A small music ensemble represents a unique form of human social activity, involving a highly complex set of interpersonal communicative skills. To achieve a joint musical goal, ensemble performers actively strive to reach out to the “other,” by sensitively attending to, and aligning their emotions with, those of their co-performers. This suggests that engagement in small music ensembles may be a fruitful domain to cultivate the habit of empathizing. The current study explored the relationship between college music students’ small ensemble experiences and their empathy skills. Undergraduate music performance majors in their senior year ( N = 165) voluntarily completed an online survey that included questions about their background and participation in and attitudes toward small ensembles. They also completed a self-assessment questionnaire that measured their dispositional empathy levels. Hierarchical multiple regression analysis indicated that students’ levels of participation in various small ensemble activities significantly predicted their empathy skills, even after controlling for the effect of personal factors. Personality also appeared to play a significant role in predicting music students’ empathy skills.

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As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to disrupt our lives in unimagined ways, families are reinventing daily rituals, and this is likely true for musical rituals. This study explored how parents with young children used recorded music in their everyday lives during the pandemic. Mothers (N = 19) of child(ren) aged 18 months to 5 years living in the United States played the role of home DJ over a period of one week by strategically crafting the sonic home environment, based on resources provided by the authors, in response to their children’s mood and state. Using a newly developed data collection tool, inspired by the Experience Sampling Method, a total of 197 episodes were collected about children’s engagement with recorded music. Findings showed that while mothers utilized music to fulfill various emotional needs, they tended to use it to maintain or reinforce their child’s positive mood rather than to improve a negative mood. Also, mothers’ reports suggested various ways that young children engaged with music, being aligned with the multimodal nature of their musical experiences. Lastly, mothers reported that their strategic approaches to use recorded music seemed to help their children feel less distressed and happier, and this, in turn, aided in the reduction of some of the burdens associated with parenting.

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This study addresses the issue of sensitive periods – a developmental window when experience or stimulation has unusually strong and long-lasting impacts on certain areas of brain development and thus behaviour (Bailey and Penhune 2012) – for music training from a neurological perspective. Are there really sensitive periods in which early musical training has greater effects on the brain and behaviour than training later in life? Many neuroscience studies support the idea that beginning music training before the age of 7 is advantageous in many developmental aspects, based on their findings that early onset of music training is closely associated with enhanced structural and functional plasticity in visual-, auditory-, somatosensory- and motor-related regions of the brain. Although these studies help early childhood music educators expand understanding of the potential benefits of early music training, they often mislead us to believe that early onset is simply better. Careful consideration on details of these research studies should be given when we apply these research findings into practice. In this regard, this study provides a review of neuroscience studies related to the issue of sensitive periods for childhood music training and discusses how early childhood music educators could properly apply these findings to their music teaching practice.