A research team led by Professor Kuniyoshi Sakai of the University of Tokyo Graduate School, in collaboration with the Talent Education Research Association (Nagano Prefecture), has for the first time used neuroscience to elucidate the differences between short-term music practice and long-term experience learning an instrument, demonstrating that for intermediate players, listening carefully to audio sources is more effective than reading sheet music.
When practicing music, there are two practice methods: one that emphasizes listening to audio (the Suzuki method) and one that emphasizes reading music scores (score reading). However, there have been no comparative studies, so it was unclear which parts of the brain are responsible for the practice effects and how music-related brain functions change with experience of learning to play an instrument.
The research team investigated the effects of short-term and long-term musical experience on brain activity in 23 Suzuki Method students (mostly junior and senior high school students) and 15 adults who had practiced another method (both with intermediate level piano playing ability) using an MRI device and a task to judge musicality about the flow of music.
As a result, they found that in short-term practice sessions (of around one week) when intermediate players begin a new piano piece, starting by listening to the audio allows them to understand the piece more accurately than starting by reading the music, and that practicing with more demanding sheet music assists the right brain.
In addition, it was demonstrated for the first time that people who have long-term experience (for more than a year) of practicing instruments other than the piano are able to understand songs more easily than those who only practice the piano, leading to more effective use of the left brain, including the language area.
This result is similar to the acquisition of one's native language through sounds rather than letters, and it is expected that similar results will be obtained for English acquisition, for example. The research team states that neuroscience has made clear the effectiveness of the "Suzuki Method," which applies the natural process of acquiring one's native language through sounds rather than letters to learning to play an instrument.
