Claire Kelly and her friend Dominique Gaucher love to sing. They've been choir buddies for the last three years in the Choeur de Montréal, a youth choir presided over by Montreal's best known choir master, Iwan Edwards.
Both girls love music. They feel transported when the ensemble works together and it sounds just great.
They're also excellent students.Gaucher, 14, is about to enter Secondary 3. She has an 87 per cent average; her favourite subjects are history and gym and she's an avid basketball player.
Kelly, 13, who has just completed Secondary 1, has an 86 average in math and science. She is on a scholarship at Trafalgar School after scoring in the 95th percentile in the math entrance exam.Gaucher can't read music but has a good ear. She's able to remember the 20-odd songs of the chorale's repertoire each season.
Kelly does read music; she plays the clarinet and has been singing since she was a small child. Singing in a choir has helped her memory, she says. "We have to memorize all the songs, so for exams and tests it really helps" to use your memory so much.
She's right. In fact, there's so much evidence that music is good for more than memory that while the Montreal Jazz Festival was under way this summer, the city also hosted a meeting of a premier group of scientists looking at the relationship between music and neuroscience.
They were here for the third such gathering, brought to Montreal because McGill University is home to the newly established BRAMS laboratory, an international facility for brain, music and sound research, affiliated with the Université de Montréal and the Montreal Neurological Institute.
BRAMS is one in a list of recent scholarly explorations into the power of music that have been undertaken by neuroscientists, psychologists, educators, musicologists, computer scientists and even sound engineers. McGill associate professor of psychology Daniel Levitin, for example, once a sound engineer, is author of the best-selling book This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession.
Another Canadian scholar whose work on music speaks directly to the learning process is Glenn Schellenberg of the University of Toronto, whose 2004 study supports the notion that musical training actually exercises parts of the brain used for mathematics, spatial intelligence and more.
"With music lessons, because there are so many different facets involved - such as memorizing, expressing emotion, learning about musical interval and chords - the multidimensional nature of the experience may be motivating the [IQ] effect," he said after the study was published.
After testing and retesting a group of 6-year-olds, Schellenberg found that the real boost to IQ - not related to school learning - came to those children taught either piano or voice.
He ascertained that children in the music groups "had slightly larger increases in IQ than the control groups," averaging 7-point gains in their IQ scores from the previous year - a greater gain than the children placed in groups either taking drama or no extra lessons.This increase in IQ is considered small but significant.
And such findings have been corroborated elsewhere. Data from SAT scores compiled for the Music Educators National Conference in 2001 showed that high school music students score higher on SATs in both verbal and math than their peers who don't study music.
In fact, test takers with coursework or experience in music performance scored an average 57 points higher on the verbal portion of the test and 41 points higher on the math portion than students with no coursework or experience in the arts.
Music, music everywhere. Studies conducted in the U.S. show that the group of applicants most likely to be admitted to medical school is made up of music majors; that music majors scored highest on reading tests; that after three years of piano instruction, students' pattern recognition and mental representation scores improved significantly; that music participants received more academic honours and awards than non-music students.
As for Kelly and Gaucher, singing might help their brains, but that's not why they do it. The most overwhelming feeling, Kelly says, is "how nice the music sounds after all the work you put into it."