Music and Math

Everybody knows that music and math are related, right? It's supposed to help kid's brains or some junk.

In all honesty, though, I think it is really interesting that there is a relationship, and maybe even more interesting to think about the other ways that music and math are related. Of course, I have no research to back this up, but I find it immensely intriguing that music is one of the few cultural universals - I've never known anybody to be confused when explaining that a major key is a "happy song" and a minor key is a "sad song". I've never heard anybody ask - "Is this song the happy kind, or the sad kind?" You can just tell. It doesn't have anything to do with the lyrics, it doesn't have anything to do with operant conditioning, it merely has to do with an intuitive association of a sound with an emotion.

Isn't that odd? I suppose it could be taken as some weird evolutionary artifact of intelligence, but still it is strange that it manifests itself consistently across the gene pool. Also, human beings typically have the ability to produce only 1 tone at a time, so it is unlikely that the specific interval between notes - (and it has to be 3 notes to hear the difference between happy and sad, otherwise you don't have enough of a frame of reference to tell what key you're in) - was some kind of primitive communication method. Especially because not everybody can sing well enough to produce a reliable differentiation between notes.

That would leave us a society where a few talented arbiters worked in cooperation to send a harmonic message of distress or safety to the always detecting but not always producing population, and honestly, it seems far fetched that such a mechanism would develop when our voices aren't really all that well equipped for sending messages long distances.

In a similar but contrasting vein, it is absolutely mindboggling how math has a universal, precise, and very significant relation to the real world. I don't know how anybody can fail to be fascinated at the fact that Pi, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to the radius, gives us a number with so many non-repeating decimal points that our computers still haven't found the end. Isn't that astounding? Astronomers and scientists recognize these patterns as so unique, so fundamentally interesting, that they are considered the one thing we can count on any technological society to recognize, no matter how alien and different. Realizing these beautiful and fascinating anomalies in the universe is a simple eventual consequence of intelligence and civilization.

I guess my point is this: Math and music are closely tied to each other in terms of aptitude and brain development. And I would argue that they stand as two of the only fundamental universals known to man. Almost anything can be argued, but there is remarkable and undeniable consistency in these two specific areas, and I think it is significant that the most universal of subjects are so intrinsically related.