The enduring myth of music and maths

Sign up to our free IndyArts newsletter for all the latest entertainment news and reviews Sign up to our free IndyArts newsletter Sign up to our free IndyArts newsletter SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. For example, if you want to show that professional mathematicians are on average better at music than other people, then you have to decide quite carefully who those "other people" are. You might expect that the kind of person who becomes a professional mathematician is much more likely than average to come from the kind of family that would consider music to be an important part of a child's education, so for that reason alone one would expect at least some "background correlation" between the two. If this is correct, then it would show a connection between mathematical and musical ability, but not the kind of mysterious connection that people hope for. In an effort to dispel this air of paradox, let me give one example of a general aptitude that is useful in both mathematics and music: the ability to solve problems of the "A is to B as C is to D" kind.