themselves. Young Imaginations is a private arts agency that provides music programs for 30 California schools. Executive director Marianne Locke speaks of their findings: "When we play traditional Japanese and Chinese music or other slow pieces and pair them with movements, such as yoga and T'ai Chi, the children become calmer and more able to focus their attention." (Cassidy 48) Following up on this observation, the organization is setting up an independent study to determine if children are calmer and perform better on certain learning tasks when exposed to slower and calmer pieces of music. In a separate and totally unrelated study, Harvard researcher Jerome Kagan reported a very interesting finding. "If you present an interesting visual stimulus to a baby, it becomes aroused and begins to move its arms and legs," Kagan noted. "[However,] if you play some music that interests them, they do the opposite - they quiet down. There is a very different psychological reaction to sound." (Knox A6)Music's affect on children have only recently been documented and published. Although the aforementioned calming effects of music have not been explained by scientists, they now know that the brains of infants are capable of extraordinary feats. New research shows that brain development is largely unfinished at birth and that the stimuli a child receives during the crucial part of their childhood will greatly affect how the brain grows and the connections the nerve-cell networks make. Music, especially classical music, when played at early stages of a child's development will help open gateways of opportunity for advanced learning. This means that exposing your child to classical music before the age of three may help him become a better math and science student later in life.Tests all over the world have confirmed that music has a strong relationship to multiple intelligences. First graders who were taught folk melodies for 7 months s...
