music and math
Yeah, this is a very interesting topic. As a HS music teacher, I look around the band room and see the best and the brightest in the school (5 out of the last 6 valedictorians, 75% of the high honor roll kids, most of the academic scholarship winners, all the kids going to ivy league schools, etc...). In my classes, the bell curve is seriously skewed to the right (towards the "A" side of the ledger....).
So are they better students to begin with? Does studying music make you better able to study other things? Do the lessons that band kids learn early on (must bring the instrument in on Tuesday for my lesson... or school starts at 8, but band starts at 7:15...) simply help kids be more responsible? Or is it that the study of music is both an art (phrasing, expression, beauty) and a science (rhythm, pitch, subdivision, fingering, technique), therefore helping to open the corpus collosum (sp?) - the "highway" connecting the left and right halves of the brain - therefore making more of the brain "usable" at any given moment? Or is it a financial thing (the old nature v. nurture thing....),e.g. if I can afford to pay for my violin lessons, mommy and daddy must be fairly well off, and therefore usually fairly intelligent (that's a big jump, but statistically justifiable....), and therefore encourage me to do well with my studies?
The answer is probably some very complex combination of all of the above. The Mozart Effect, though recently downplayed (with a controversial study...), shows that music must have SOME effect on learning and the brain, at least in the short term. (Long term effects are really difficult to ascertain due to the lack of a control group.)
As for the relationship of Music and Math - perhaps it has something to do with rhythm? Playing music in time requires the very precise division of time into sound and silence - over time (no pun intended), perhaps this helps turn some abstract concepts into concrete ideas?
Here's a link to some research on the topic, including an excerpt from when the governor of Georgia proposed giving every newborn a cassette of classical music (an intriguing idea, perhaps ultimately ineffective...)
http://members.aol.com/abelard2/zell.htm
Here are some random quotes taken out of context (for "hmmmmm" purposes only)
Preschoolers who studied piano performed 34 per cent better in spatial and temporal reasoning ability than preschoolers who spent the same amount of time learning to use computers. (Rauscher, Shaw, as reported in Neurological Research, February 1997)
Preschoolers who took singing and keyboard lessons scored 80 per cent higher on object-assembly tests than students at the same preschool who did not have the music lessons. (Rauscher & Shaw, as reported in Symphony Sep.-Oct. 1996)
Dr. Rauscher and Dr. Shaw's results show that the spatial reasoning performance of 19 preschool children who received eight months of music lessons, far exceeded the spatial reasoning performance of a demographically comparable group of 15 preschool children who did not receive music lessons. The researchers note that well-developed spatial intelligence is the ability to perceive the visual world accurately, to form mental images of physical objects, and to recognize variations of objects. The researchers theorize that spatial reasoning abilities are crucial for such higher brain functions as music, complex mathematics, and chess. As many of the problems in which scientists and engineers engage in cannot be described in verbal form, progress in science may, in fact, be closely linked to the development of certain spatial skills.
Moreover, scores on a puzzle task, designed to measure spatial reasoning ability, increased significantly during the course of the period they received the music lessons.
...listening to 10 minutes of Mozart's Piano Sonata K 448 increased spatial IQ scores in college students, relative to silence or relaxation instructions. The new findings replicated the effect, and found no increase in spatial skills after subjects listened to 10 minutes of either a composition by Philip Glass or a highly rhythmic dance piece, suggesting that hypnotic musical structures will not enhance spatial skills.
As a music teacher, musician, composer/arranger, and Mensan, I find this to be a fascinating topic. And I never liked Philip Glass' music anyway....
