Music affects people’s lives in so many different ways – most listen to it, some make it, and some play it. Whatever you do with music, you undoubtedly enjoy it.
However, if you learn to play a musical instrument and read music, there are a huge number of transferrable skills and benefits that you might gain from it:
Your Memory – Playing a musical instrument is no easy task for the brain. It requires a huge amount of simultaneous activity such as reading, interpreting, and acting out what you have interpreted all in a very short space of time. For example, if a pianist is playing music, they have to read, interpret, and play the correct notes on the keyboard all in a tiny amount of time.
Body and brain coordination– When playing a musical instrument, the body must coordinate at a rapid rate in response to what your brain is telling it to do. The hand-eye coordination of your body will be vastly improved by playing music. For example, a drummer has to read music, interpret this music, and move their hands and feet all at the same time – this is a huge amount for the brain to do, and will be strenuous at first.
Maths – Almost everything to do with music is based around mathematics. Different keys of music have different numbers of sharps and flats, and every instrument requires you to either have or develop the ability to recognise time signatures, hold a rhythm, and improvise in various different keys, which relates to problem solving.
Reading and Understanding – When learning to play a musical instrument, your mind is constantly trying to read and understand notes, chords, time signatures, clefs, and many other things. This constant reading and transferring of information between what you read and what you do will increase your reading and understanding skills considerably.
Creativeness – The skill of creativeness in music is obvious and speaks for itself! A musical instrument is the only thing will allows a person to make the sound of exactly what they are thinking in their head, assuming they know how to play the instrument well enough. Absolutely nothing else in the world offers this possibility and this is an amazing skill to have.
Whilst playing music will provide the musician with a number of skills, it will also help them to expand their knowledge on various things that they may not have without music, and also to develop themselves as a person. Learn more about this through SoundChime. Music makes people more social, it encourages them to mix with other like-minded musicians, attend concerts, and so much more. It terms of knowledge, playing music will teach the musician so many things as they get deeper into the world of music, such as how music is produced, different musical genres and the instruments used in them, how music is written, the ideas behind various types of music and how people express themselves via it and have done for centuries, etc. The list of benefits and skills that one can attain from picking up playing music is endless – music is a truly universal language that everyone can relate to.