Does Singing Make You Smarter? What the Research Shows for IQ

Singing has not been shown to make anyone smarter: no study has measured IQ before and after singing lessons or choir membership. The best randomized trials, all in older adults, found either no effect of choir singing on cognitive tests or a small advantage that was no longer statistically significant once the groups' starting scores were taken into account.

Singing does have some narrower, better-supported effects. It helps people memorise words set to a melody, and a singing-based therapy helps some stroke patients recover speech. This page covers where the belief comes from, what the choir trials found, the clinical evidence, and why people who sing may differ from people who do not before they ever join a choir.

Singing in a choir asks a lot of the brain at once. Singers read notation, hold a melody and words in memory, listen to the voices around them, and control breathing and pitch in real time. Those demands overlap with "executive functions", the mental skills used to plan, switch between tasks and keep information in mind, so it is easy to assume that regular practice strengthens them.

Two other ideas feed the belief. One is the popular theory of multiple intelligences, which lists a "musical intelligence" as if it were a separate ability to be trained. The other is the long-running claim that music in general raises IQ, which ranges from the short-lived Mozart effect to the claim that instrument lessons make children smarter. That second claim has been tested more than any other. A 2020 meta-analysis by Giovanni Sala and Fernand Gobet pooled 54 studies of music training in children and found that, once study quality was taken into account, the effect on cognitive and academic outcomes was about zero. Our page on IQ and musicians covers instrument training in full; singing is the narrower question here.

Most singing research is in older adults, because choirs are cheap and popular with retirees, and because researchers hope they might slow cognitive decline. Three studies give a fair picture.

• A cross-sectional Finnish study: Pentikäinen and colleagues compared older choir singers with matched non-singers. In the 74 people who took a full neuropsychological battery, the singers did better on one measure, the verbal flexibility part of executive function, and no better on any other cognitive domain. Because the singers chose to sing, the design cannot show that choir caused the difference.

• The Community of Voices trial: Johnson and colleagues randomized 12 US senior centres, with 390 adults aged 60 or older, to start a weekly community choir straight away or six months later. After six months, the choir group felt less lonely (standardized effect size 0.34) and reported more interest in life (0.39), but there were no group differences on the cognitive tests or on physical outcomes.

• A two-year trial in Singapore: Feng and colleagues randomized 93 older adults at high risk of dementia to weekly one-hour choral singing or to weekly health education for two years. On a composite cognitive score, the singing group came out slightly ahead (a difference of 0.15 points, p = .042), but after adjusting for the groups' starting scores the difference shrank to 0.12 and was no longer statistically significant. Brain scans and blood markers showed no difference.

None of these studies measured IQ. The outcomes were neuropsychological tests of memory, attention and executive function, and the best-designed trial found nothing on them. The fair summary is that choirs clearly help older adults feel less lonely, and any effect on thinking ability is small at best.

Singing has a more promising record in clinical groups, where the question is recovery or support rather than raising a healthy person's intelligence.

• Mild to moderate dementia: Särkämö and colleagues randomized 89 people with dementia and their family caregivers to 10 weeks of coached singing, coached music listening or usual care. Both music groups improved more than usual care on mood, orientation and memory for past events, and the singing group also improved on short-term and working memory. The sample was small and the gains were on cognitive tests, so this says nothing about IQ in healthy adults.

• Aphasia after stroke: "Melodic intonation therapy" teaches people who have lost fluent speech to sing or intone short phrases on a simple melody while tapping out the rhythm, then gradually move back toward normal speech. A 2022 meta-analysis by Popescu and colleagues found a small-to-moderate benefit in randomized trials (g = 0.35), mainly on repetition tasks rather than everyday conversation. Non-randomized studies showed effects nearly six times larger, which the authors linked partly to natural recovery after a stroke. Anyone with speech loss after a stroke should be assessed by a speech and language therapist.

• Babies and lullabies: In a study by Nakata and Trehub, six-month-old infants watched videos of their own mothers speaking or singing, and they stayed attentive for longer during the singing. That fits the idea that singing is a good way to hold a baby's attention and share a calm moment. No study has shown that lullabies raise later IQ.

The best-supported cognitive effect of singing is narrow and practical: words are easier to learn when they are set to a tune. Ludke, Ferreira and Overy randomly assigned 60 adults to learn short phrases in Hungarian, a language none of them knew, by listening and then speaking, rhythmic speaking or singing. After a 15-minute learning session, the singing group did best overall, and the advantage was statistically significant on the two tests that asked people to recall and produce the spoken phrases. The difference was not explained by musical ability, musical training or phonological working memory.

This is "near transfer" in the usual sense: practice with a particular kind of material helps you remember that material. Learning a song in Hungarian helps you remember the Hungarian phrases in it. It does not make you better at the reasoning puzzles and other unrelated tasks that make up an IQ test. Sala and Gobet's work on chess, music and working-memory training found the same pattern for far transfer to general ability: apparent effects shrink as studies get better.

People who sing are not a random sample of the population. Swaminathan, Schellenberg and Khalil tested adults on nonverbal intelligence (Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices) and on musical aptitude, meaning the ability to tell whether two melodies or rhythms are the same. Music lessons were linked to higher intelligence, but that link disappeared once musical aptitude was taken into account, while aptitude stayed strongly related to intelligence. The authors concluded that people who are high-functioning to begin with are more likely both to have a good ear and to take lessons.

The same selection is likely for choirs. Long-term choir members tend to be people who enjoy group activities and have the time and health to attend rehearsals every week. Education, income, health and social life all differ between people who join choirs and people who do not, and all of them are linked to cognitive test scores in older age. That is why the randomized trials matter more than comparisons of singers with non-singers, and why their mostly null cognitive results are the better guide.

No study has shown that singing raises IQ. Randomized choir trials in older adults found no effect or a small, uncertain effect on cognitive tests, which are narrower than an IQ score.

Singing has been linked to better mood, less loneliness and, in small trials, some gains on memory tests in people with dementia. Those are real benefits, but they are different from becoming more intelligent.

There are no good data comparing the IQ of singers with that of non-singers. Studies of music lessons suggest that people with higher ability are more likely to take up music in the first place, which would make singers look smarter even if singing changed nothing.

Yes, for the words being sung. In one experiment, adults who sang new phrases in Hungarian remembered and reproduced them better than adults who spoke them.

There is no evidence that it does. Babies pay more attention to singing than to speech, which makes it a good way to engage and soothe them.

Singing is a social, enjoyable activity with some specific benefits, especially for mood and loneliness in older adults and for remembering the words of a song. There is no evidence that it makes you smarter in the sense of raising IQ, and the people who sing in choirs were probably different from non-singers before they joined. If you want an accurate measure of your reasoning ability, you can take a full-length online IQ test.

1. Sala, G., & Gobet, F. (2020). Cognitive and academic benefits of music training with children: A multilevel meta-analysis. Memory & Cognition, 48(8), 1429-1441. [doi.org/10.3758/s13421-020-01060-2](. doi.org

2. Pentikäinen, E., Pitkäniemi, A., Siponkoski, S.-T., Jansson, M., Louhivuori, J., Johnson, J. K., Paajanen, T., & Särkämö, T. (2021). Beneficial effects of choir singing on cognition and well-being of older adults: Evidence from a cross-sectional study. PLOS ONE, 16(2), e0245666. [doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0245666](. doi.org

3. Johnson, J. K., Stewart, A. L., Acree, M., Nápoles, A. M., Flatt, J. D., Max, W. B., & Gregorich, S. E. (2020). A community choir intervention to promote well-being among diverse older adults: Results from the Community of Voices trial. The Journals of Gerontology: Series B, 75(3), 549-559. [doi.org/10.1093/geronb/gby132](. doi.org

4. Feng, L., Romero-Garcia, R., Suckling, J., Tan, J., Larbi, A., Cheah, I., ... Kua, E. H. (2020). Effects of choral singing versus health education on cognitive decline and aging: A randomized controlled trial. Aging, 12(24), 24798-24816. [doi.org/10.18632/aging.202374](. doi.org

5. Särkämö, T., Tervaniemi, M., Laitinen, S., Numminen, A., Kurki, M., Johnson, J. K., & Rantanen, P. (2014). Cognitive, emotional, and social benefits of regular musical activities in early dementia: Randomized controlled study. The Gerontologist, 54(4), 634-650. [doi.org/10.1093/geront/gnt100](. doi.org

6. Popescu, T., Stahl, B., Wiernik, B. M., Haiduk, F., Zemanek, M., Helm, H., ... Fitch, W. T. (2022). Melodic Intonation Therapy for aphasia: A multi-level meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials and individual participant data. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1516(1), 76-84. [doi.org/10.1111/nyas.14848](. doi.org

7. Nakata, T., & Trehub, S. E. (2004). Infants' responsiveness to maternal speech and singing. Infant Behavior and Development, 27(4), 455-464. [doi.org/10.1016/j.infbeh.2004.03.002](. doi.org

8. Ludke, K. M., Ferreira, F., & Overy, K. (2014). Singing can facilitate foreign language learning. Memory & Cognition, 42(1), 41-52. [doi.org/10.3758/s13421-013-0342-5](. doi.org

9. Sala, G., & Gobet, F. (2017). Does far transfer exist? Negative evidence from chess, music, and working memory training. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 26(6), 515-520. [doi.org/10.1177/0963721417712760](. doi.org

10. Swaminathan, S., Schellenberg, E. G., & Khalil, S. (2017). Revisiting the association between music lessons and intelligence: Training effects or music aptitude? Intelligence, 62, 119-124. [doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2017.03.005](. doi.org

Hero image: Choir Loft, by Nazareth College from Rochester, NY, USA, CC BY 2.0. Via Wikimedia Commons.