I know that watching MythBusters every week makes science seem "cool," "interesting," and "important," but trust me when I tell you that not everyone in a white coat gets to spend their days testing whacky hypotheses via the demolition of walls and construction of shark robots. Fact is, sometimes these guys just get bored out of their minds and start testing any old arbitrary thing just to earn that paycheck for the week and keep the grants flowing! Take these cats over at the University of Amsterdam. As if the world didn't take Amsterdam non-seriously enough, these researchers have taken the time to carefully prove that, surprise, surprise, the act of listening to music makes you better at playing it yourself. Here we all were thinking that listening to something aural in order to imitate it better was a pretty logical and non-scientific principle. But apparently, it's headline-grabbing science. Thanks for logging in those hours, Amsterdam! Who says you're not a focused bunch?
But to be fair, things do take a turn for the slightly more scientific when you explain them with fancier words. For example, "more and more labs are showing that people have the sensitivity for skills that we thought were only expert skills," explained Henkjan Honing, a researcher behind the study. Sounds intriguing, right? "The UvA-study shows that listeners without formal musical training, but with sufficient exposure to a certain musical idiom... perform similarly in a musical task when compared to formally trained listeners."
The conclusion? Drum roll please... Listening to music helps one understand how it is made! In other words, all those Baby's First Mozart CDs have finally been justified. Uh, but only if you want them to play classical music, apparently, because the study also showed that subjects showed more competence creating music in genres with which they were familiar.
But $5 Walmart Mozart CD or no $5 Walmart Mozart CD, you're not going to want to stop forcing your kid to keep taking piano lessons just yet. After all, you don't need a study to tell you that learning how to do something professionally helps you to do it better... or, wait... maybe you do? Someone had better do a study on that too... if they're not too busy, that is.