On a recent evening in a second-floor room of the University United Methodist Church in Chapel Hill, Joshua Pongsitiphon tries out the final chords of a funeral march on a slightly out-of-tune piano.

If your parents ever submitted you to regular music lessons as a kid, you probably got in a fight with them once or twice about it. Maybe you didn't want to go; maybe you didn't like practicing. But ...

Researchers have debunked the much-publicized idea, known as the Mozart effect, that listening to classical music improves children’s ability to reason about spatial relations and other nonverbal ...