Your Brain on Playing the Piano

 

Want a full body workout? Play the piano! It seems obvious: sensory processing, motor control, hand-eye coordination, mental concentration, mental agility, and multitasking. It also builds mental and muscle memory.

Three parts of the brain particularly benefit from piano playing: the motion, visual and auditory cortices. Both sides of the brain and the bridge between those two sides are involved. It has been found that musicians’ brains can be larger structurally: attention, hearing and listening, emotion, memory, motor actions to produce sound, and learning.

Brain-related reading skills specifically improve with piano playing. Notes constitute a universal and unique language, which necessitate decoding just as alphabetic-based languages do. Beyond reading letters, notes reading is translated into hand motions. Each language has its own rhythm, which can be facilitated through music as composers optimally link oral language with musical rhythm. Indeed, when playing songs in different languages, the performer can cognitively and kinesthetically internalize those language-specific characteristics.

Likewise, mathematical thinking improves with piano playing. Music theory is mathematically-based in notes and rhythm.  The brain processes the combinations and sequencing of those elements, which reflect mathematical patterns.

All ages benefit, even in terms of brain plasticity (making more connections between neurons and creating new circuits, for instance) with consistent piano practice. Such practice also activates creative areas of the brain, facilitating original expression.

Taking piano lessons ramps up the impact of the brain even more: improving reading, expanding vocabulary, interpreting oral prosody emotionally, discerning sounds more subtly, and sequencing verbal information.

In short, playing the piano is a smart idea!

 

The Mathematical Harmony in Music

 

“Music is the mathematics of one who does not know that he is counting.” Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716)

 Tomoko realizes the preciseness and patterns of music. Not surprisingly then, math helps in reading music. The simplest task such as counting the beats uses math. Each time signature codes the number of beats per measure, and the notes represent fractions of a measure and beat – such as whole notes, quarter notes, eighth notes and so on. In turn, reading these rhythmic notations can help one read and solve math equations. 

In fact, mathematics lies underneath much musical composition and reflects the very nature of music itself. Even the concept of octaves is mathematical. An octave is the distance between a given note with a set sound frequency (that is, the string’s vibration) with another note with double that frequency. A perfect fifth is 1.5 times the frequency of the octave’s base note. Ratios help make music harmonious.

Music compositions reflect patterns, just as math does: symmetry, repetition, transposition, inversion.  The process for perceiving and generating those patterns mirrors mathematical processes. Johann Sebastian Bach very consciously incorporated mathematical principles into his keyboard compositions. His work “Musical Offering” is comprised of ten canons, in which each canon is a mathematical transformation of the principal musical line. In fact, a mathematical breakthrough enabled Bach to write “The Well-Tempered Clavier.” Keyboard instruments used to be tuned using a just-toned scale, which made shifting to keys other than the tonic sounded “off.” The equal (even)-tempered scale, popularized by Bach, evened out the frequency ratios between all 12 notes of the chromic scale so that shifts of harmonies to other keys would sound the same.

Tomoko rightly asserts that reading and playing music require good discipline, improve listening and collaborative skills, and strengthens mental and muscle memory.  Those practices can also build math skills and recall of math details. A harmonious blend!