“If all of my skills were taken away from me except one, the one I would want to retain is the ability to speak, for with it I could regain all the rest." -Daniel Webster
Music is a powerful tool for connecting and communicating. Music brings experience to life and provides a fun and natural context for learning and practicing new skills. Music can teach sounds, concepts, vocabulary and grammar. Because movement is a natural part of music is it also a great tool for teaching the motor skills that underlie speech, feeding and fluency. Music can serve to soothe, calm, and distract from the drudgery of practice. Music uses sounds and silences to structure time and it can serve as a tool for enhancing memory through repetition. It is also easily adapted to a wide range of individual abilities.
Music stimulates and uses many parts of the brain. The same can be said of speech. Areas in both the left and right hemispheres work together for interpretation and production of rhythm, melody, and pitch as well as vocabulary, syntax and phonology. This inter-hemispheric collaboration supports fluency, auditory processing, speech and language production and language comprehension.
