It is important to be aware of two things: It is passive listening to music and active listening to music. The gap between these concepts is enormous. Passive listening to music is just background music, but active listening to music is when you play music yourself. In my opinion, an understanding of music can come only as a result of the personal performance of this music. For example, Albert Einstein played the violin well and when he managed to find a good idea, he exclaimed "This idea is the highest musicality of thought". The famous mathematician Grigory Perelman also played the violin well, and the famous physicist Max Planck played the piano well. There are many such examples when active listening to music contributes to the development of talent. Chopin’s personal performance a million times will bring more emotions and understanding of Chopin than passive listening to Chopin even from the best pianists in the world. I was surprised to learn that there are 100 million pianists in China, yes, yes ... I want to ask: for what? I understood one thing: musical literacy allows you to perform a composition in accordance with your own preferences, and this is very important for the emotional development of the brain. I don’t provide any references or studies, I just experienced the influence of active listening to music on myself and believe me, it’s just great. No passive listening to music can compare with your own extraction of sounds from a live acoustic piano with a good tuning. If you can how to perform a musical composition well, then it is just happiness for a short while while you are performing. For the sake of this moment, it is worth getting a musical education, which will greatly help in the development of the brain to study other subjects.

I saw this a couple of weeks ago:- https://amp.smh.com.au/education/he-had-never-heard-anything-so-amazing-why-one-15-minute-class-is-changing-lives-20190806-p52eg2.html?__twitter_impression=true

Student's wider academic sense is linked to complex thinking, so it is hard to carry out its theoretical construction, as well as statistical measurement. Despite this situation, there are some articles for checking:

Article Exploring the academic and psychosocial impact of El Sistema...

Article Music training improves speech-in-noise perception: Longitud...

Thank you for your answers, I appreciate the suggestions for some interesting reading.

There has been a very interesting long-term study in elementary schools in Berlin on that topic (the main publication itself is in German, but you might be able to find an abstract in English):

Bastian, Hans Guenther: "Musik(erziehung) und ihre Wirkung. Eine Langzeitstudie an Berliner Grundschulen." Mainz: Schott, 2000

There is a lot of research that speaks to the effectiveness of instrumental music learning. This question should be separated from the general context of the influence of music on children and their way of thinking. There is a lot of research, it is the domain of music psychology. Of course there are also many contradictions. Critical emphasis is placed on research methodology and the errors that may occur in such research.