Selective listening … not just the kind practiced by your children 

Imagine you’re at the opera. During the first act, you’ve managed to ignore the sound of shuffling feet and candy wrappers. But in the second act, just as the soprano begins her glorious aria, you hear a cell phone ring and become completely distracted. If the opera isn’t your thing, imagine you’re watching a friend’s band perform but your other friends won’t be quiet long enough to let you listen to an actual song. Or maybe you’re at your child’s choir concert and the other kids are singing so loud you can’t focus on your son’s angelic voice.  

In all of these situations, your attention is being taxed to its limit.  

In psychology, attention – the capacity to maintain selective concentration – has two major components: Selecting what you want to attend to and ignoring the rest. For instance, you focus your attention when you listen to a garbled announcement on the subway, watch out for kids as you drive down a suburban street, or ignore an overly chatty colleague in the background while working.  

Boosting your attention span 

Did you know that music is a natural and fun way to increase your capacity to pay attention? In fact, any kind of music practice can help boost your attention. Though the evidence is still coming in, studies have found that musicians have a cognitive advantage in focusing their attention, outperforming non-musicians in laboratory tests. The benefits of developing your attention span extend to all other aspects of life – from the classroom to the workplace and everywhere in between. 

At the RCM Research Centre, attention is one of the major cognitive skills we focus on when developing new classroom techniques and teaching performance skills. Indeed, listening to and performing music requires that we concentrate our attention. A violinist may focus on the beat given by the conductor while ignoring her fellow orchestra members who are erroneously speeding up. Alternatively, a tenor in a choir may need to listen selectively to the alto line in order to pick out his entrance note.  

Learning to focus through music 

In our Smart Start^TM curriculum, children learn to focus their attention through music. One activity involves listening to music and moving like “flying” or “stomping” dinosaurs, depending on whether the music is high or low pitched. Besides having fun while learning about the fundamentals of pitch, this participatory activity also hones a child’s attention skills. The child needs to attend to the music and selectively focus on the pitch height he or she hears while ignoring other characteristics such as tempo or loudness.  

Even infants can develop age-appropriate attention skills. In another Smart Start activity, caregivers bounce infants on their laps in time to a song and then hold during a rest or sustained note at the end, before resuming. The infant learns to anticipate the rest and the subsequent return to bouncing. Varying the time keeps the infants from simply memorizing how long to wait and instead encourages them to really pay attention to the music. Children in our programs also play different games that measure the components of attention, with a special focus on language abilities. 

At the RCM Research Centre, we examine the effects of long-term music practice on attention and foster this critical skill through music classes.  

So the next time you’re trying to follow a conversation in a crowded room or focus at the opera, take a moment to think about how your musical experience might have shaped your ability to pay attention.