in 1987 outside Philadelphia. It is designed for children from birth through age eight, with its heaviest emphasis on the earliest years. Classes mix singing, movement, and simple percussion instruments. A parent or caregiver takes part in every session rather than dropping the child off. According to Music Together’s own site, the program now operates in more than 2,000 locations across more than 35 countries. That scale makes it the most widely used branded early-childhood music curriculum most Toronto families will run into, including at ABC Academy.
What the Published Studies on Music Together Actually Found
Music Together’s website points to a small number of peer-reviewed studies as evidence its program works. We checked the two central ones directly, against the original journal articles, rather than relying on the program’s own summary of them.
The first looked at effortful control, a child’s ability to resist an impulse, such as waiting before grabbing a snack. Researchers followed 32 parent-child pairs who had been randomly assigned, starting when the babies were 9 to 15 months old, to either weekly Music Together classes or a weekly unstructured play date. At age three, the children completed three self-control tasks: waiting to eat a snack, waiting to peek at a wrapped gift, and waiting to touch it. Only one of the three tasks showed a real difference between groups. Children who had taken Music Together scored higher on the snack-waiting task than the play-date group, an average of 3.47 versus 2.45 on the task’s scale, a statistically significant gap (p = 0.03). The other two tasks, peeking and touching, showed no significant difference between groups. This was a small, preliminary study of one specific skill. It is not evidence that the program boosts self-control in general.
The second study looked at parent-child conversation. It followed 89 parent-child pairs, again randomly assigned to Music Together or a play-date control, starting at 9 to 15 months old. Researchers counted “conversational turns,” meaning back-and-forth exchanges between parent and child, and rated the quality of the parent’s speech. They measured this at the start of the study and again at six and twelve months in. The Music Together group showed a significantly bigger increase in conversational turns than the control group in the first six months. That specific gap did not keep growing in the second six months. The two groups’ rate of improvement from six to twelve months was not significantly different, though the music group’s overall edge from the start of the study to the one-year mark was still slightly ahead, just not by a statistically significant margin. Parental verbal quality moved on a different timeline: it showed no group difference in the first six months, then a significant improvement for the music group specifically between six and twelve months. This is the more robust of the two Music Together-specific studies, mainly because of its larger sample. Its results were also more mixed than a simple summary suggests: one measure (conversational turns) showed an early advantage that leveled off, while the other (verbal quality) showed a later advantage that emerged only in the second half of the study.
What Independent Research Outside Music Together Adds
Not every relevant study involves Music Together specifically, and it matters which is which. Two other peer-reviewed studies are worth including here, each clearly labeled for what it actually tested.
One study looked at prosocial behavior, meaning sharing and helping, in 36 children between ages three and four who were enrolled in an early childhood music program. This was not Music Together. The researchers described the program only in general terms, as “an early childhood music program.” The study found that how much a child shared a musical instrument with another child was positively correlated with how much time that child had spent in the program. It found no significant difference by age or by sex. This is a small, exploratory study, and a correlation like this does not prove the music program caused the sharing behavior. Other factors, such as which families choose to enroll their children in music programs in the first place, could explain part of the pattern.
The other study looked at something more basic than any specific curriculum: whether babies respond physically to musical rhythm at all. Researchers tested 120 infants between 5 and 24 months old, playing them music, drumbeats, and speech while recording their movement with video and motion-capture technology. The infants moved more rhythmically to the music and drumbeats than they did to speech. The tempo of their movement loosely tracked the tempo of what they heard, though it did not lock precisely onto the beat the way an adult tapping along might. Infants who moved more rhythmically also smiled more during the task. This tells us infants respond to musical rhythm in a measurable, physical way from a very young age. It does not tell us anything about long-term brain development, IQ, or later musical skill. Those are separate questions this study did not test, and no reputable source claims it did.
Where the Evidence Is Still Thin
Some honest limits are worth stating plainly. The peer-reviewed research specifically on Music Together comes from a small number of published studies, largely from one research group, with sample sizes in the dozens rather than the hundreds. That is a genuine evidence base, not marketing copy. But it is also a preliminary one, and the field has not yet produced a large, independent replication. No government body or national survey tracks how many Canadian or Toronto families enroll babies and toddlers in early-childhood music classes each year. Statistics Canada does not publish a participation figure broken out by age for this specific activity. No Ontario education body tracks it either, because these programs mostly operate entirely outside the school system. Families comparing programs should treat any sweeping claim about long-term outcomes with real caution. The research that does exist points to modest, specific, short-term effects, things like waiting a little longer before grabbing a snack, or taking more back-and-forth turns in conversation with a parent. It does not support the idea that early music classes permanently rewire a baby’s brain or guarantee later musical talent.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Music Together have real research behind it, or is it just marketing?
Both things are true at once. Two peer-reviewed studies exist that specifically tested Music Together, published in the journals Infancy and Child Development. Those are real, randomized studies, not marketing claims. But the total evidence base is small: two studies, sample sizes of 32 and 89 families, and mostly one research team. It is genuine evidence, not proof of sweeping outcomes.
What age should a child start an early-childhood music program?
Music Together itself is designed for children from birth through age eight. The peer-reviewed studies that tested it began with babies who were 9 to 15 months old. A separate study found that infants as young as 5 months already respond physically to musical rhythm. No study we reviewed identifies one specific “best” age to start, or shows that starting earlier produces a measurably better outcome than starting later within that range.
Does early music exposure make babies smarter?
No study we reviewed supports that specific claim. The research found narrow, specific effects: better performance on one particular self-control task, more back-and-forth conversation with a parent, and more rhythmic movement paired with more smiling. None of the studies measured general intelligence, and none found or claimed a broad cognitive boost. Be skeptical of any source that summarizes this research as “music makes babies smarter.”
Is sharing and helping behavior in preschoolers really linked to music classes?
One small study found a link, with real limits. It followed 36 children ages three and four in a generic early childhood music program, not Music Together specifically. It found that time spent in the program was positively correlated with how much a child shared a musical instrument in a lab task. The study was exploratory, the sample was small, and correlation is not proof that the music program itself caused the sharing behavior.
Music Together at ABC Academy of Music
We would rather point families to what the actual, verified research says than let marketing claims stand in for evidence. That means being upfront about which findings are solid, which are preliminary, and where the data simply does not exist yet. ABC Academy of Music offers Music Together classes for babies, toddlers, and preschoolers at our studios in Lawrence Park, St. Clair West, Dufferin Grove and Oakwood, and Brampton. Visit our toddler and Music Together classes page for our current schedule, or contact us to ask which age group and location works best for your family.
SOURCES:
- Music Together, “About Our Early Childhood Music Program,” Music Together LLC, https://www.musictogether.com/about
- Music Together, “Independent Research about Music Together,” Music Together LLC, https://www.musictogether.com/about/research/research-about-music-together
- Smith, A.R., McGregor, C.M., Carr, K., et al., “The Impact of a Music Enrichment Program During Infancy and Early Toddlerhood on Effortful Control at Age 3: A Preliminary Investigation,” Infancy, vol. 29, no. 1, 2024, pp. 72-79, https://doi.org/10.1111/infa.12563
- Smith, A.R., Salley, B., Hanson-Abromeit, D., Paluch, R.A., Engel, H., Piazza, J., and Kong, K.L., “The Impact of a Community-Based Music Program During Infancy on the Quality of Parent-Child Language Interactions,” Child Development, vol. 95, no. 2, 2024, pp. 481-496, https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.14005
- Ilari, B., Helfter, S., and Huynh, T., “Associations Between Musical Participation and Young Children’s Prosocial Behaviors,” Journal of Research in Music Education, vol. 67, no. 4, 2020, pp. 399-412, https://doi.org/10.1177/0022429419878169
- Zentner, M., and Eerola, T., “Rhythmic Engagement with Music in Infancy,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 107, no. 13, 2010, pp. 5768-5773, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1000121107
- ABRSM, “Making Music 2025: Extending Our Ambition for Music Education in the UK,” ABRSM, 2025, https://www.abrsm.org/sites/default/files/2025-04/Making%20Music%202025%20-%20Extending%20our%20Ambition%20for%20Music%20Education%20in%20the%20UK.pdf
- ABRSM, “Learning, Playing and Teaching in the UK in 2021: ABRSM Making Music Report 2021,” ABRSM, 2021, https://www.abrsm.org/sites/default/files/2023-08/web_abrsm-making-music-uk-21.pdf