Making music with others helps young people in terms of identity development and also helps them cope with issues that occur while growing up. For instance, musical engagement and shaping musical abilities are important for the development of various traits and skills in children and adolescents. Therefore, this paper aims to apply a rigorous empirical model to longitudinal data in order to answer the questions of who will stay engaged in musical activities and what factors can predict who is more likely to stop, as well as determine the typical length of the period in which children continue to make music.Įngaging in musical activities of any kind can have positive consequences in many areas (for an overview see ). This line of research goes back to the 1960s and various reasons for quitting musical activities have been identified but apart from very few exceptions, there is a lack of longitudinal data musical engagement and dropouts. Many researchers have investigated children dropping out of musical activities to predict the age they will stop taking part and work out the reasons behind this. We know that music is a popular leisure activity for children and adolescents, but not all of them actually engage in musical lessons or activities and even fewer ‘survive’ musically–which in this case means staying engaged in their musical activities while growing up. While there are some people who keep engaging with music for many years, many more stop practising music at some point during childhood or adolescence. Typically, people with a middle class background in western societies start learning an instrument and join an orchestra or band at 8–12 years old, but many children are already enthusiastic about learning an instrument at the age of 6 or 7.
Why did I ever stop making music, is a question that probably many people asked themselves at some point of time (if they ever engaged in any musical activity). All 2 files are available from the Goldsmiths’ Department of Psychology, This research has been supported by the Humboldt’s foundation’s Feodor-Lynen post-doctoral fellowship for Nicolas Ruth and the Anneliese-Maier research prize awarded to Daniel Müllensiefen by the Humboldt foundation.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. Schools and German education ministries had us agree on data protection which is why we can only share data upon request. The subjects were secondary school students that shared sensitive data. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: This study contains human research participant data. Received: ApAccepted: OctoPublished: November 24, 2021Ĭopyright: © 2021 Ruth, Müllensiefen. Warner-Czyz, University of Texas at Dallas, UNITED STATES When do young people stop making music? PLoS ONE 16(11):Įditor: Andrea D. Musical home environment is an important factor that is associated with lower drop out rates while conscientiousness and theory of musicality showed smaller significant associations.Ĭitation: Ruth N, Müllensiefen D (2021) Survival of musical activities. Results indicate that about 50% of all students drop out of music lessons and other musical activities by the time they turn 17 years old, with most students quitting between the ages of 15 and 17. Other factors like type of learned instrument, gender, personality and intelligence were taken into account for further analyses using generalized linear models.
A survival analysis was applied to investigate the trajectories of musical activities across this age span.
This study used longitudinal data from secondary school students in the UK and Germany aged between 10 and 17 years. Nonetheless, we know very little about how the proportion of musically active children changes with age and what traits influence the survival of musical engagement. Previous research has focused on finding reasons for quitting musical activities, pedagogical strategies to keep students engaged with music, and motivational factors of musical training. Although making music is a popular leisure activity for children and adolescents, few stay musically engaged.
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