What does Mozart have to do with Math?

A wildly-famous theory called the ‘Mozart Effect’ has long claimed that listening to classical music like prompts an improvement in the subject’s spatial-temporal reasoning. 

As popular as the theory is, not everyone in the field is convinced of a direct link between the two. Mathematician and educationist Jogesh Motwani weighs in saying, “I personally have no direct experience of their inter-connectivity…but I do think one enhances the learning of the other. Both require discipline, thinking and exploring; to that extent obviously they will reinforce each other positively.” He is quick to add, “There are many who are good at one and terrible at the other. There are some who do both. But learning multiple things is important, and music and math are both great things to learn.”

Blurry purple lights and a faint miscellany of rehearsing instruments at the Hard Rock Cafe’s lounge area always makes for a promising event. Preparing to perform,  the students of Mumbai’s Crossroads School of Music are the kind to sing, dance, jive and like Abba wisely suggested, have the time of their life. Poised and purposeful, with their instruments held like second skins, with the presence of mind to improvise away slips during performances, they are free and articulate off-stage. Many of these children, who have been immersed in a musical ambience from a tender age, display significant social and cognitive skills. 
Perhaps this is a given—a bunch of bright young learners with good guidance and practice, just doing their natural thing. Or perhaps, their collective sharpness implies a more complex relation between music education and enhanced brain faculties, as some researchers have often proposed.

Oliver Sacks in Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, observes, “There is certainly a universal and unconscious propensity to impose a rhythm even when one hears a series of identical sounds at constant intervals. We tend to hear the sound of a clock, for example, as tick-tock, tick-tock—even though it is actually tick tick, tick tick.” 
If this is true, a person exposed to the rhythm and sound patterns of songs/instruments would naturally learn to detect symmetries and sequences, facilitating a positive effect on their mathematical capacities. This positive effect of music on the brain, documented but not conclusively explained, is better observed in children simply because they are easy receptors of inputs. And it is not just mathematics that shares a coquettish rapport with music. 

Guitarist Soumya Ghosh, CEO and founder of the school, reveals that in his experience, continued exposure to music goes hand-in-hand with a gradual evolution of cognitive and behavioural functions–for example, playing the keyboard would not only prompt finger coordination, but also help you grasp timing and spatial patterns better. If you play in tandem with other instruments (as in a band), it will develop your listening, collaborative, organisational, thought-processing, journaling and improvisational skills. By that logic, any instrument/vocal piece that requires swift connection-building, reasoning and pattern identification for a flawless rendition of its set notes is likely to hone children’s agility of mind, if not entirely rocket their mathematics grades.

Samaira Sinha, one of Crossroads’ younger tots, transitioned effortlessly from verse one, to pre-chorus, to chorus, to the later verses of Adele’s complicated and beautiful Rolling in the Deep, (her breath breaking perfectly at the right end of the lyrics). The calculation involved in the exercise seems incredible for an 8-year-old. But then again, this 8-year-old has been around music for the better part of her life.

Even as the camaraderie between these two brain-sharpeners remains fraught with mystery, it is clear that parents like Samaira’s are happy to give Mozart a chance to jazz up their young ones’ lives, musically and otherwise. It is safe to say then, that music education in the country could very well be poised to hit a high note.