Music Instrument Music Reading and Relation to Math
Math teachers have often noticed that students who are expert in math have studied, or are studying, music. In the by, it was causeless that the kind of subject field necessary to excel in playing a musical instrument would extend to other academic areas, leading to 
Since the fourth dimension of the ancient Greeks, people accept been fascinated with the relationship between music and mathematics. Pythagoras (died 500 B.C.) is considered by some to be the founder of both math and music – famous for his theorum on triangles in mathematics, only also for developing the concept of intervals in music (link from Physics of Music course, George Gibson, University of Connecticut).
The relationship between math and music has been written about by philosophers, poets, scientists, musicians, mathematicians, and others. Currently, at that place are dozens of books in print on the field of study, ranging from historical perspectives to explorations of acoustical, theoretical, concrete, or analytical relationships.
The American Mathematical Society has a web folio devoted to Mathematics & Music – with several videos, podcasts and articles exploring the connections between the two, including a link to a TedEd talk below, which uses Beethoven'sMoonlight Sonata (C# minor, Op. 27, No. 2) "to illustrate the way Beethoven was able to convey emotion and creativity using the certainty of mathematics."
Now we know that Beethoven was not thinking about math when he composed the Moonlight Sonata. And he was not completely deaf, as the video implies. At the fourth dimension he composed that sonata, he was suffering from severe tinnitus and had lost more than half of his hearing, just he was always able to hear music in his mind even if he could not physically hear it – he wouldn't take needed to rely on math to compose. Nevertheless, the video is a fascinating look at how the sound of this iconic piece of music can exist described mathematically.
So is at that place a connection between high achievement in music and in mathematics? At that place take been several correlational studies over the by twenty years. To mention just a couple: a 2006 study from the Center for Arts Education Research at Columbia University showed that over a flow of six years, students in five elementary schools who were studying violin consistently had larger improvements in standardized examination scores in mathematics than control groups at the same grade level.
And a report funded by the NAMM Foundation (National Association of Music Merchants) with back up from the Grammy Foundation and the U.S. Department of Educational activity, also in 2006, compared students in height-quality school music programs in iv areas of the country (Due west, Midwest, East, Southward) with students in lesser-quality music programs in those same geographical areas.
At the elementary school level, students in the top-quality programs scored 20% better in mathematics than students in the bottom-quality programs. At the middle schoolhouse level, students in the elevation music programs scored 17% higher in mathematics than children in schools without a music program. (Synopsis; Admission to total article) And for those of you who may question how summit-quality music programs were adamant, the periodical commodity answers that question.
Data from 1999 – 2013 showed that students who took iv years of high school arts and music classes had scores in the Critical Reading and Mathematics portions of the SAT that ranged from fourscore to 103 points college than students who had half a year or less of arts and music courses.
In the various correlational studies, researchers sometimes refer to arithmetic, sometimes mathematics. Arithmetic is usually used when speaking about very young children, and mathematics when the studies involve older students. It depends on what is being tested or used for evaluation. Arithmetics is the study of numbers and basic addition, subtraction, multiplication and sectionalization. Mathematics studies the relationships among numbers, shapes and quantities; it includes arithmetics, geometry, calculus, trigonometry, algebra – and uses symbols, 
Basic elements of music, such as pitch, rhythm, tempo, form, and meter can all exist related to measurement of fourth dimension and frequency, which are mathematical concepts. For example, musical intervals are mathematical ratios; meter signatures are written as fractions. The Mathematics & Music page on the American Mathematical club website has multiple sources for looking at the connections.
And those connections may be reflected in our brains. Gottfried Schlaug, Professor of Neurology and Director of the Music and Neuroimaging Laboratory at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, suggests that neuroplasticity that occurs in encephalon regions involved in musical processing "may have an effect on mathematical performance because of shared neural resources involved in the mental manipulation of symbolic representation."
According to several researchers, those "shared neural resources" are the neural networks involved in spatial-temporal reasoning , which is crucial to both music and mathematics.
Spatial-temporal reasoning (sometimes shortened to ST reasoning) is the power to visualize spatial patterns and mentally move them in space and time. People who are good at spatial-
Musicians use spatial-temporal reasoning all the time, without knowing what information technology is. We bargain with patterns in music, patterns that are transposed or inverted in time and space, but the relationships between notes remain the aforementioned. Moving through the circumvolve of fifths to play scales or arpeggios in all keys involves spatial-temporal processing. Visualizing how a chord pattern in one octave volition wait in another is spatial-temporal power – as is agreement meter signatures, subdivisions of a trounce, a piece unfolding within a sure period of time. Composers create scores for whatsoever number of instruments, visualizing how all of the parts fit together, and conductors do the same when they are learning the score for operation – spatial-temporal processing.
And that brings us back to the study by Frances Rauscher and colleagues in 1993 that led to the media cosmos of the "Mozart Effect."
I've written about this study previously in the post, Music makes you smarter – or mayhap not. But to epitomize, Rauscher'south written report demonstrated that, later on x minutes of listening to either Mozart's Sonata for 2 pianos in D major, K488, listening to a relaxation tape, or silence, those students who had listened to Mozart scored eight -9 points college on an IQ examination that measured spatial-temporal reasoning. Rauscher made admittedly no claims about general IQ – only about spatial-temporal reasoning, and noted that the effect didn't last very long, only almost 15 minutes. Nevertheless, the media loved the idea that listening to Mozart could make y'all smarter, and the Mozart Effect was born – and persists today.
Rauscher realized early on that it wasn't listening that would atomic number 82 to long-term strengthening of spatial-temporal reasoning, but actually learning to play and studying a instrument. She has been involved in several studies since the first one in 1993, every bit have other researchers, and the results evidence that studying an instrument improves spatial-temporal reasoning; some of these studies test mathematics ability rather than ST reasoning and find a correlation between music and mathematics achievement. Just the trajectory seems to be that studying music improves spatial-temporal reasoning, which is used extensively in mathematics. Therefore, learning and studying a instrument can accept a benign event on math learning.
None of the scientists or educators involved in this research are saying that 1 should study music to exist better at math. That's not why most of us want to study music. Only many exercise stress that there are educational and cognitive advantages to studying music and that it shouldn't so readily exist dismissed from the curriculum. If the brain is using shared networks for sure kinds of processing in math and music, then studying music can simply be a benefit for learning math.
Musical class is close to mathematics — non mayhap to mathematics itself, but certainly to something like mathematical thinking and relationship. — composer Igor Stravinsky
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Source: https://www.themusiciansbrain.com/?p=3648