Music lessons for at-risk children could aid the youngsters develop reading and language skills.

A pioneer research project has documented the impact of an extracurricular music education on the brains of less-fortunate children. Researchers from the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at the Northwestern University in Chicago reported their findings in a paper published Tuesday.

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The scientists spent two summers in Los Angeles with underprivileged children who were provided free music education by the Harmony Project, a non-profit association that offered free music lessons to low-income students.

The students were connected to a neural probe to record how the music education affected their young brains. The study let the scientists figure out how children "distinguished similar speech sounds, a neural process that is linked to language and reading skills."

The study's children, with ages between six and nine, were split into two groups.

One group of children were given one year of music lessons by the end of the study. The other received double the time, with two years of free education.

The results researchers collected from the study suggest the children's brains only start to react to the music lessons after at least two years of music tutorials.

"We used a quick but powerful neural probe that allowed us to gauge speech processing with unprecedented precision. With it, we found that the brain changes only followed two years of music training," said Dr. Nina Kraus, Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory director of Northwestern.

Dr. Kraus added that the outcome of the study was proof that making music could have a lifelong and profound effect on learning and listening if it's an active part of a child's education.

It's a mistake to think it would just be just a quick fix.

Tagsbrain, Nature Neuroscience, Music, Project Harmony, Research, scientific research, Science, science research