Children’s Research Centre
Does playing a musical instrument affect how
good you are at maths?
Andrew Gray
Introduction
I was interested in finding out whether being good at music had a link with being
good at maths because I am good at both of them and I wanted to see if other
people were similar.
My main focus was to distinguish between three types of people: those who can
play a musical instrument and read music, those who rate themselves well at
music but can’t read music; and those who don’t claim to be good at music at all.
I then wanted to see whether there were differences between them in how good
they are at maths.
Other people have written about the link as well. Research has showed that
maths and music are linked in different ways. Some theories claim that it is linked
if you listen to music; one example of this is the ‘Mozart effect’ which says that
listening to Mozart from an early age will develop a strong ability in maths. Others
claim that learning to play musical instruments helps pupils learn maths: ‘Pupils
in a school in Los Angeles who learned to play the piano and read music
improved their numeracy.’ Some say that learning rhythm helps with aspects of
maths: ‘When children learn rhythm they are learning ratios, fractions and
proportion’, and ‘the learning of music emphasizes thinking of space and time.’
Method
The method of research I used was a questionnaire (see Appendix); I planned it
so it would easily fit on to two sides of a sheet of A4 paper. The questionnaire
had various types of questions: some were plain ‘Yes or No’ answers and some
required ratings. The musical questions were based around facts like ‘Do you
play a musical instrument?’ which is a simple ‘Yes or No’ answer and if they state
the instrument they play that is a fact about their musical ability. Other questions
asked people to rate how good they were at maths.
The four schools chosen were in the local area so it was easier for them to return
the questionnaires to me. A letter was sent to the head teacher of each school
asking permission to give them out; I enclosed a copy of one of the
questionnaires in the letter so they could read the questions first. All of the head
teachers agreed to give the questionnaire out and I received approximately 250
completed questionnaires.
The participants were 11-12 years old (Year 7). The questionnaires would have
been completed in a quiet working atmosphere where no one should have looked
at anyone else’s questionnaire for ideas, so it was fair.
One of the schools was the school that I go to. When they gave the questionnaire
out the teacher did not state that I wrote it or that I was a child researcher, they
only mentioned it was a researcher from the Open University.
Findings
Figure 1 shows the difference of maths ratings between those who say they are
good at music and play a musical instrument and those who say they’re not good
at music but play a musical instrument and so on. There is a large difference
between the maths ratings of those who play musical instruments (A and B) and
those who don’t (C and D). This shows there is a link - if you play a musical
instrument you are more likely to be good at maths.
Fig 1.
Key: Group A - children who said they were not good at music but played a musical instrument.
Group B - children who said that they were good at music and played a musical instrument.
Group C - children who didn’t think they were good at music and didn’t play a musical
instrument.
Group D - children who said they were good at music but didn’t play a musical instrument.
Figure 2 illustrates this point more clearly. The first bar represents the
children who played a musical instrument and the other represents those
who don’t. There is a difference of 0.66 in the maths ratings between
children who play an instrument and those who don’t, with over 100
questionnaires in each group.
Fig 2.
Discussion
These results show that there is probably a link, but there are questions to
raise about it. The first being the reliability of the rating type questions. The
rating questions required answers on a scale of 1-10 which depended on
the accuracy of the person filling in the questionnaire to whether it was
their real capability.