There’s a conversation that comes up regularly in music schools like ours. A parent sits across from me, a little hesitant, wondering whether their child really needs music lessons — or whether sport, tutoring, or another activity might be a better use of limited time and money.
It’s a fair question. And the honest answer, backed by a growing body of research, is that few structured activities offer a developmental return on investment quite like music education.
This isn’t an argument for pushing every child toward a concert stage. It’s about what music actually does to the developing brain — and why what happens in a piano lesson, a group class, or a music playgroup matters well beyond the music itself.
When a child learns music, the brain doesn’t just get better at music. It gets structurally better at a range of tasks — and this is the finding that keeps showing up across research groups, universities, and countries.
A comprehensive review published in Frontiers in Psychology (January 2025) synthesised the existing evidence on music training and executive function in preschool children aged 3–6. Executive functions are the cognitive tools we use to plan, focus attention, follow instructions, and manage emotions — exactly what teachers want to see more of in a classroom. The meta-analysis found consistent, positive effects from music training on these skills, particularly in working memory and inhibitory control: the ability to pause before acting on an impulse.
This matters in practical terms. A child who can hold instructions in mind and wait their turn is easier to teach across every subject. Music education appears to be one of the more effective early interventions for building that capacity.
A separate 2024 study published in Frontiers in Education explored the link between music training and executive function specifically in 6–7-year-olds. The researchers found that the demands of music-making — reading notation, listening, responding, and performing simultaneously — engage the frontal regions of the brain in ways that directly support the development of executive function. The study noted that music training affects both the auditory and sensorimotor areas of the brain, and also the regions involved in higher-level cognitive integration.
Put simply: learning to play an instrument is one of the most cognitively complex tasks a young child can take on. That complexity is precisely what makes it valuable.
One area where the research is becoming increasingly compelling is the relationship between music education and literacy.
A 2025 preprint study from researchers examining cortical tracking of speech — the brain’s ability to synchronise with the rhythm of spoken language — found that musical training was linked to enhanced reading ability and phonological awareness in 57 children aged 5–9. What’s interesting about this finding is the mechanism. The brain, when processing speech, essentially locks onto its rhythms, using that synchronisation to break down the continuous stream of sound into recognisable words. Children with dyslexia often show weaknesses in this process. The researchers found that musically trained children showed a pattern closer to that of advanced readers — suggesting that music may accelerate the brain’s journey toward reading maturity.
The pathway the researchers identified was phonological awareness: greater musicality predicted stronger sound-processing skills, which in turn predicted higher reading scores — independent of family income, cognitive ability, and other background factors.
A 2025 systematic review on the role of songs in supporting language development in preschool children with language delays reinforced a related point. Songs — through rhythm, repetition, and a multisensory approach — meaningfully improved children’s word learning, speech fluency, and communication engagement. One of the cited studies found that when parents sang with their babies regularly by six months of age, those children had measurably larger vocabularies by 14 months.
That’s not a small effect. That’s the beginning of literacy, happening through music, before formal schooling ever starts.
It’s worth being honest about the limits here, because the research genuinely is complex.
Not all studies agree. Some large-scale trials have failed to find significant differences between children who receive music training and those who don’t. Some researchers argue that many of the observed benefits reflect pre-existing advantages — wealthier families, more engaged parents, higher baseline cognitive ability — rather than music training itself.
There’s also a timing question. Several meta-analyses suggest that training effects on literacy and language become more significant over longer periods, which means short-term interventions often show weaker results. The benefits of music education appear to compound over time, which means consistency matters more than intensity.
None of this undermines the case for music education. But it does clarify what we’re talking about. Music lessons won’t turn every child into a prodigy, and a term of group classes isn’t a guaranteed academic booster shot. What consistent, quality music education does — over months and years — is build the kind of brain that learns better.
The research is interesting. What it looks like in the room is more interesting.
A three-year-old who’s just started music classes is learning to listen carefully, match pitch, feel a beat, and wait for their turn. A five-year-old learning basic piano is reading simple symbols, coordinating two independent hands, and holding a short musical phrase in memory while preparing to play the next one. A seven-year-old in a group ensemble is learning to track their own part while listening to everyone else.
All of these tasks are, from a neuroscience perspective, extraordinary. They demand attention, memory, coordination, and self-regulation — the exact suite of skills that support learning across every other domain.
A broad longitudinal review of the evidence, published in PMC, summarised it this way: children who undergo musical training show better verbal memory, second-language pronunciation accuracy, reading ability, and executive functions. The degree of structural and functional adaptation in the brain correlates with intensity and duration of practice. And critically — the timing of music education matters. There are sensitive developmental windows, particularly in early childhood, where the brain is especially receptive to music’s shaping influence.
Starting early isn’t everything. But it helps.
If your child is in music lessons — or you’re considering it — the evidence is genuinely on your side. Not because music will solve every developmental challenge, and not because it guarantees a particular academic outcome. But because it’s one of the few activities that exercises nearly every cognitive system simultaneously, in a way that children often find genuinely enjoyable.
Enjoyment matters too, by the way. Motivation and social context are frequently cited as the underappreciated variables in music education research. Children who engage willingly, in an encouraging environment, show greater and more lasting benefits. That’s why the quality of the experience — the teacher, the group, the culture of the school — matters alongside the research findings.
Music is often treated as an add-on, something that gets cut when schedules fill up or budgets tighten. The evidence suggests it’s closer to the opposite: a core developmental experience that pays dividends in domains well beyond the music room.
David runs Forte School of Music, with locations in Toowong and Coorparoo, Brisbane. Forte offers group music programs for children from six months of age through to primary school and beyond.