General intelligence explains the link between math and music skills

A study of young adults with backgrounds in mathematics or music found that individuals with better mathematical abilities tended to have better musical abilities as well, and vice versa. However, this association was most likely caused by intelligence being an important contributor to both groups of abilities. The paper was published in the Journal of Intelligence.

Musical abilities are skills involved in perceiving, understanding, remembering, and producing musical elements. They include activities such as perceiving pitch, rhythm, melody, harmony, tempo, and musical structure, as well as producing or performing music. Mathematical abilities, on the other hand, include skills such as understanding numbers, quantities, patterns, spatial relations, logical relations, and abstract symbolic rules.

Researchers notice that music and mathematics have a deep relationship. Music is based on mathematical principles such as ratios and repeating patterns.  Similarly, musical and mathematics abilities are also related because both involve pattern detection, sequencing, memory, attention, and rule-based processing. Rhythm perception, for example, requires sensitivity to timing and ratios, which are also important in mathematics.

Music theory also contains mathematical elements, such as intervals, proportions, scales, and harmonic relations. Some studies find small to moderate positive associations between musical training and mathematical performance.

Study author Michaela A. Meier and her colleagues investigated the relationship between different facets of musical and mathematical abilities. They note that evidence on the relationship between music and mathematics is mixed, with many studies reporting low to moderate associations and similarly sized effects of music training on mathematics achievements. Based on this, study authors expected to find small to moderate positive associations between different aspects of musical and mathematics abilities.

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Study participants were 170 adults. 99 of them were women. Their average age was 25 years. Study authors recruited three different groups – 1) the mathematics group, comprised of students or graduates working in the fields of mathematics, physics, engineering, or related fields; 2) the music group, comprised of students or graduates of music, music education, musicology, or a related field; 3) the control group, comprised of participants who neither excelled in mathematics nor in music, and who were studying or working in a field unrelated to music or mathematics (mostly psychology).

Study participants completed assessments of musical abilities (three tasks focusing on musical perception – the computerized adaptive Beat Alignment Test, the Mistuning Perception Test, and the Melodic Discrimination Test), mathematical abilities (tests of basic numerical abilities task, arithmetic fluency, and higher mathematical knowledge). They also completed self-report questionnaires about their general musical activity (the Goldsmiths Musical Sophistication Index), mathematical experience (the mathematical Sophistication Index), and an assessment of intelligence (the Intelligence Structure Test).

Results showed mostly weak associations between tests of mathematical and musical abilities. Both tests of mathematical and musical abilities had weak to moderate positive associations with intelligence. In other words, participants with better mathematical or musical abilities tended to be somewhat more intelligent compared to participants with worse mathematical and musical abilities. The only exception was the Beat Alignment Test, performance on which was not associated with intelligence.

In general, associations of intelligence with mathematical abilities tended to be somewhat stronger than associations with musical abilities. When study authors explored whether musical and mathematics abilities remain associated when their links with intelligence are controlled for, results showed that their association was reduced to almost 0. This means that the link between mathematical and musical abilities is likely produced by intelligence affecting both groups of abilities.

“These results imply that intelligence accounts for a substantial proportion of the association between mathematical and musical abilities,” the study authors concluded.

The study contributes to the scientific understanding of the nature of musical and mathematical abilities. However, it should be noted that the design of this study does not allow any causal inferences to be derived from the results.

The paper, “Are Mathematical and Musical Abilities Related Beyond Intelligence?,” was authored by Michaela A. Meier, Lara Spitzley, Serra Ulusoy, Alexandra Hubmann, Rylie DelaCruz, Roland H. Grabner, and Daniel Müllensiefen.