Forget the Mozart Effect and Baby Einstein, take it easy on acquisitions for your two-year-old’s private library, and don’t fret if your three-year-old hasn’t started violin lessons just yet.
The key to unlocking a child’s potential intelligence and happiness may indeed lie in music, but succumbing to the commercial juggernaut that is the baby-genius-making industry may not be in either your child or your wallet’s best interest.
Instead, try making up songs with your toddler. A new study suggests that regular informal music-making with very young children may even have benefits above and beyond those of reading.
But there’s an important, interesting, and somewhat beautiful catch – for best results, make it shared music-making in your home.
In an analysis of data generated from a study involving more than 3,000 children, a University of Queensland team investigated the associations between informal home music education for very young children and later cognitive and social-emotional outcomes.
The team found that informal music-making in the home from around the ages of two and three can lead to better literacy, numeracy, social skills, and attention and emotion regulation by the age of five.
By measuring the impact of music and reading both separately and in combined samples, the researchers were able to identify benefits from informal music activity over and above shared book reading, most strongly in relation to positive social behaviour, attention regulation and to a lesser but still significant extent, numeracy.
Part of an Australian Research Council funded study titled “Being and becoming musical: towards a cultural ecological model of early musical development”, the study aims to provide a comprehensive account of how Australian families use music in their parenting practices and make recommendations for policy and practice in childcare and early learning and development.
Last month, the team was awarded the inaugural Music Trust Award for Research into the Benefits of Music Education.
Music and its relationship to mental and social development has long captured the attention of parents, researchers, even philosophers.
Science has shown that music’s effect on the brain is particularly strong, with studies demonstrating an improvement in IQ among students who receive music lessons. Advantages in the classroom have been identified for students who study musical instruments, and the effects of ageing on cognition may even be mitigated through lifelong musical activity.
So how is this study different, apart from its focus on early childhood?
Crucially, its findings are based on situations where the child’s musical activities were informal and shared, typically with a parent – essentially a playful social experience.
Simple and fun musical activities can have enormous power in developing numeracy and literacy: try improvising a counting song, or making up new rhymes to familiar tunes.
But the true power of musical play lies in the unique blend of creativity, sound and face-to-face interaction; the learning is strengthened by its basis in a positive, empathic emotional relationship.
Parents are increasingly enrolling very young children in specialist music classes – undoubtedly a positive development. Reading, however, is rarely “outsourced” in this way, and this study suggests that parents should feel encouraged and empowered in tapping their own inner musician before looking outside the home.
As with most aspects of parenting (in my personal non-scientific experience), there is no substitute for a parent’s personal involvement, even if it involves long-forgotten modes of behaviour such as taking simple pleasure in making sounds.
Being playful with sound is something we’re all born with – indeed, toddlers are humanity’s greatest virtuosos in that regard – yet too many are silenced over the years by the “better seen than heard” brigade.
It’s no accident that we talk about “playing” a musical instrument; a turn of phrase that too easily becomes sadly ironic if formal music lesson structures calcify into strictures.
So recapturing a sense of play (if you’re an adult) is crucial to the process of shared music-making, and this research invites parents to focus on the element of “playing” music with toddlers, using any tools at hand.
The human voice is a great place to start, and the kitchen cabinet contains a wealth of percussion instruments. Whistles and bells could be the next step, followed by a toy piano for more ambitious stage parents.
Long before conventional music lessons start, jam sessions with your toddler (not of the messy sticky preserved fruit variety) can be an enormous developmental asset.
You might even find it a two-way street – if children can teach adults anything, it’s how to play. So take the time, play with your child, and “play” music together.
Along with the newly-confirmed bonus benefits for baby, you’ll both be connected to music: a fundamental component of a happy and healthy life.
Google’s efforts to scan millions of books for an online library have passed another legal hurdle with the United States appeal court agreeing earlier this month that the search-giant’s Google Books project does not violate copyright law.
The appeal judges’ ruling supports an earlier district court ruling two years ago. The case was brought by the Authors Guild, which argued that Google’s initiative constituted copyright infringement and could deprive authors of revenue.
But Google has successfully argued that its efforts could actually boost sales by making the text of books searchable, making it easier for people to find published works.
This latest outcome came without much surprise in the US, and the ruling is consistent with the earlier court rulings on fair use. The Authors Guild plans to appeal the case before the US Supreme Court but it is unlikely that it would succeed.
Google Books and Australia
The Google Books decision is based on a so called “fair use” doctrine which means that everyone can use copyrighted works free as long as the use falls under a particular definition of “fair”, including for “criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research”. But such broad and flexible doctrine does not exist in Australia or in most other countries, including Europe.
Instead, Australian copyright law contains narrower and more specific “fair dealing” exceptions as well as a few even more narrowly defined specific copyright exceptions.
It is unlikely that the Google Books project would fall under any of these exceptions. This means that if Google is sued in Australia for the same Google Books project, it is likely to lose the battle. Due to much stricter European copyright laws, a few years ago Google lost a case on Google Books in France.
On the other hand, Australian laws are more flexible than French ones and Australian courts may be as well able to find in favour Google. In short: the legal situation of Google Book still remains uncertain in Australia.
How Google Books works
It is worth clarifying here that not everything that can be found on Google Books website was digitised and made accessible by Google for free and without the permission from the copyright holders.
If you can access chapters from a book, it means that Google has got permission from the publisher of the book to do so (and maybe agreed to remunerate the publisher – hence the author(s) – for this too).
It is only when Google does not have an agreement with the publisher, it takes a risk to digitise the book but then only show snippets of the text. This can be a few lines or a short paragraph where the search terms can be seen.
The US appeal court’s decision on Google Books confirmed that the use of snippets (but not chapters or full books) is fair use.
Google Books is an innovative and useful service but the question is whether Google should pay authors and publishers for its use of their work.
The Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) proposed last year that Australia follow the US and introduces a fair use doctrine.
Accepting fair use in Australia would mean that Google is free to digitise all Australian books for free, put the text in its search engine and allow users to view at least snippets from the books.
Australian authors argue that fair use would further worsen their financial situation that is already rather miserable. As a result, government has not shown any signs in taking up this proposal.
It is true that fair use doctrine has its own risks. For many it looks open, flexible and seems to welcome innovative services such as Google Books. On the other hand, it creates even more uncertainty for those who want to rely on it.
What use is fair? Each particular case needs to be checked in court, but Australian courts do not have years of experience in applying fair use, as US courts do.
Alternatives to fair use
If fair use is not a perfect solution, what could be a compromise? This is a question with no easy answer.
Instead of fair use, European academics suggest reviewing the existing copyright exceptions and adding one broader exception that could apply in “emergency” situations such as Google Books case.
The ALRC also suggested, in its report last year, an alternative to fair use; the consolidation and expansion of existing fair dealing exceptions. Maybe this could be a starting point for a discussion?
One of the problems Google Books faced was the difficulty in finding all the copyright holders of a work and signing a contract with each of them. The Google Book Settlement was meant to ensure that all copyright holders whose books were used in Google Books were remunerated.
Wouldn’t it make sense to create licensing solutions that would make it easier for such projects as Google Books to get licenses and pay fees for millions of authors and publishers? Authors would then get paid and the global service would stay running for all to use.
Open access means making peer reviewed works freely available in digital form, so that anyone with internet access can use them, without financial, legal or technical barriers. It allows users to download, copy, print and distribute works, without the need to ask for permission or to pay.
To the mark the eighth annual Open Access Week, we asked what readers wanted to know about the initiative.
Why do we need open access? How can I use it? Is it better for the sciences or the humanities?
Lucy Montgomery: Open access is a powerful mechanism for widening access to knowledge and for increasing the impact of research beyond universities. Because it makes peer-reviewed scholarship free at the point of use, open access helps ensure people who need knowledge can access it, even if they can’t afford to pay for it.
Patients scouring the internet for the latest information about rare medical conditions, scholars in the developing world, and practitioners who want to apply evidence-based research to challenges they face every day, are just a few examples of groups who benefit from open access.
The global shift to open access is being driven by a consensus that the public has a right to access publicly funded research outputs. Closed publishing models rely on recovering the costs of publishing research by selling access to it. This made sense in a print-dominated world, when the marginal costs associated with making and distributing physical copies of books and journals was high; it makes much less sense in digital landscapes where the costs of making additional copies of a work once it’s been published are very low.
The global shift to open access is being driven by a consensus that the public has a right to access publicly funded research outputs. Gideon Burton/Flickr, CC BY-SA
Once a work has been made open access, it’s free for anyone in the world to read or download. This is a boon for anyone who has ever been frustrated by a pay wall, for teachers looking for resources that can be shared easily with students, and for scholars who hope their work will contribute to a wider body of knowledge.
Although open access has been faster to take off in the sciences, it also has important benefits for scholars working in the humanities: helping authors to share their work with the communities that they write both for and about, and making knowledge and ideas available to new audiences.
How can journals meet the costs of editing, typesetting, proofreading, website construction and management if they move from subscriptions to open access?
Keyan Tomaselli: One of the key blind spots in open access discussions is the cost it poses to publishers. Journals that are not funded by foundations or universities are financially vulnerable in an open access environment unless they start charging for publishing articles. This is because their “permissions income stream”, which are paid to journals through national copyright agencies when their articles are reproduced in student course packs, will dry up.
In this model, the burden of payment will shift from reader or library payment for downloads or subscriptions, to author or institution for articles to be published. The assumption that open access is free – after data charges are paid – is wrong because though readers can access articles for free, authors and their institutions will end up paying so journals can recoup their costs. Data charges relate to the cost of internet access and downloading.
Too often one forgets that such accessing of the internet has cost implications too. And then there are journal post-production costs, including online platform hosting, marketing, discoverability, and archiving, among other things.
Open scholarship includes open notebook, open data and open review as well as open access. What are more systematic and rigorous treatments of open scholarship?
But although the nature of research is changing profoundly, the current system still only rewards and recognises traditional publication. Opening up scholarship has multiple benefits: research claims can be verified, work doesn’t have to be repeated to recreate the data, and data can be analysed from other perspectives.
It’s now possible to put a digital “stamp” on different scholarly outputs, called digital object identifiers (or DOIs). This means a researcher can be cited when another uses their work, and receive recognition.
By having an “open process” in research, we can put digital stamps on all aspects of research, such as progress in thinking through an online discussion paper, for instance; new techniques; and approaches and experiments. These can themselves be cited and therefore rewarded, rather than only recognising traditional published outputs.
How do we ensure research published under open access continues to have a system of rigorous quality checks, such as peer review, that can cope with the enormous load of research looking for publication?
James Bradley: We can’t ensure rigorous peer review of research will be undertaken under open access. Not only that, we know for sure that the explosion of open access journals has allowed for the publication of not just bogus work, but also work that’s irrelevant or useless for scientific or the whole academic enterprise.
How do we know this? For starters, there was an infamous sting in late 2013 that revealed a nonsensical piece of research was accepted for publication by a large number of open access journals. Then, there’s the research showing the huge numbers of “predatory” journals, which are basically in it for the money. The academic or the academic’s institution pays for publication and the piece gets in, regardless of quality. That’s why so many researchers often get emails from start-up journals soliciting our work — for a fee. It’s all about profit.
There’s another form of quality control that transcends peer review and lies in the after-life of a publication. Gideon Burton/Flickr, CC BY-SA
To mitigate this situation, there’s the Directory of Open Access Journals, which is supposed to act as quality control. If you make it on to the list, then you are supposed to be reputable. But some of the journals that have made it to the list are, in fact, “predatory”.
But it’s false to assume that all research that makes it into a front-rank publication is great or that all work in pay-for-publication journals is junk. The peer review system has always had flaws. Ultimately, there’s another form of quality control that transcends peer review and lies in the after-life of a publication — the opinion of your peers.
And this can, to some extent, be measured by metrics through citation databases. But it’s also reflected in the status and reputation accorded by your peers. It was ever thus, and most definitely remains the best form of quality control.
To what extent does this issue go beyond the machinations of open access versus the nuances of what’s free and not free, to the problem of the role of the university in a world where capitalism and the internet frame much of what we do?
Tom Cochrane: Open access has three points of origin. These, in no particular order, are the interests of the researcher in greater exposure and readership; the distorted economics of the price of scholarly communication (as distinct from the true cost of academic publishing); and the fact that the internet has made open access possible in the first place.
Openness in access to research outputs, research data and research processes, enhances replication capability, and allows review. Gideon Burton/Flickr, CC BY-SA
As the debate about open access has matured, it has also become clear that greater openness can also provide protection against research fraud or dishonesty. Openness in access to research outputs, research data and research processes, enhances replication capability, and allows review.
Open access has no particular correlation or causal relationship with the broader role of universities, other than to improve the efficiency and integrity of research and to increase the likelihood of greater integration with their various communities. It’s certainly true that we wouldn’t have seen it develop without the internet and, as such, the movement is another case of innovation and disruption of legacy models.
Where are we getting with the movement, year to year? How much concrete progress has there been as opposed to awareness raising?
Virginia Babour: There’s no doubt that the open access has come a long way. There are now mandates for open access in many countries and institutions globally.
These mandates vary in what they require. Some, like the one in the United Kingdom, are primarily supported through publication in open access journals. Others, like Australia’s funding councils’ mandates, are via deposition of an author’s research in university repositories.
There’s also been an explosion of different technologies around open access, including new ideas on what can be published – just parts of articles, such as figures, fir instance – and new models for publishing open access books.
Finally, the infrastructure to support open access is developing with licenses for publishing, which lay out clearly how articles can be used. And identifiers for people and documents (even parts of documents), so there can be better linking of scholarly literature.
Open access is an evolving ecosystem. There will be different models to fit different specialities and probably different countries. But that’s fine if it works.
At the BookShelf 
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