Have you ever wondered why music can speak to us so personally? Perhaps we have our own reason for this, a place, a time, a loved one missed? Perhaps it speaks to us in a way we do not realise and are moved by the music as if we can only just hear the whispers.

Cognitive archaeologist Steven Mithen of the University of Reading theorises that language and music have both evolved from a musical protolanguage that our hominid ancestors used to calm their children while they searched for food, a descendent of which we use in a similar context today, “motherease”.

Psychologists, linguists and neuroscientist have recently used neuro-imagining techniques to gather a large amount of data regarding brain regions, specifically how those areas interested in music and language overlap.

Music has been found to activate a wide range of brain regions which include the auditory complex (devoted to hearing), the cerebellum (movement centres) and the amygdale (an emotional centre), leading some scientists to think that this high jacking of the various regions begins to explain the enthralling experience music can provide for us. It has also been found that music stimulates areas of the brain responsible for understanding and producing language, which broadly includes the Wernickes and Broca`s area respectfully, which brings forward the interesting notion that musical syntax could have arisen from the mechanisms that evolved to organise and understand grammar.

It is this connection in particular which is of interest to us and one that seems to grow stronger with each research study. So if music and language have a lot in common, then can each influence the development of the other? They both have grammar whereby basic elements are organised into sequences, of which there is a hierarchy, based on established rules. In music, notes join to form melodies as in language, words join to make sentences, each building on the previous to form stories and song. In creating melody and song, children are exploring the notions which give arise to language.

Prosody is the natural melody recognised in speech which includes aspects such as pitch level, pitch range, pitch contour (pattern of rises and falls), timbre (richness), volume, rhythm and tempo. These are the elements other than the words we speak in order to convey, or to understand, the emotional context of those words. When we are happy or excited, we tend to speak slightly higher and quicker than when we are sad or insecure. Phrases are delineated by pauses and breaks in the pattern of words, which also appear in music, with timing and pitch patterns being found in both also.

These elements of speech have been found to be understood and recognised before birth with newborns indicating they preferred the same stories, read by the same voice (their mother) than any other (De-Casper, 1980). In exploring what it is that unborn children can hear it was found that the higher frequency sounds, with much of the information regarding the meanings of words, were muted, meanwhile the lower frequency musical qualities (rhythm, tempo, volume, pitch contours) were well received (Spence and Freeman, 1996)

They are so receptive to these aspects that newborn babies have been found to have accents.....honestly. In a study of French and German newborns, pitch contours in their cries were found to match those of their respective mother`s language (Wermke, 2009). Further research into newborns using neural imagining has shown that are born ready with the ability to process music and recognise ordered vs changeable/out of key music (Saccuman and Perani, 2008).

In a study carried out by neuroscientists Steinbeis and Koelsch (2008) they found using functional magnetic resonance imaging that the area of the brain which responds most acutely to chords in music was the superior temporal sulcus, which is responsible for nonverbal social cues such as gestures, non-word vocal sounds and eye movements, which gives weight to the view that the activation of this part of the brain is a clue towards music helping forge social ties.

With this mere dip into what is the ocean of research into music, language and our brain, we now turn our attention to its role as a developmental tool and the importance of frequent opportunities to experience music as a child.

A study (Thompson, 2004) published findings into how six year olds, after a year of musical lessons were able to identify emotions expressed in spoken sentences increasingly compared to those whom did not have the lessons. They found that they were able to more accurately discern those sentences conveying anger and fear even when spoken in a foreign language. English speakers who had a musical background were found to have much stronger brain activity when listening to a foreign language than those whom had no musical background suggesting that learning to sing or play an instrument can help people become more attuned to the melody of speech and in turn, decipher their meaning (Wong and Kraus, 2007). In 2009, Moreno of the Rotman Research Institute of Toronto recorded that eight year olds whom had taken music lessons showed a better reading ability than children who had focused on painting, giving rise to the notion that music may aid with the skill of deciphering words.

There is evidence then that exposure to music, particularly at an early age, can help develop not only our understanding of language through developing structure in music, but also the aspects of tone, rhythm and tempo which can give us much more information regarding what is actually meant, leading to perhaps a greater ability to empathise and work in the social arena.

For Forest School Practitioners this underpins the importance of what we do in terms of giving learners a wealth of opportunities to express themselves in a wide variety of ways. We can see just how much music is an important part of our development when we take into account it`s links with language development and the need to make sure we are providing an environment whereby learners can feel comfortable and confident to experiment and explore sounds and music, be it as part of a review or during the course of their interests in the session, as this can help support their development with language and their understanding of the subtle aspects used to convey meaning.

Sticks, stones, leaves or claps. Let’s bring on the orchestra.