Poster Trumpet-playing robot
Toyota's Partner Robot plays a trumpet
Chris 73 / Wikimedia Commons

When it comes to learning, music and science go hand-in-hand

In third grade, with my mom's encouragement, I decided to enter our school's science fair. I chose to test the effect of emotion on the growth of bean plants — by playing classical music recordings and saying loving words to my plant. (Though I played violin, the screechy sounds I produced didn't quite qualify as music.) Meanwhile, my neighbor took care of the other plant by playing rock music and saying mean things to her plant.

The result? My neighbor accidentally forgot to take care of her plant, and it died.

The experiment didn't reveal very much about the effect of emotion on plant growth, but my neighbor and I did learn a valuable lesson about the danger of confounding variables — and it piqued a scientific curiosity that has stayed with me as I've progressed from my third grade naivete to my current state of wonder as a first-year medical student. There's so much left for science to discover, and the clock is ticking.

Classical music has been an important part of my life — and my education, both as a scientist and as a person generally. In my neurobiology course, I am now learning how making music literally alters our brains.

Though it would have been a stretch to credit classical music for my bean plant's prosperity, I personally experienced the music's comforting effect as I continued to play the violin in college with chamber and symphony orchestras. I then taught extracurricular violin and music theory at the rural high school where I became a chemistry teacher after my undergraduate years.

I found students who struggled to see the significance of double-replacement chemical reactions light up when they saw my violin, a graspable object waiting to be explored. Lunch time was a cacophonous inspiration: some students would come in to my classroom to try their hand at creating perfectly resonant notes with violin and bow while others would go into the lab area and try producing new chemical reactions that we didn't do as a class but that they could think through with their chemistry theory.

Music — and not just classical music — inspires a sense of creativity and sustains our motivation, going hand-in hand with the empowering nature of science. The delicate interplay between music and science in our education helps us think without letting us forget how essential it is to feel.

Akhila Narla graduated from Washington University in St. Louis with a degree in Environmental Biology and then joined Teach for America prior to starting medical school at Stanford. She is a National Health Service Corps Scholar interested in research, advocacy, and policy that addresses health disparities for underserved communities.


Akhila Narla is a source in American Public Media's Public Insight Network. To sign up or learn more, click here.

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