Tuning Up Young Minds: Music lessons give kids a small IQ advantage

Researchers have debunked the much-publicized idea, known as the Mozart effect, that listening to classical music improves children’s ability to reason about spatial relations and other nonverbal tasks. Learning to play a musical instrument or to sing, however, may indeed give youngsters an intellectual edge over their peers, a new study suggests.

Six-year-olds who took weekly piano or singing lessons throughout the school year exhibited an average IQ increase of 7.0