Evidence shows that music training, such as ColorSoundation, rather than passive listening, has a huge impact on brain development. There are many benefits linked to early music education and academic achievement. Young children taking music lessons showed dramatic improvement in their verbal intelligence. Elementary school students in higher quality music education programs had 20% improvement in standardized tests of English and Math. Students who receive music education are proven to have higher IQ scores, show better working memory abilities, and are more creative.
Music has become apart of our every day lives. Whether we receive music training or we hear it on the radio, it surrounds us. Music can drastically affect our mood, can improve creativity, can shape our personality, can improve motor and reasoning skills, can be used as therapy, and can even help us exercise!
Daniel Levitin wrote in his book “This is Your Brain on Music”, “Whenever humans come together for any reason, music is there. Weddings, funerals, graduation from college, men marching off to war, stadium sporting events, a night on the town, prayer, a romantic dinner, mothers rocking their infants to sleep and college students studying with music as a background….” He continues to note that…music is and was [always] part of the fabric of everyday life. Only relatively recently in our own culture, five hundred years or so ago, did a distinction arise that cut society in two, forming separate classes of music performers and music listeners. Throughout most of the world and for most of human history, music making was as natural an activity as breathing and walking, and everyone participated. Concert halls, dedicated to the performance of music, arose only in the last several centuries. Understanding why we like music and what draws us to it is therefore a window on the essence of human nature….”.
DREAMS FULFILLED THROUGH MUSIC has pioneered the use of the ColorSoundation Curriculum in the teaching of individuals of all ages with varying disabilities since 2013.
While originally designed and developed with pre-K through 2nd grade students in mind, DREAMS FULFILLED THROUGH MUSIC has developed supplementary adaptations to the basic curriculum so that it fills an important void in available music instruction materials for students with IDD (Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities). These adaptations have become a mainstay in music programs now offered in several area Day Habilitation Centers in the San Antonio area.
