Music world

Nashville, TN… In its debut year, the Life & Faith Tour will kick off in a big way by giving back to local communities in three cities this summer: Richmond (6/19/2010), Rockingham, NC (7/10/2010) and Atlanta (7/24/2010). The diverse lineup for the event includes six-time Grammy ® Award winner Amy Grant, multi-platinum selling band MercyMe, CMA Award winners Diamond Rio, Grammy Award ® winner Israel Houghton, Point of Grace, David Crowder*Band, Natalie Grant, The Nelons and Triumphant Quartet, Southern Gospel acts as well as Christian ventriloquists and comedians, authors, motivational speakers and more.

The Life & Faith Tour is a Christian festival with a major fundraising component to benefit the local community, born out of the simple desire to give back and leave a community in better shape than it was when they arrived. Created years ago by former fireman Ronnie Jackson, as an initial fundraiser for the local fire department in Kenbridge, VA, what started out as a cookout with local entertainment grew into a major fundraising event with headlining acts such as Travis Tritt and Alabama.

Today, over 30 years later, the tour has grown into a major family attraction. What sets it apart from other festivals is how it presents an opportunity for organizations to raise funds; this is done by simply spreading the word.

Starting February 15, tickets will be available for $47.50 and $10 of that automatically goes to a local organization. If the ticket buyer doesn’t choose a beneficiary, a default organization in each city will benefit, ensuring that the community benefits from every ticket sold. Organizations will range from local churches and youth groups to the YMCA, Red Cross and other worthy civic groups. Churches and organizations are welcome to sign up as a beneficiary starting on January 15.

“This is truly an effortless act, all organizations have to do is talk about the show, and then when a patron goes to buy a ticket, that organization gets $10 just for the referral,” Jackson explains. “However the churches and organizations must be registered on the tour’s website to become a beneficiary. When purchasing a ticket, patrons will be able to choose a church or organization where their ticket proceeds will go. Each Life & Faith venue can hold 70,000 people so a sellout crowd would leave that community with $700,000 as the tour busses pull out of town. It is truly a remarkable way to give back to the community.”

Compassion International is just one of the many sponsors that have climbed on board to help make this event possible. As a beneficiary for the tour, it is an opportunity that not only raises funds for their own organization, but it also benefits others in the surrounding communities as well. For every 70k people who attend, the tour will provide the funds to build a Habitat of Humanity home in that state.

For organizations to register to become a beneficiary and to view the full all-star lineup along with finding more information please visit www.lifeandfaithtour.com.

Advocating the introduction of music classes into school curriculum, a new research has states that learning to play musical instruments has positive effects on the brain and it helps children improve their learning and understanding of language. The research, which is a review of several studies on the benefits of music, suggested that connections between brain cells are established during musical training that can help in other forms of communication, such as speech, reading and understanding a foreign language.

“The effect of music training suggests that, akin to physical exercise and its impact on body fitness, music is a resource that tones the brain for auditory fitness,” said the researchers, at the Northwestern University (NU) in Illinois, who carried out the review.

They said, the studies showed that society should “re-examine the role of music in shaping individual development” and schools should consider boosting efforts to incorporate musical training into the curriculum, LiveScience reported.

Studies have shown such training leads to changes in the brain’s auditory system. For example, pianists show more brain activity in their auditory cortex — the part of the brain responsible for processing sounds — than non-musicians in response to hearing piano notes.

Musicians also have larger brain volumes in areas essential for playing a musical instrument, including motor and auditory regions, the researchers said. They found that these advantages of music training appear to cross over to our understanding of speech.

Speech and Music have quite a bit in common. They both use pitch and timing to get information across, and both call for memory and attention skills to process, they said. Some studies proved that children with musical training have more neural activity in response to changes in pitch during speech than those without such training.