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music correlationDate: August 3, 2010
I thought I had been told or read that there was a strong correlation between music and medical science professions.
Am I dreaming this? Can anyone point me to literature. I have searched menc.org to no avail.
Thanks
Jason
Replies (4): Threaded | Chronological
John Howell on August 3, 2010 7:30pm
Jason: It sort of depends on what you mean by "correlation." A lot of medical professionals are indeed musicians, and often very good ones, and were musicians long before they entered med school. But those may well be high-achieving people in the first place. A correlation is not necessarily a cause-and-effect relationship.
Traditionally there was assumed to be a real correlation between musical ability and mathematical ability, but more recently that seems to have been modified to computer programming, perhaps because of the creative aspect of that field.
John
Lana Mountford on August 3, 2010 9:38pm
I spent 32 years in a successful and very rewarding software development career, starting in 1970 as a programmer trainee, and ending in 2003 as the principal database designer for a leading international online retailer (named after a river in South America).
I started playing piano when I was 3, was on a full scholarship at the Kansas City Conservatory (later the UMKC Conservatory) when I was 9, and started college on a piano performance scholarship in 1969 (dropped out after a year, got married, long story ... ). My first computer-related job in 1970 was rewriting a bunch of "old" code into COBOL, so this goes back a few years.
At that time, I read an article that described a study done by IBM in the early 60s in which they showed a correlation between musical training and ability to learn programming quickly. My employers at the time used this study to justify the hiring of musicians as entry-level programmers, and it seemed to work really well. I just did a Google search to see if I could find the original IBM study, but no luck so far. I'll keep looking.
Over the years, I've given this some thought given my own experience. In my opinion, it's not so much the mathematics involved in music and programming that make one a predictor of the other. It has much more to do with pattern recognition. For example, even today, when I look at a new piece of piano music, I KNOW precisely how the fingering will work out based on the patterns I see. Computer programming, systems design, database design, etc. all rely on patterns as well, and the ability to size up a problem and ascertain which logic "patterns" will solve the problem is what makes a "great" programmer/designer/analyst.
My own experience over the years reinforced this idea: that musicians seem to have a "head start" when it comes to analyzing problems and designing solutions, and that seems to be based on the ability to recognize patterns.
Lana Mountford
Bellingham, WA
John Howell on August 4, 2010 11:26am
Lana: Yes, over the years a lot of people have tried to pin down "musical talent" to a single brain site or a single gene or whatever, and the result always seems to be that music uses so many DIFFERENT brain functions that there's no good single predictor. But pattern recognition certainly seems to be one of those functions.
My father was a music educator, and tried to use first the Seashore tests (which were very atomistic and broke "musicianship" down into little discrete areas that could be tested), and later on the Iowa tests (which I think were more general), but neither one panned out as a good predictor for beginning instrumental class students.
And in my career conducting and producing (only a couple of my several careers, all in music), I've found time and again that desire or ambition or work ethic or whatever you want to call it is often a stronger factor than native talent, and that someone who really wants something and is willing to work to get it can often beat out someone with more native "talent." And I suspect that's the case in any field, and certainly in any creative field.
Digital skill is also part of music making (the finger kind, not the number kind!). The typing teacher in my high school wouldn't allow first-year students into his classes because he thought they weren't coordinated enough, but he allowed musicians in because we WERE!
So Jason, I'm kind of afraid that your question is much too general to have a simple answer. Sorry about that! And not least is the question of whether the technical side of music takes a different set of skills and abilities than the creative side. Music is one of the re-crative arts, so those of us in education have to keep developing not only creators but re-creators of our art.
All the best,
John
on August 4, 2010 12:31pm
Hi, Jason--
Check the Coalition for Music Education in Canada, at weallneedmusic.ca. There are wonderful statistics corelating music and medicine, music and sciences, music and general well-being. There is much useful information to be shared as educators and church musicians as well.
Very Best Wishes,
Anne Marie Page
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