I'm top set for Maths and quite good at music, so yes, there is a definite connection.

Car Expert

for you maybe.... i mean, some musical people aren't good at maths, some maths people aren't good at music. i think, maybe there IS no connection. just musical people are generally clever...?

I'm not sure you can draw a definite conclusion from one person, CE

I was always good at both maths and music at school, but then to be honest there was not much I was really BAD at. The only subjects I really didn't feel confident about were humanities and physics, and even then I don't know what was due to bad/good teachers. It would probably have been interesting to see how I did at humanities at GCSE but I dropped Geog and History the first chance I got! And I somehow managed an A at GCSE physics. Certainly none of my maths/sciencey teachers would have been at all worried about me doing their subjects for A Level.

This is very true. So many teachers simply do not have any imagination when it comes to teaching so I agree with your sentiments wholeheartedly and just wish I could have had a slightly better teacher, especially for the second year!

I know what you mean to a limited extent.I used to enjoy looking for patterns in maths to and would often point them out to my teacher to be told (of course) that so-and-so devised that in year x. For instance I remember trying to work out a pattern for squared numbers (eg. 6^2 + 8^2 = 10^2) and trying do devise formulae to fit the patterns. Sadly, as I don't actively do any advanced maths now, that part of my mind is mostly inactive. Had I gone to uni, I would almost certainly have done maths and/or music. The reason I didn't go was out of choice.


You don't need creativity to play the piano, this is true. It can't really be compared to drawing in that sense I suppose as playing is recreating what someone created years ago.

I think it helps to be creative if one wants to play the piano *well*... one might just as well say you didn't need to be creative to draw, as one is reproducing what is already there just as one plays music that is already written. Depends what you mean by creative...

I used to work out random things with maths just because I wondered "what if....?"

This isn't true for me, as I'm awful at maths! (45% in my mock GCSE ) but a lot of the people who are at the top of my maths class are musical.

People who are good at music tend to be clever anyway, in my general experience (all GCSE and A-level music classes are very bright). I know a lot of great performers who arent good at maths and they arent very good at theory either. Strangely enough, my maths work only started to get better as I took up an instrument and now I'm doing A-level and loving it! My sister has lots of special needs and is about a year behind the rest of her class... but after about 4 lessons on piano she is playing grade 2 hands together and grade 2 bass after about 2 months (but onli so long because I had to teach her about note values and all the different notes in a scale). So I have no idea where that leaves the theory that maths and music go hand in hand
Although I asked my maths teacher today and she swore by it

Jen
xXx

I've always found maths fairly straightforward (until imaginary numbers came along......and then all numbers disappeared!) and similarly, music - especially the theory - has always made sense to me.

Playing, that's something else entirely, and I would suggest that's another part of the brain!!

Significance testing isn't covered in GCSE Maths .

..and we presumably don't have enough entries on this thread for it either?

Whassat?

Oh very clever

Sarah - significance testing is about taking samples, and seeing whether the results are significant enough to support a hypothesis or not. This varies with size of sample, nature of distribution, etc. It's Statistics, though, so barely qualifies as Maths.

I'm hopeless at maths with the qualification that I can do quite quick mental arithmetic, but anything else - likke trigonometry, algebra, geometry - (basically, forget it).

I think you can approach music in two quite distinctive ways, probably involving different parts of the brain. For the more creative side of music, pure maths, the creative side of art etc you use more of the right-hand (intuitive) side of the brain. For the notational side of music, more basic maths, purely figurative painting etc, you use more of the (logical) left-hand side of the brain.

Wasn't there some research that showed that after a music degree you begin to experience music more from the left hand side of the brain, at least for a while?

Therefore the musicians who are more likely to favour improvisation, approaching music aurally etc are more likely to be less good (if not hopeless) at maths? And the musicians who prefer to approach music from the purely notational side are more likely to be good at (basic) maths?

When I did music A-level and we had to do Baroque 4-part harmony I did it all in my head and found it really easy, while failing my maths resits (increasingly abysmally ) 2 or 3 more times. Another girl in the class was brilliant at maths and worked all her Baroque harmony out logically but without hearing it in her head at all.

Violinia

I think they can be connected in some people, but obviously not always. They certainly are to some extent in me - I'm lucky enough to be a top-set mathematician despite the fact I'm not over-fond of the subject (annoyingly, my Maths teacher seems to have the delusion I'll be taking it at A Level but I do have a couple of years to break it to him ) and I'm a fairly good musician generally.

Often people who are generally intelligent are also reasonably musical - both my co-Horns are very intelligent, I know - so I might guess that the correllation between maths and music often comes because of the good all-rounders rather than just people who are randomly good at two subjects.

I'm not half bad at music but I just got chucked off my Higher maths course. *upset*

I've pretty good at academical things and i do music...i think it does help

I have always hated maths and really struggled with it. If it hadn't been for maths I would have got 10A*s at GCSE, as it was I got 9A*s and an A. So for me there is no link between maths and music, although strangely enough I do enjoy theory, which is quite mathematical...

Ahhh right. I figured it must be something like that, but never did Stats.

Just seems common sense that what is true in CE's case is not necessarily always true

Actually, it is. I did my 1st piece of coursework all on Stats, I think most people do coursework on it, and there are marks where you have to justify whether or not your stats were reliable because of the number of results collected etc.

Ditto that. I've just finished my coursework in that vein as well.

NM

Really? All the t-tests and hypothesis testing stuff only comes in at S3; it's ridiculously complicated for GCSE level! I only did it because for the AS Use of Maths that I'm being forced to do this year, there isn't a limit to how much you can put in for the coursework and our teacher taught it to us really briefly. Looking back, my GCSE Stats one was pretty basic - just the core things like histograms, cum freq, box plots, standard deviation and spearman's rank correlation (that made me feel so clever at the time, lol)

I'm in the top set for maths at my school and at least 10 out of about 20 pupils play an instrument . So in my opinion i would feel there was a connection . But isn't there a general occurence that musicians are usually intelligent ?

Julie xx

Yes, once you exclude the drummers.

Considering you are in the top set, shouldn't that be 1 in 2 pupils?

Yeah, it is quite complex, although our teacher makes it harder than it needs to be for the marks. But because we are a top set in a good school, it is assumed that the whole top set will easily get an A*, and many of them are from Asia, and covered all this stuff years back (don't know why, but all the Hong Kong boarders at my school are incredible at maths...often they end up teaching the teacher). Personally, I'm giving it up ASAP.

Edit: btw, in GCSE coursework for maths, you can't get full marks unless you include non-syllabus work, that is, A level stuff. I tihnk that's why we're doing it.

That's interesting. I didn't do GCSE coursework: top set maths did the exam in Y10, and sat the 'Coursework Paper' instead, which they probably wouldn't expect spontaneous A-level work in. I still got an A*, so no harm done. I did GCSE Statistics in Y11, which as anakrron commented didn't have any significance testing on - in fact, if memory serves, it didn't have much on it at all . Just Spearman's rank coefficient of correlation which, of course, is wrong .

Curiously, I didn't encounter significance testing until I was at university - I did A-level Maths with Mechanics and A-level Further Maths (Further Pure and Further Mechanics). The undergraduates have just been set an assignment which mentions that they can use t-Tests etc. as they see fit, but most of them haven't done it - as they too studied mechanics not stats.

That. Is. So. Unfair.
Maths coursework is killing me. As are my 9 other pieces
I expect you did a different board in that case actually. I think I do OCR, but don't hold me to that.

I HATE MATHS

I hate maths too!! Although I love algebra, I could sit and factorise, expand, simplify etc... equations all day.

I'm doing OCR too, higher paper - 47% to get an A. Did you have to do a module exam yesterday? I thought I did ok at the time, but now thinking back I really don't think I did

No, we don't do any modules cept coursework. I heard that every board has a really low A grade boundry, but A* is always over 80% Funny, algebra is the only bit of maths I despise with my heart and soul. Maybe we should do a combined GCSE and we'd be great

Only 47% gets you an A?? Good grief, it's not surprising that new entrants to university often struggle. Studying for a degree, 40% would only give you a pass mark. To get the equivalent A grade would need a mark in excess of 80%, and at some unis perhaps even >85%. Just shows how much you need to know about your chosen subject!

Is that so it makes the governments' education and exam statistics look like every school leaver is really clever??? An A* result of over 80% is setting the right boundary, but the A grade requirement is just a joke. Surely it gives some students a false impression of their abilities?

Well personally, I find maths quite easy, and I'm fairly musical....

I presume this is a GCSE paper(?), and the higher level papers are deliberately hard so that 47% actually means the student had studied hard and knew their stuff. On a lower paper, one might require 80% just to get a B. That is how it is supposed to work anyway. At uni, everyone would get the same paper and be marked out of the same 100%, so that students would be directly compared. With the GCSE exams, the lower papers would be easier, but on any given tier one could only get a certain range of marks - ie even 100% on the lowest tier would not gain an A - whereas the highest papers would have stuff in that they expected almost every student to get wrong, to sort out the very brightest.


I loved algebra at school.

You reckon? You should come and see some of the "A grade" students I know. They can't even do multiplication without a calculator...and yet can score an A at GCSE maths! Yes, the last 3/4 questions on a paper are challenging, but the rest really isn't much more than common sense and applying some formulae. Is it right that Intermediate Tier people can only get grade B, and Foundation Tier can only get grade D?
The problem I have with the low A grade and high A* is that you can't differenciate between someone getting 47% and 77% - they both get grade A, but with a 30% difference. That's a lot. It's stupid.

Well that is how it is supposed to work - I can't claim that it does. It seemed to work reasonably well when I did GCSEs. I agree that mental maths is not tested very much if at all. Part of academic maths after all IS applying formulae etc. Even if it's not actually applicable in real life I believe that usually the inter/lower papers work something like that. When my brother did GCSEs (5 or 6 years before me) the grade boundaries were very narrow: one could only get A-B on the highest paper, or risked failing. Really stupid, that was.

Firstly, isn't the point of GCSEs that they aren't applicable in real life?

And French Higher Tier works like your brother's GCSE - if you don't get a high enough mark (about 40% I hear!) then you get a U, and no marks are carried forward for that section. Luckily you can opt to do Foundation Tier in just one bit of it though!

I guess that's why they don't test useful things like mental maths then...


Crumbs, that's evil.

I think John had to take the same level all the way across. So if there was a risk he would fail a higher paper, had to go for intermediate, and some of them only marked up to C. Stupid.

He did do them *thinks* about 15 or more years ago though...

And also why I need to learn about 50 equasions for chemical reactions which I have never heard of, and have no purpose in life. Whoop-de-doo for the curriculum. Whoop-de-doo for Ruth Kelly *adopts impression of her man voice* and her stupid education reforms which will allow businesses to purchase schools and teach kids more pointless rubbish...

GCSEs/A levels must be getting easier! I mean, they can't exactly be getting harder can they?

Well, although it might seem pointless right now by itself, all maths/sciences etc are providing a foundation for higher-level stuff, which are applicable in real life. For example, unless you don't know all those mind-numbing equations etc, you would never be able to do a Chemistry degree - and without Chemists our world would be very limited indeed So the moral of the story: GCSE is boring, some stuff is pretty pointless, but it's a necessary hurdle to get to the next stage that actually means something!

I did OCR GCSE Maths, and the grade boundary for my mocks (i.e. June 2004 papers) was 50-60% for an A*. But in our real ones (June 2005), it was *apparently* an easier paper, and you had to get 100 or so out of 130 to get an A*.

My maths is really bad at the moment Being held in detention currently for coursework that I don't understand Though most people in my school who are musical are good all around rather than just maths.

I was always diabolical at both...having found a way to improve my musical skills, knowledge and understanding, I'm now looking for the Kodaly equivalent for maths teaching!

I'm doing a higher paper and you need 95% to get an A*!

NM

my friend's teacher said so too!!!however i don think that is true, since i got 98 for add maths but i don realy seem to have much ''talent'' in music.i find it hard.although i got disticntion for grade 1 and 4 (i started late)but i find it quite hard..not to say talented.

We'd be amazing, 100% everytime!

When I found out that you only need 47% to get an A, my hopes lifted! In a way, it also means for people like me who aren't top set but are second set, who WON'T cover the whole syllabus, only about 2/3 of it and also have a really **** teacher a chance to get a good grade.

I'm not particularly good at maths (despite being in the top set). However, I know a lot of musical people who are exceptionally good at maths. I'm (without meaning to be arrogant) exceptionally good at English. Maybe I should join the 'confuzzled about maths even though we are in the top set' club - any vacancies?

I was exceptional at English at school. I guess think music-academia link is not necessarily confined just to Maths

I have generally found that musicians are good all-rounders. The friend of mine that is really good at a few instruments is really good academically as well. Generally the people who get the highest marks in the school that I know of are musicians as well. 2 out of 3 last year and 2 out of 3 the year before, 3 out of 4 the year before and I can't be bothered trying to remember any further back but they were generally all musicians. Another link (don't know whether it was just my school or what) but most of the school captains were also musicians.

One of them (a 2004 graduate) played the violin and got top marks in the school in every subject she studied and got the highest band in the state. She studied English, the two top Maths, Biology, Chemistry and Physics.

I dont think it works for me,
i'm no good at maths, even the simple stuff - i prefer more creative subjects

It definitely links for me... I'm top of my year group at Maths, and I wouldn't say I'm really really musical, but I like to think I have talent

I suffer quite badly from discalculia ( a form of dyslexia but relating to numbers,figures etc. rather than the written word ) I even read the clock "back to front".

I have been learning the piano for about 7 years now and although I find it difficult sometimes ,I have noticed a gradual improvement in my mathematical skills . maybe one helps the other.

Anyone else like me ?