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Power Of Music Research Paper

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The Power of Music

Everyone knows the story of the Piped Piper of Hamelin. He had the ability to hypnotize people with his flute by playing the most enchanting music. But he's just myth, right? No one has the power to charm people with music. Well, you'd be surprised. Throughout history, music has always been recognized for its calming and almost hypnotic effects on the human mind, and for its ability to rouse and inspire the spirit. Only recently has science uncovered the truth about music. Researchers have long suspected that music affects the brain in the most profound ways, and now they finally have evidence to back up that theory. Such an interesting topic definitely deserves further exploration. Come with me on this …show more content…

Music's calming effects can extend to children as well, as directors at Young Imaginations have seen for 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

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