Musicians tend to be quite a clever bunch. While it’s up for debate as to whether playing music literally makes you ‘smarter’, as such, it’s certainly proven to do lots of lovely things to your brain. There are tons of advantages to learning an instrument, and these are just the start…

Improving your memory

There’s a whole lot to remember when learning music, so it naturally affects your capacity to store and draw on information. Your cognitive, organisation and spatial-temporal skills can all benefit from regularly playing music, and the effects are more potent the younger you start. So ignore Junior’s whinging and make him stick to those piano lessons. He and his expanded grey matter will thank you later.

Enhancing mental processing

Playing an instrument means absorbing a lot of information at once, which means that practically every part of your brain is involved with the process. From the motor cortex to the sensory cortex to the corpus callosum, amygdala and cerebellum, music causes numerous areas of the brain to grow and develop in tandem. This results in a significant boost in your brain’s overall efficiency.

Teaching maths skills

In learning to read music, you’ll find yourself doing a great deal of counting. Keeping track of notes and rhythms can do wonders for a person’s mathematical skills, which is evident in students from primary school all the way to university level. If you’ve ever wondered how some kids manage to be good at everything, it’s likely that they’ve grown up playing an instrument (or they’re just unfairly gifted).

Bettering reading comprehension

Yep. First maths, now English. Playing an instrument means constant comprehension, so this one isn’t too surprising. When you see notes on a page, you have to recognise what that note is, what sound it makes, and then translate it into a finger position. That’s not so different to reading a block of text and trying to understand what it’s actually saying. It’s all about training yourself to derive specific meaning from different symbols.

Teaching concentration

Good concentration is a reasonably important trait to have, to say the least. You’ll have a hard time learning anything if you can’t concentrate, and learning a musical instrument is a fantastic way to develop this skill. The focus you apply to pitch, tempo and rhythm can be applied to all walks of life. Playing a in a band increases the effect even more, because you have to learn to not only hear yourself, but listen for cues from everyone else as well.

Has this inspired you to take up the clarinet once more? If you’re wondering where to find quality instruments nearby, look no further than your local listings.