do playing certain instruments make us smarter?

[letterhead]

guys, read up.

http://www.cerebromente.org.br/n15/mente/musica.html

come on, as long as u play music, u're a genius, who the hell cares what u play. in this day and age, chinese pop can make u a millionaire. But, it is obvious, that those in my school who play classical instruments are significantly better at their grades than average.

 

[Hayley]

yes.
it's obvious.
example singing.
when you go to a vocal class, u learn something
and that makes us smarter in singing.

 

[jeremyspk]

hmm
i personally think that music is a gift and has little to do with whether you're smart or not (and also, depends how u wanna define smart :/ )
if smart in terms of IQ, i guess you need to have a certain IQ to be creative, which is required for "giggin" musicians. A keyboardist can't possibly play triads all the way right? Need to improv then nice eh , and improv definitely need IQ. But how high, hmmm... that's another question.

I would choose to believe that a computer genius and a musician can both have same level of IQ, but both are "wired" to do different things. The expert in programming is probably trained to see codes and stuffs, and the musician is trained to listen to notes, key, progressions, rhythm, etc. Both are intelligent, but the reason why they chose what they chose is because they like what they are doing - same intelligence but a passion in different areas.

just my 2cents :mrgreen:

 

[barefoot]

I believe that it helps to open up your left brain alittle which are normally totally closed in especially if your a mugger since young thanks to our right brain oriented education

 

[danilo]

It's hard to say...

I have a friend who is trained up to grade 8, is a music teacher etc but doesn't know how to compose music.
Some people are self-taught, and come up with the great original music.

Also it's not very fair to say classical music > rock or other music
Technology plays a part too.. they have a saying that if people like Beethoven were born in this era, they will be playing symphonic progressive heavy metal or something.. cos electric guitars weren't invented yet =)

 

[pf]

7 kinds of smarts

There are more smarts than 1. :mrgreen:

http://www.jobscareers.com/articles/thomasarmstrongs7kindsofsm.html

 

[Zerker]

Learning more about music, guitar parts, amps, tubes, effects everyday is the best thing that has happened to me, so yeah i would say it does make you smarter.

 

[Heyn]

i get what doubleblade is saying, coz i'm like experiencing both ends now.. haha

 

[tim098]

my personal take on the play classical instruments = smarter kids is quite simple. I feel that these kids probably have tonnes of tuition as well. to be able to send ur children for piano or violin classes, the parents must have some form of respectable bling, which they'd use for tuition as well since we live in kiasu singapore. But i definitely also agree that theres all the different smarts. theres booksmart which i personally consider not smart at all and theres the intellgent. probably other kinds of smarts that i ve never heard of before as well.. but yea i d disagree violently with people playing "classical" instruments being smarter than people playing "non classical" instruments