Listening is also a part of learning and it has its own positive effects on a child’s personality. Children learn a lot about melody & rhythm by just listening to music. Music listening played a major role in my own initial training. My father used to play all different kinds of music and that’s how I developed a special bond with music early in my childhood. When you listen different kinds of music, you learn to connect with different things. You learn to connect with your own emotions and others’ emotions as well. When my father played ‘morning & evening ragas’ or ‘wind’ by Hari Prasad Chaurasia , I learned to connect with the nature and its beauty. When I first listened albums by western artists I found that they wrote mostly about social and political issues that time. It helped me develop a good understanding about the world around me. I tried to find out where my favorite artists came from and why they wrote songs on particular issues. Billy Joel wrote a brill...

What smart parents do to make their kids smarter There is a widespread view that learning to play a musical instrument in childhood stimulates cognitive development and leads to enhanced skills in a wide variety of areas, including mathematics and general IQ. Now, in a recent scientific study done by Harvard Medical School, Boston College, and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, the experts found that Children who study a musical instrument for at least three years outperform children with no instrumental training on non-musical tests of vocabulary and non-verbal reasoning . Both the above skills are essential for a child’s developing intelligence. This new finding adds to a list of music's magic. Tests showed the kids who practiced instruments scored much higher than their non-musical counterparts on auditory discrimination and finger dexterity, both skills closely tied with musical training. The longer the child was musically trained, the higher the scores. Psycholog...