Date: Wed, 26 Jul 1995 22:31:58 -0400 To: rusin@washington.math.niu.edu From: charbon@sover.net (Peter Charbonneau) Subject: Music/Math Dave ... I came across your name in an archived post from 7Dec94 concerning the relationships between music and math. This question is somewhat off the wall, but I need to start somewhere. My mother is a professor in dept. of edu. at the College of Santa Fe and she asked me to search the internet for references to the effect of musical ability on one's ability to do math. I searched Library of Congress, Harvard, Dartmouth and some other college libraries and/or archives to no avail. I was wondering if you knew of any research and/or published papers on this subject. ANY help would be greatly appreciated Regards, Peter Charbonneau charbon@sover.net pucharbo@fc01.psf.ge.com --------------------------------- Peter Charbonneau Senior Software Engineer Lockheed-Martin 100 Plastics Ave M.S. 2269 Pittsfield, MA. 01201 pucharbo@fc01.psf.ge.com - Work charbon@sover.net - Home (413) 494-7089 - Work (413) 494-7701 - Fax (413) 458-9862 - Home ============================================================================== Date: Thu, 27 Jul 95 11:30:33 CDT From: rusin (Dave Rusin) To: charbon@sover.net Subject: Re: Music/Math >My mother is a professor in dept. of edu. at the College of Santa Fe and she >asked me to search the internet for references to the effect of musical ability >on one's ability to do math. I searched Library of Congress, Harvard, Dartmouth >and some other college libraries and/or archives to no avail. I was wondering >if you knew of any research and/or published papers on this subject. Yes indeed this is studied. I cannot find the article right now but I recently saw an article in the popular press summarizing some work; just last week I heard what appeared to be the same results on an NPR news broadcast (I know they sell transcripts and tapes and are internet-connected; try something like atc@npr.org [All Things Considered].) This most recent study looked at the extent to which listening to music improved test-taking abilities in school. I believe they called it the Mozart Effect, since classical chamber music gave results superior to both popular rock and complete silence. The effect is a statistically significant rise in test score a short time (1 hour?) after listening to about 10 minutes of music. It is noteworthy that there was no long-term improvement. The radio report summarized a controlled experiment now underway in which one class had a music course added to its curriculum to see what long-term effects the _study_ of music (rather than the _listening_ to it) had on academic work. This is a tricky issue, since it is widely believed that, for example, the real gain from 5 years of piano lessons is an improved work ethic. The study mentioned included a control group which would be given a computer class or something comparable. As far as the connection between music and _math_ in particular, much can be said which rings true but is not, as far as I know, particularly well substantiated. Right brain / left brain fans are quick to point out characteristics which math and music have in common, for example. Mathematicians and musicians are said to share other characteristics which lead to all sorts of pop-psych interpretations -- both are male-dominated fields (especially composing rather than performing); both have greater than average numbers of southpaws; and so on. I will say that in my personal experience there is a decided affinity between the two fields. Big math conferences regularly feature performances of (usually classical) music as part of the social calendar, and almost never, say, a sporting event or a trip to an art gallery. Biographies of famous mathematicians frequently mention their continued interest in music (all kinds -- Tom Lehrer, for example, was a mathematician for a while); other activities one might expect, such as chess-playing, are comparatively rare. Of course, I don't know how far one can push these analogies. It's also true that math conferences almost always schedule a long walk or hike, and it's true that many mathematicians have a strong interest in languages; I don't know the significance of these connections. In my experience this does not work the other way: among musicians there may be fewer who have an absolute loathing of mathematics, but I don't think there is a general interest in things mathematical. I suspect that music appreciation is a broader field, in the sense that there are kinds of musical talent which are _not_ affiliated with mathematical skill. (There are also plenty of mathematicians with no particular musical interest, ability, or training, so I suppose the same goes both ways.) I will look for references, but here are some general pointers. Science magazine would be likely to report on the kind of connections you are looking for when a reputable study is done. Psychology Today would likely discuss the topic at a more superficial level. For case studies of individual mathematicians, you might review the biographies (usually obituaries) in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society. An extreme example of this might be the book "Godel, Escher, Bach" by (I think) Douglas Hofstader. The topic comes up from time to time on the newsgroup sci.math, but the responses tend to be kind of vague and anecdotal (like this letter!) so you if you post to that group, try to phrase a specific query. Mathematically-oriented topics are often treated with some disdain in music circles (and I am sympathetic to the complaints myself), but there are certainly music professionals who would be able to comment on the topic from their end (for a long time, the music department at Princeton had the largest computer budget of any department there -- I think that was Babbit's influence?). Reliable work in the education community may be hard to find; as it is, there is little enough printed material on mathematics education of any sort. The best place to look for information from that angle might be the Journal of Research in Mathematics Education (JRME), although in my exposure to that journal I don't recall any articles discussing a connection with music. I am a professional mathematician, but am only an interested amateur when it comes to music or (primary/secondary) education, so don't accept what I've written as the last word! I can try to help you clarify any hypotheses you might consider likely or worth studying. We have members of our math faculty who work specifically in math education, so if there's a specific question you'd like to have answered I can put it to them for you. Good luck, dave ============================================================================== Date: Thu, 27 Jul 95 11:38:53 CDT From: rusin (Dave Rusin) To: charbon@sover.net Subject: Re: Music/Math Funny how these things work: as soon as I fired off my letter to you I checked the rest of my mail and found this as the first entry in this week's Scout Report: a WorldWideWeb site and mailing list I thought you might find useful. ARTSEDGE, the national arts and education information network. has been created by The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts (with support from the U.S. Department of Education.) A Web site and discussion list are available to encourage discussion about using the arts in all aspects of K-12 education. The project would like to attract artists, arts educators, and teachers of other subject areas. This is an opportunity to share information about integrating the visual and performing arts into the K-12 curriculum. It is a cross disciplinary list -- so science educators (for example) who want to use the arts to teach about science are as welcome as arts educators who want to share ideas with their peers about curriculum and issues pertaining to arts education. The discussion list will be a moderated list to keep it interesting and lively. http://artsedge.kennedy-center.org send email to: listserv@kennedy-center.org in the body of the message type: subscribe k12artsed your.first.name your.last.name ============================================================================== Date: Fri, 28 Jul 95 11:11:35 CDT From: rusin (Dave Rusin) To: charbon@sover.net Subject: Re: Music/Math MUSIC POWER ENHANCES BRAIN FUNCTION (Boston Globe, 10/94) This is what our scanner/OCR read it as: [Retouched 12/1998 -- djr] By RICHARD A. KNOX of the Boston Globe Music -- either performing it or listening to it -- has the power to enhance some kinds of higher brain function, a University of California research team has shown in new experiments with adults and preschool children. But it has to be the right kind of music. The findings, reported recently at the American Psychological Association meetings in Los Angeles, open new windows onto the way the brain works and how it can be primed to work better, They provide encouragement to a small but growing band of psychologists and educators who say music and other arts should be integrated into core curricula, not treated as frills offered - if at all - only to the artistically inclined. The studies could "revitalize the role of music in public education," the researchers conclude in a paper prepared for the psychology conference. "There is a causal link between music and spatial reasoning," co-author Frances Rauscher of the University of California at Irvine added in a telephone interview. "We now know it's true for the short term in adults, just from listening to music. It's true for eight months and probably longer in preschool children, by actually studying music. So there's no reason to expect it would not be true for older kids." Rauscher and her colleagues at UC Irvine's Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory attracted considerable attention last October with a report in the British journal Nature on what they call "the Mozart effect." After listening for 10 minutes to a tape of Mozart's sonata for two pianos in D major, K. 488, college students in that earlier experiment scored approximately 9 points higher in IQ tests of abstract spatial reasoning than subjects exposed to 10 minutes of silence or a meditation tape. Spatial reasoning tasks, which are generally processed by the brain's right hemisphere, involve the orientation of shapes in space. Such tasks are relevant to a wide range of endeavors, from higher mathematics and geometry to architecture, engineering, drawing and playing chess. One of the experiments reported replicated and extended the "Mozart effect" findings. Among 84 undergraduates in the subsequent study, those who listened to the same Mozart piece and then had to solve visual puzzles involving folded cutout shapes scored much higher than others who listened to IO minutes of silence, although the "silence" group caught up on successive days. Interestingly, listening to other types of music -- the monotonous repeating harmonies of a Philip Glass composition ("Music with Changing Parts") or the thumping rhythms of electronic British-style "trance" music, which Rauscher calls "technopop" -- did not enhance subjects' spatial test scores. Neither Mozart nor the other music had any effect on subjects' ability to perform tests of short-term memory, which was consistent with the researchers' prediction about how the brain processes certain kinds of musical and spatial input. The researchers believe that listening to Mozart's music, with its complex patterns of evolving musical themes, somehow primes some of the same neural circuits that the brain employs for complex visual-spatial tasks. They base their ideas on a "neural network" theory of music perception developed in 1990 by Gordon Shaw and Xiaodan Leng of UC Irvine and Eric Wright of the Irvine Conservatory of Music. "In a nutshell, you have these neural pathways throughout your cortex," the higher brain centers involved in perception and thought, Rauscher explained. "The theory is when you experience something or learn something, these connections become stronger." The psychologist cautioned that the "Mozart effect" does not imply that pop music is toxic to the brain. "That has been a huge point of misunderstanding," Rauscher said. "When the first study came out, people got the idea that if Mozart would have this enhancing effect, heavy metal rock 'n' roll would have the opposite. I got a lot of backlash from that, including death threats from heavy-metal musicians calling me at home. We're not saying that heavy metal is going to bum out your brain." The UC Irvine group believes that other kinds of music would enhance spatial reasoning as long as it shares with Mozart patterns of symmetry and evolving musical themes. That might include some kinds of rock 'n' roll, Indian music and improvisational jazz. As provocative as the "Mozart effect" studies are, the researchers found that the effect is short-lived, 15 minutes at most. After that, Mozart listeners do no better on spatial tests than others. To determine whether music can have more lasting benefits for spatial learning, the California researchers studied a group of 3-year-olds enrolled in a Los Angeles public preschool program. Of the 33 children, 22 received eight months of special music training -- daily group singing lessons, weekly private lessons on electronic keyboards and daily opportunity for keyboard practice and play. When tested on a spatial reasoning task -- assembling pictures out of puzzle pieces -- "the children's scores dramatically improved after they received music lessons," the researchers reported. Among preschoolers without music training, spatial test scores remained unchanged over the eight-month experiment. The music group's scores on other cognitive tasks were no different from the non-music group, consistent with the researchers' predictions. Like musical performance, assembling disparate visual elements into a coherent picture "requires forming an ideal mental representation of something which is eventually realized," the scientists said. Future studies will investigate different spatial reasoning tests, other types of music instruction and different ages. "We have shown that music education may be a valuable tool for the enhancement of preschool children's intellectual development," the researchers said. The group wants to show whether music training improves cognitive skills of school-age children, find out how long the effect lasts, and identify the mechanism behind it. Others interested in the integration of music and other arts in school curricula were enthusiastic about the new studies. "The main reason we teach music is because music itself is worthwhile," said Paul Lehman, dean of the University of Michigan school of music. "But at the same time music does a lot of other good things too, and especially in times when music is being cut back in school curricula."