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  • cognitively accessible mathgeonz@mathstodon.xyz
    Oct 6, 2026, 3:31 PM

    @eloisa @joannaholman
    Welp, in my experience working at community college, folks who are doing something with music more often stick to things and get the degree.
    I suspect it would hold for other skill-related activities, especially if there's a social element.
    The whole "performance time" is a lot like exam time...
    ... and then there is the brain coordination and how many parts of the brain work together with rhythm and math and language.

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  • AlexanderVIAlexanderVI@stranger.social
    Oct 7, 2026, 11:24 AM

    @geonz @eloisa @joannaholman All that, and to recap the original point - learning ANYTHING new is an exercise in learning how to learn.
    Music involves novel materials, vocabulary, technique, etc, and (especially in school) usually means working with other people to achieve a result none can achieve on their own.

    Unless you spend your life doing the exact same thing from age 10 to death, learning how to navigate all those kinds of things is useful.

    But it requires work, which people dislike.

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  • Eloísaeloisa@photog.social
    Oct 6, 2026, 3:52 PM

    @deirdrebeth @geonz @joannaholman as someone who had and enjoyed music and barely passed basic maths I fail to see that connection. 😅

    I can see it with language, though. Maybe the learned instrument/s and genres played a part on it too? 🤷🏻

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  • cognitively accessible mathgeonz@mathstodon.xyz
    Oct 6, 2026, 4:09 PM

    @eloisa @deirdrebeth @joannaholman
    Most folks who don't get math haven't had good teaching. We've got folks here who *get* how to teach maths to people for whom it doesn't come naturally.
    Last week I was at a webinar and a math professor talked about applying math to DJ ing and how it reeled his resistant learners it. The mmore he talked, though, the more I realized he also knew a LOT about the basic structures of arithmetic and algebra that so many people are told they're supposed to already know.

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  • Eloísaeloisa@photog.social
    Oct 6, 2026, 4:21 PM

    @geonz @deirdrebeth @joannaholman you're not wrong. In all my life I only had one teacher who actually made the effort to try to get me to understand it. Unfortunately it was too late, and wasn't even called maths. It was quantitative methods, from my Humanitities track in high school. That I liked.

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  • AlexanderVIAlexanderVI@stranger.social
    Oct 7, 2026, 11:48 AM

    @eloisa @geonz @deirdrebeth @joannaholman

    The math<->music link exists but you don't need a ton of math to just do some music.

    Western music theory does use numbers to organize itself, and if you really want to number up, look into classical Indian music and how it treats subdivisions.

    I didn't study math past the age of fifteen (which is when I started music, coincidentally), but have never encountered a musical situation where math was the stumbling block.

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  • DB Schweindeirdrebeth@mas.to
    Oct 7, 2026, 11:58 AM

    @AlexanderVI @eloisa @geonz @joannaholman

    You misunderstand my meaning. It's not a "you must know x to do y". It's "if you understand x, y is easier".

    Most musicians I know don't think about maths at all, they just innately know how things come together because of all the music theory knowledge.
    The mathematicians have an easier time learning music theory because it matches the things they already know.

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  • AlexanderVIAlexanderVI@stranger.social
    Oct 7, 2026, 12:37 PM

    @deirdrebeth
    Yes, you are right, I took that wrong - thanks for clarifying, and I agree completely.
    I suspect there's also something about the study habits and self-application of those who work hard to get better at math that is very applicable to learning music. This seems particularly the case for classical students - I can't think of many folk musicians who make a math-music connection, but I've known plenty of classical musicians who also did well in math.

    @eloisa @geonz @joannaholman

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  • AlexanderVIAlexanderVI@stranger.social
    Oct 7, 2026, 1:40 PM

    @deirdrebeth I had a quick gander at your profile and I can definitely say our views of life are not diametrically opposed, though I suppose on any number of specifics we might disagree. Interesting discussion nevertheless - thanks again.

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  • Tim Ward ⭐🇪🇺🔶 #FBPETimWardCam@c.im
    Oct 7, 2026, 1:30 PM

    @geonz @eloisa @deirdrebeth @joannaholman At age 11 my maths teacher taught that mathematics is "the study of patterns". Which clearly includes music.

    The point at which I could no longer "get" maths - I could, at a push, learn stuff by memorising it, which I'm bad at, but I could no longer just "see" the patterns - was second year maths at Cambridge. I gave up and did something else for my third year.

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  • DB Schweindeirdrebeth@mas.to
    Oct 8, 2026, 12:06 PM

    @TimWardCam @geonz @eloisa @joannaholman

    Oh that's a lovely way to put it!
    I could always see the patterns, but wasn't terribly good at remembering which dead mathematician figured out what, so hard a hard time in whatever year they were focused on theorems.

    Sewing/knitting/etc. is also maths, speaking of patterns.

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  • DB Schweindeirdrebeth@mas.to
    Oct 6, 2026, 4:46 PM

    @eloisa @geonz @joannaholman

    Did you understand the difference between 3/4 time and 4/4 time?
    How about 7/16 time?
    How about whole note, half note, quarter note?
    That's all maths, and if you do them wrong (say running 4/4 time on a 3/4 time song) you end up in a different place (with a different answer) than your peers.

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  • Eloísaeloisa@photog.social
    Oct 6, 2026, 4:57 PM

    @deirdrebeth @geonz @joannaholman not that I recall. In my country we have music very young (since primary) and we call them something else, we don't use numbers for it. But what you said made sense bc of what I remember from seeing drawn on the partitions. Now I wish they would've explained it that way back then. I wouldn't have given up organ. 🤦🏻

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  • CaiCai@gamepad.club
    Oct 8, 2026, 6:46 AM

    @deirdrebeth @eloisa @geonz @joannaholman Felt this hard when I became a teenager and stopped progressing musically. I've played the piano since I was five, but always had a shaky relationship with math until I was well into adulthood. There came a time when the people I was talking to & the literature I was reading about composition just ceased making sense to me 😭 Of course you can still play and enjoy music without understanding it as math, but I feel there is so much more to learn if you do

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  • CaiCai@gamepad.club
    Oct 8, 2026, 6:49 AM

    @deirdrebeth @eloisa @geonz @joannaholman But also, music teaches ability to feel and keep time, develops hand-eye coordination, the ability to read a sheet of symbols and comprehend it as a language, to memorize movement and anticipate what's coming ahead, and of course tunes the ear to comprehend multiple inputs simultaneously, etc. etc. And learning music teaches discipline and the importance of regular practice ✨

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  • Joanna Holmanjoannaholman@aus.social
    Oct 6, 2026, 10:43 PM

    @eloisa @geonz in addition to the maths and language related things others have mentioned, skills on the easy to learn recorder also transfer to other harder forms of music making. The mechanics of recorder have similarities to more advanced woodwind musical instruments like flute or clarinet, the sheet music reading skills transfer to almost any instrument

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  • VirginicusVirginicus@universeodon.com
    Oct 7, 2026, 10:41 AM

    @eloisa @geonz @joannaholman The general skill I learned from music is timing. I have no musical talent at all, but feeling how fast to do things, from how fast to push a lawnmower to how to synchronize six tasks in the kitchen, is valuable daily.

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  • Paul McKonepdmckone@cosocial.ca
    Oct 7, 2026, 1:34 PM

    @eloisa @geonz @joannaholman

    Music also supports people skills:
    - teamwork (playing with the band)
    - coordination (all together now)
    - turns-taking (leadership and followship)
    - tenacity (practice makes proficient), and
    - balance (harmony, melody, solo, silent).

    Seeing "plays <musical instrument>" on a resume tells me something about what it's like to work with the candidate.

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  • Gifliangiflian@techhub.social
    Oct 10, 2026, 4:38 PM

    @futzle @eloisa @geonz @joannaholman thinking about it, my university music theory classes, especially the 20th century ones, were good training for incident management in tech later on (analyzing logs, looking for patterns in graphs)

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