The multi-laboratory approach of the "The Music Ensemble" project and its results
10.11.2025
The project "The Music Ensemble," led by the Department of General Psychology at the University of Padua, involved 600 expert musicians and 600 non-musicians in one of the first multi-laboratory studies in psychological and neuroscientific sciences.
The project investigated whether playing a musical instrument offers cognitive benefits. It explored the differences between expert musicians and non-musicians in terms of memory, intelligence, executive functions, and personality traits. Coordinated by Massimo Grassi and Francesca Talamini, it involved 110 researchers from 15 countries, with the results published in "Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Sciences."
This study represents a novelty in psychological sciences by using a unique agreed-upon protocol.
Massimo Grassi explains: "This type of approach is an emerging novelty. Ours is a new way of conducting research, transparent and collaborative." The study was conducted as a registered report, with a pre-registered research protocol discussed with the journal and reviewers before data collection, ensuring transparency and openly declaring the research hypotheses, tools, and measures used. This approach not only optimises economic resources but also promotes the principles of Open Science, allowing scientifically less advanced nations to participate in the research.
Grassi emphasises that this method of collaborative research shows how science can transcend national and political borders, promoting the sharing of knowledge and collaboration among different scientific communities. The project gathered data from 600 expert musicians and 600 non-musicians, numbers 30 times higher than traditional studies where a single laboratory typically collects no more than about twenty participants per group: akin to equipping researchers with a microscope 30 times more powerful than those usually used in the literature.
The results show that musicians have a significantly better short-term musical memory, small advantages in visuospatial and verbal memory, as well as a slight increase in both fluid and crystallised intelligence and executive functions. In terms of personality, it emerged that musicians tend to be more open to new experiences, and it was observed that they generally come from families with a slightly higher socio-economic status.
The "The Music Ensemble" project highlights the advantages of the multi-laboratory approach, improving the quality and replicability of results, fostering transparency and international collaboration, and demonstrating how science can transcend political and geographical boundaries.
