Music Together & Early Childhood Programs: What the Research Shows

By ABC Academy of Music teaching team · Updated August 2026

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: Music Together®. It launched in the US in 1987. It now runs in more than 2,000 locations across over 35 countries, per its own materials. But does research back up what these classes claim? Below is what we found after checking Music Together’s own cited studies against the real journal articles, plus what other peer-reviewed research says about early music exposure. See our best age to start music lessons article for how this early window connects to later instrument study. 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 kids learning an instrument. A large UK survey (2025) found that age eight is the single most common starting age. Three quarters of people who ever learned an instrument started before age 12. That data is about formal lessons: piano, guitar, violin, and the like — the kind we cover in our piano lessons statistics article. It says almost nothing about babies and toddlers, since formal lessons rarely start that early.

Early childhood music programs are a different category entirely. They do not teach reading notes or scales. They use singing, movement, and simple instruments like bells and shakers, with a parent or caregiver joining in. Schools rarely offer anything for this age group at all. The same UK survey found only 5 percent of schools offered an infant music club, far behind orchestra (46 percent) or band (41 percent). For kids under five, this kind of music exposure mostly happens outside school.

What Music Together Actually Is

Music Together® is the best-known program for this age group. A composer named Kenneth Guilmartin created it starting in 1985. A US researcher helped him. The program launched near Philadelphia in 1987. It is built for children from birth through age eight. The earliest years get the most focus. Classes mix singing, movement, and simple percussion. A parent or caregiver joins every session, instead of dropping the child off. The program now runs in more than 2,000 places across 35-plus countries. That makes it the most common branded early-childhood music program Toronto families will meet, including at ABC Academy.

What the Published Studies on Music Together Actually Found

Music Together’s own website points to a small set of peer-reviewed studies as proof its program works. We checked the two main ones directly against the original journal articles, rather than trusting the program’s own summary. Both studies were done in the US.

Both were small, randomized studies comparing Music Together classes to a plain play-date group. The self-control study is preliminary. It is not proof the program builds self-control in general — only that one task, out of three, showed a real gap. The talk study is the more solid of the two, mostly because it had almost three times as many families. Even so, its results were mixed. One measure showed an early edge that faded. The other showed a later edge that only appeared in the second half of the study.

What Independent Research Outside Music Together Adds

Not every relevant study involves Music Together, and it matters which is which. Two other peer-reviewed studies belong here, each clearly labeled for what it actually tested.

One US study looked at sharing and helping in 36 kids, ages three and four, enrolled in a generic early childhood music program — not Music Together. It found that more time in the program lined up with more instrument-sharing with another child. It found no difference by age or sex. This is a small, early-stage study. A link like this does not prove the program caused the sharing. Other factors, like which families choose to enroll kids in music programs at all, could explain part of it.

The other study asked something more basic: do babies move to musical rhythm at all? Researchers filmed 120 infants, ages 5 to 24 months, while playing them music, drumbeats, and speech. The babies moved more rhythmically to music and drumbeats than to speech. Their movement loosely tracked the beat, though not as precisely as an adult tapping along. Babies who moved more rhythmically also smiled more. This shows infants respond to rhythm physically from a very young age. It says nothing about long-term brain development, IQ, or later musical skill — our music lessons and child brain development article looks at those questions directly. This study did not test them, and no honest source claims it did.

Where the Evidence Is Still Thin

Some honest limits are worth stating plainly. The research on Music Together comes from a handful of US studies. Most come from one research group. Sample sizes run in the dozens, not hundreds. That is real evidence, not marketing copy. But it is early-stage. Nobody has run a large, independent repeat of it yet. No government body tracks how many Canadian or Toronto families enroll babies in these classes each year. Statistics Canada does not break this out by age. No Ontario body tracks it either, since these programs sit outside the school system. Families comparing programs should be wary of big claims about long-term outcomes. The real research points to small, short-term effects — waiting a bit longer for a snack, or trading a few more words with a parent. It does not show that early music classes rewire a baby’s brain or guarantee musical talent later.

Music Together at ABC Academy of Music

We would rather point families to what the real, checked research says than let marketing stand in for evidence. That means being upfront about which findings are solid, which are early-stage, and where the data just 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.