On Thursday 29 November 2007 2:33 am, mmille10@comcast.net wrote:
I took a couple music theory courses in college years ago. One of my professors mentioned that he noticed a correlation between those who were good at math and those who tended to grasp music theory readily. He had no explanation for this though.
The underlying connections are still a topic of research. We do have a name for it, though - synesthesia. Wikipedia has interesting links on the topic. Both math and music share many conceptual bases - magnitude, multiples, fractions, proportion, symmetry, cycles, permutations, combinations and so on. A person with deep understanding of these concepts could express them in various ways - dancing (body), music appreciation (ears), sculpting/painting/drawing (hand, eye), singing (vocal organs). What we call "math" is symbolic math - done with marks on paper. Understanding symbolic math is easy once the conceptual math is in place, but building conceptual understanding through symbols is a hard problem; as many teachers will attest.
Subbu