6 ms·

Are musicians better language learners?

51 points by pyduan 12y ago

tzmudzin 12y ago
If you want a subjective, personal view as anecdotal evidence on this: music IS another language. There are regional variations (Western vs oriental) with their own phonetics (scales...) and grammars (rules of harmony, chord progressions). Not to mention that quite a few musicians describe it as a means to express themselves. Reading sheet music is not much different from reading in a different alphabet, music theory is the equivalent of grammar study, and BTW playing by ear is pretty much like the natural language acquisition (the way kids pick up their mother tongue). You'd be surprised how many parallels both in the nature and in the learning process you'll find. Learning music is like learning another language [Source: I'm a multilingual who just started learning to play piano as an adult.] EDIT: formatting
- illumen 12y ago
  Yeah, music is another style of communication. The industrialisation of music has destroyed a really joyful way for people to express themselves and to communicate with people around them. When musical literacy is lacking in a person it is truly sad. I read somewhere musical illiteracy is around 95% of the USA now. Which is a pretty good market for people who have to buy all their music! When you combine this with no knowledge of food preparation, and no knowledge of the environment, it makes for a pretty poor existence IMHO. Oh well :(
  - rprospero 12y ago
    > When musical literacy is lacking in a person it is truly sad. As a member of the musically illiterate, I ask why? From my perspective, it feels like being musically illiterate is like being unskilled in the ceramic arts (which I also am). It's absolutely true that I cannot make music of my own and would be forced to buy all my music. It's also true that I cannot make porcelain figurines of my own and have to buy all of those as well. My inexpensive solution has been to simply not own any porcelain figurines or music. Honestly, between the two, I'd be more interested in learning the ceramic arts at the moment. Not that I really need figurines, but it sounds like more fun and I have some ideas for bathroom fittings. Why should I learn music instead? I'm probably coming off as a bit abrasive and I apologize for that. People have been making music for thousands of years, so there's obviously something neat going on there that I'm missing.
    - thatsjustcrazy 12y ago
      Why don't you just try both?
- markyc 12y ago
  do you have a tutor or are you learning on your own? can you point me to resources you're using for piano learning for adults?
  - tzmudzin 12y ago
    The /r/piano FAQ (https://www.reddit.com/r/piano/wiki/faq https://www.reddit.com/r/piano/wiki/faq) is a great starting point. There's a ton of resources available online, so the trouble is actually in picking the really good ones. Still, if you want to play well, you should probably get a teacher. As for myself: I've started lessons about 6 months of trying on my own. The teacher's role is to point out the small things one does not even notice when learning on one's own -- and those can really make a huge difference. But in the end it is all about the learning process -- seeing what works for you at any given stage, filling the gaps, re-evaluating periodically if your approach should change. And it's a long-time project. Most people become comfortable after 10 years or so of daily practice. So either you're extremely committed/desperate/forced/enjoy the learning process with the long-term goal in mind, or you quit. The specific resources I can recommend are: - Lypur's video courses on youtube (both piano + music theory) - "Piano Handbook" by Carl Humphries - "All About Music Theory" by Mark Harrison - http://www.musictheory.net - Willi Schneider's "Klavierfibel"
    - joshuapants 12y ago
      One important note on teachers: they make you play with the proper form and that makes a huge difference. It makes you less likely to develop an injury, and after you get over the initial hurdle of learning how to make your hands stay in the appropriate positions it makes it much easier to play. Bad technique makes even relatively simple music hard to play.
- ianamartin 12y ago
  I'd quibble with this a little. I don't think music qualifies as another language in the way that we're talking about. I'd say it qualifies about as much as a programming language does. I don't think anyone would suggest that knowing C++ or Python will make it easier for you to learn Russian. [Source: I was a professional violinist for 25 years before I got into programming.]
galfarragem 12y ago
My experience tells me that there are no correlation between these variables: one of my best friends is a great musician (pianist) and is terrible with foreign languages despite having had several language courses. IMHO, would make more sense to rephrase it as: Are singers better language learners?
- baristaGeek 12y ago
  So based on one counter-example you're implying that a correlation doesn't exist?
- agumonkey 12y ago
  I think it depends what 'great' means and how he learned. I'm a self-taught (by ear, by eyes, barely no "theory"[1]) failed musician, therefore not great, but after years of failed intuitions on what was and how to make music, I had moments where I felt the grace of being 'on' the music. That taught me a few things: - Sometimes there are things that were completely invisible to you. - These things looked complex and painful, in reality they aren't. - The right approach was too foreign for your (my) brain. - Years of failing aren't waste, you learn patience and faith (yes faith). - It is often summarized as `make haste slowly` - Learning another weird thing won't ever be the same [1] Music theory is a notation for experiences, don't learn theory until you felt what is described carnally a little. Beside they're only restricted abstractions. I knew chord progressions, modes, counterpoint, yet it wasn't until a day where my mind and ears just clicked that all these ideas suddenly became obvious, the symbols mapped my feelings one to one and understanding/remembering them was free.
  - galfarragem 12y ago
    Apparently music is maths, but despite being confortable in maths and reading the music notation, I'm terrible playing the piano. Another thing that doesn't make sense to me is that my friend has a terrible memory: somebody says something to him today, tomorrow he will not remember (unless is something that he "feels" somehow). By the other hand, if it is music, he remembers/plays it after listening just once sometimes even years later.
baristaGeek 12y ago
This is a specific case which is part of a broader fundamental principle. This principle might sound reduntant, and it's basically that "people who learn how to learn are better learners". Learning how to play a musical instrument is something that never permeated our general culture as much as it should've had, which implies that doing so requires the acquisition of -in some level- unconventional skills. This ability to acquire unconventional skills can be extrapolated to any other area of knowledge. For example in my case, the shift was from music to CS. EDIT: BTW, I speak 3 languages.
new8754 12y ago
But this be fixed by taking sodium valproate? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6973842 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6973842
flyinghamster 12y ago
Looking at my own history, it makes sense. As a kindergartner, I was playing a toy organ with play-by-number song books, and later in grade school I played clarinet. Big mistake: quitting in eight grade. As a side note, whenever I looked up words in the dictionary, I always paid attention to the etymology as well as the definition. The only subject that I aced in college was Spanish, and the teacher was very good (and a native speaker), but not easy. We started Spanish 101 with 30 students, and ended Spanish 104 with just seven. Now, 30+ years later, it's a bit rusty, but I can still read it pretty well, and can sort-of understand written Portuguese as well. I can drive down Collins St. in Joliet and easily read the signs on the businesses. But wait, there's more! One Sunday, in 1993, I walked down to a neighborhood church that I had never visited before, and sat down, as it turned out, behind the music director. She heard me singing the hymns, and asked me immediately after the service if I'd be interested in joining the choir. Then, the next week, the handbell choir was playing, and I was hooked -- I ended up joining both. More recently, I joined a community chorus that sings a wide range of pieces, and a great many of the old masterworks are not in English. I've found that I could pretty readily pick up pronunciation for a variety of languages, and even though I've never taken German lessons, I can almost figure out what's being sung in Bach or Mozart works -- and when I read an English translation, the relationships between English and German almost jump off the page for me. I still wouldn't be able to put together a coherent sentence in German, though. If I had the time and money, I'd consider taking German, and maybe even Russian (I taught myself the Cyrillic alphabet at one point, so the alphabet would be the least of my problems).
- replicant 12y ago
  > Now, 30+ years later, it's a bit rusty, but I can still read it pretty well, and can sort-of understand written Portuguese as well. I don't want to be picky. But I would not attribute your ability to read Portuguese to your musical background, but to your Spanish. My experience is that most Spanish speakers can read Portuguese to a certain degree and vice-versa. Never having studied French, I was able to read some child comics.
  - gothenburg 12y ago
    This is true. I'm Portuguese and I can read full texts (even books) and I never had a course, or even a lesson, of Spanish. I can understand Italian at some degree as well, due to the same reason.
cjbprime 12y ago
Yes, there seems to be a massive obvious correlation here: people who are good at learning difficult skills over time (an instrument and musicianship) are good at learning difficult skills over time (a new language). I doubt there's any real link/cross-sharing between music and language here. Some people enjoy investing time into something that they will be bad at for a very long time and then become good at, and some people hate it. If you went through that with music as a child, you're probably more likely to have the confidence to want to go through it again as an adult with a language, because you know that it's something you've done before successfully. Programming's in the same category.
- 6stringmerc 12y ago
  Well, I did check into this as part of advanced study, and your doubts are misplaced - there is a real link/cross-sharing between music and language...because there's an observable link/cross-sharing between music and overall intellectual development. Here's a quick summary citing the study that I think I used in my own inquiry[1]: Confirming the belief that the relationship between music and academic performance is positive, “researchers have found that music instruction actually enhances student achievement in areas outside music” (Kelstrom, 1998, para. 12). It is believed that “music develops critical thinking skills and improves skills in reading, writing, and math. Music develops and improves spatial intelligence, which transfers to high-level math and science. It develops perceptual skills necessary in many academic areas” (Kelstrom, 1998, para. 31-32). According to this study, music has a strong influence, because it produces and develops skills needed for many academic processes. [1]http://www.kon.org/urc/v5/fujita.html http://www.kon.org/urc/v5/fujita.html Personally, as both a musician, person who successfully learned a foreign language, and was, for a time, on a professional track to become a programmer, I can say that programming is very low on the totem pole. It is predominately mechanical in nature deriving from logic comprehension, compared to music, which is a highly expressive and dynamic format. Or, to put it another way, I've never seen a "collaborative jam session" in programming that wasn't anything but chaos, because the format simply doesn't allow for it. Programming is great to understand how machines work, but to build the machines, the mind should be expanded via music and the arts to enable practical creativity.
ianamartin 12y ago
Both my parents are/were (dad is retired now, mother still teaches) University German professors for over 40 years each. Both of them have claimed for years that they can spot the music majors in the first day of class just by noticing how much better at pronunciation they are than the other students. Neither of them have done anything serious with their observations beyond notice that their musician students are often far better in the language than the non-musicians. It's anecdotal for sure. But it's quite a lot of anecdotes, for whatever that's worth. It's also worth pointing out that a better pronunciation from a set of students can skew the teacher's view of the students' actual abilities in the language. That is, two students could have roughly identical mechanics, vocabulary, etc., but the student with better pronunciation will be perceived as having a better grasp of the language. You can argue that the way the words sound is a part of the language, so this isn't really a skew. But you get my point. On paper, they are the same; in speech one comes across as better.
- agumonkey 12y ago
  Pronunciation, spelling or grammar shows an ability to discriminate and classify things with precision. It's not a strong case, dyslexia for instance deceptively fooled caretakers into thinking one was subpar when he/she was not, but it still is a very good sign.
- mapleoin 12y ago
  My personal experience definitely agrees with this. I think it might have something to do with a "trained" ear or a better discernment or attention paid to small variations in sound.
- yodsanklai 12y ago
  > they can spot the music majors in the first day of class just by noticing how much better at pronunciation they are than the other students It makes sense. I can see at least two explanations. First musicians are used to listening to sounds in order to reproduce them accurately. Second, less obvious reason, is that they are less shy to "perform". Maybe I'm wrong and generalizing my own case, but I think that sometimes people are just too shy to work on their accent. As kids, we used to make fun of those that were trying to have a correct accent.
bwanab 12y ago
This doesn't match my personal experience. I learned music at five and have been an active musician all my life, but languages have always bee hard for me. I believe that music is much more related to computer languages - just instructional notations as opposed to natural languages.
- hessenwolf 12y ago
  But do you play by ear? I don't think sight reading would help at all. I had been playing music for years, sight reading, and had picked up no musical ear. Now, I can happily play along with the radio, and pick up languages by sound quite well. Except for German. And I live in Germany. German is just... schmooshy.
- ionforce 12y ago
  I'm not down with your link between music and computer languages. Music is performative while what makes success with computer languages is the ability to juggle abstractions at different levels of zoom. I don't see an overlap there other than the nominal "they are both langauges".
  - bwanab 12y ago
    I think there's a disconnect in our statements. By music, you seem to refer to the artistic, creative, performance oriented activity. My reference, as I thought TFA was about, was to the notational aspect of written music. Listen to Bach if you want an example of "juggling abstractions at different levels of zoom".
- frost_knight 12y ago
  It matches my experience too, much to my frustration. I've studied music theory and composition for years and have composed a fair number of pieces. I can play piano and sing but have no interest in being a performer. My instrument is pen and paper (or midi controller, Finale, and Ableton). I'm 3 credits short of a bachelor's degree because I've never been able to pass any foreign language course. 10 attempts. Languages go through my head like sand through a sieve. I even took a language proficiency test and the proctor said I did so badly that I could have achieved a better score through blind chance, randomly selecting answers. I'm now married to a fluent Japanese speaker. Even with her help it doesn't make any difference, it just won't "stick" no matter how hard I try. She tells me my pronounciation is excellent, however. The college I went to will not accept any substitutions, thus the frustration. And yet I learn programming languages quickly.
phabian 12y ago
As a professional musician, classicaly trained, who just recently (I wasted a lot of time living in terminal and emacs while playing with linux distros) started learning programming from ground up I find Lisp, S-expressions and more functional approach attractive and comparable to music composition. If we take for example Bach fugues of Beethoven Sonatas we can see functional approach of may I say multiparadigm: development of motives, objects, augmentation, expanding themes(functions) that contain smaller themes (closures) etc.. The beauty and magic of SICP lectures and their may I say musical approach to composing higher abstractions is just plain better than pure python or javascript tutorials that I tried learning from. Not to mention amazing talks and writings from Alan Kay, Guy Steele, Pg, Norvig and other hackers who for me define the essence of hacking and programming. The whole point of writing lisp in itself is like some strange Bach or Mozart read/eval loop that never stops. I am far from being an average user of lisp but I keep doing it day and night. It is not easy though. The only sad thing is so many people dismiss lisp and I see finding a job will also not be an easy thing. By the way I am open for internships in some lisp shops, I would work for free. I dont know how much I can contribute but I could at least clean extra parentheses (thats a joke! :)))
raincom 12y ago
Yes, if you are good at singing in various styles. Singing in various styles teach a few things about voice quality and tunes. 1. Every language has its voice quality. So, learning phonemes alone does not help us one to acquire a new accent or language. Voice qualities vary within a language itself: compare the southern accents, midwestern accents, New York accent, British accents. Yes, there are phonemic differences between accents within a language: but there is a change in the voice quality. 2. Academic research about the voice quality in languages have not reached beyond what John Laver had said (check his phonetic description of voice quality). And of coure, IPA has incorporated some symbols like 'breathy voice', etc, which you can see in the extended IPA. To me, voice quality should be the first thing one shud master before getting into phonemes, lexical stress, intonational stress, etc. Academics are too busy with their instrumental (acoustic) phonetics. Even majority of phoneticians are just into instrumental phonetics. Ian Catford, a great phonetician, advised students of linguistics in general to master how to use their vocal apparatus. 3. Joe Estill, an opera singer turned a voice teacher, did a great research on how to train anyone to sing. Her focus is on how to acquire voice quality. She calls such steps as 'figures'. They are like thin voice, thick voice, breathy voice; then adding other combinations to them: high larynx, low larynx, Aryepiglottic sphincter, etc. Such skills help a singer to sing in various styles. Even if you want to do pitch match properly, you should do it in a thin voice (not with the speaking voice, which is thick voice for Americans, kinda semi-thick(breathy) for Indians in the south Asia, etc. 4. There is another thing singers and instrument players are good at: how to remember tunes. Even though speech is not like a song, you can find possible tunes of a language. In linguistics, it is called "intonational phrase". So, one does not need to master phonemes of a target language in order to imitate the tune units (tunits or intonational phrase) of any language. How many language training materials teach this? Most, if not all, language training materials subordinate the voice quality and the tunits to phonemes and lexical stress/lexical tone. Whereever they touch about tunits, they spend 4 pages on the intonation of the target language.
riot504 12y ago
From personal experience/observation. I have zero musical talent, my wife gives me a hard time for not being able to hold a beat by simply tapping the table. However, I can pick-up foreign languages with relative ease. I have never become fluent any foreign language, but have been able to read/conversant in Turkish, Russian, Italian, French and Spanish. I will admit East Asian languages are extremely difficult reference their tonal aspects; I have a hard time understanding/speaking those types of languages.

51 points by pyduan 12y ago

If you want a subjective, personal view as anecdotal evidence on this: music IS another language. There are regional variations (Western vs oriental) with their own phonetics (scales...) and grammars (rules of harmony, chord progressions). Not to mention that quite a few musicians describe it as a means to express themselves. Reading sheet music is not much different from reading in a different alphabet, music theory is the equivalent of grammar study, and BTW playing by ear is pretty much like the natural language acquisition (the way kids pick up their mother tongue). You'd be surprised how many parallels both in the nature and in the learning process you'll find. Learning music is like learning another language [Source: I'm a multilingual who just started learning to play piano as an adult.] EDIT: formatting

illumen 12y ago
Yeah, music is another style of communication. The industrialisation of music has destroyed a really joyful way for people to express themselves and to communicate with people around them. When musical literacy is lacking in a person it is truly sad. I read somewhere musical illiteracy is around 95% of the USA now. Which is a pretty good market for people who have to buy all their music! When you combine this with no knowledge of food preparation, and no knowledge of the environment, it makes for a pretty poor existence IMHO. Oh well :(
- rprospero 12y ago
  > When musical literacy is lacking in a person it is truly sad. As a member of the musically illiterate, I ask why? From my perspective, it feels like being musically illiterate is like being unskilled in the ceramic arts (which I also am). It's absolutely true that I cannot make music of my own and would be forced to buy all my music. It's also true that I cannot make porcelain figurines of my own and have to buy all of those as well. My inexpensive solution has been to simply not own any porcelain figurines or music. Honestly, between the two, I'd be more interested in learning the ceramic arts at the moment. Not that I really need figurines, but it sounds like more fun and I have some ideas for bathroom fittings. Why should I learn music instead? I'm probably coming off as a bit abrasive and I apologize for that. People have been making music for thousands of years, so there's obviously something neat going on there that I'm missing.
  - thatsjustcrazy 12y ago
    Why don't you just try both?
markyc 12y ago
do you have a tutor or are you learning on your own? can you point me to resources you're using for piano learning for adults?
- tzmudzin 12y ago
  The /r/piano FAQ (https://www.reddit.com/r/piano/wiki/faq https://www.reddit.com/r/piano/wiki/faq) is a great starting point. There's a ton of resources available online, so the trouble is actually in picking the really good ones. Still, if you want to play well, you should probably get a teacher. As for myself: I've started lessons about 6 months of trying on my own. The teacher's role is to point out the small things one does not even notice when learning on one's own -- and those can really make a huge difference. But in the end it is all about the learning process -- seeing what works for you at any given stage, filling the gaps, re-evaluating periodically if your approach should change. And it's a long-time project. Most people become comfortable after 10 years or so of daily practice. So either you're extremely committed/desperate/forced/enjoy the learning process with the long-term goal in mind, or you quit. The specific resources I can recommend are: - Lypur's video courses on youtube (both piano + music theory) - "Piano Handbook" by Carl Humphries - "All About Music Theory" by Mark Harrison - http://www.musictheory.net - Willi Schneider's "Klavierfibel"
  - joshuapants 12y ago
    One important note on teachers: they make you play with the proper form and that makes a huge difference. It makes you less likely to develop an injury, and after you get over the initial hurdle of learning how to make your hands stay in the appropriate positions it makes it much easier to play. Bad technique makes even relatively simple music hard to play.
ianamartin 12y ago
I'd quibble with this a little. I don't think music qualifies as another language in the way that we're talking about. I'd say it qualifies about as much as a programming language does. I don't think anyone would suggest that knowing C++ or Python will make it easier for you to learn Russian. [Source: I was a professional violinist for 25 years before I got into programming.]

galfarragem 12y ago

My experience tells me that there are no correlation between these variables: one of my best friends is a great musician (pianist) and is terrible with foreign languages despite having had several language courses. IMHO, would make more sense to rephrase it as: Are singers better language learners?

baristaGeek 12y ago
So based on one counter-example you're implying that a correlation doesn't exist?
agumonkey 12y ago
I think it depends what 'great' means and how he learned. I'm a self-taught (by ear, by eyes, barely no "theory"[1]) failed musician, therefore not great, but after years of failed intuitions on what was and how to make music, I had moments where I felt the grace of being 'on' the music. That taught me a few things: - Sometimes there are things that were completely invisible to you. - These things looked complex and painful, in reality they aren't. - The right approach was too foreign for your (my) brain. - Years of failing aren't waste, you learn patience and faith (yes faith). - It is often summarized as `make haste slowly` - Learning another weird thing won't ever be the same [1] Music theory is a notation for experiences, don't learn theory until you felt what is described carnally a little. Beside they're only restricted abstractions. I knew chord progressions, modes, counterpoint, yet it wasn't until a day where my mind and ears just clicked that all these ideas suddenly became obvious, the symbols mapped my feelings one to one and understanding/remembering them was free.
- galfarragem 12y ago
  Apparently music is maths, but despite being confortable in maths and reading the music notation, I'm terrible playing the piano. Another thing that doesn't make sense to me is that my friend has a terrible memory: somebody says something to him today, tomorrow he will not remember (unless is something that he "feels" somehow). By the other hand, if it is music, he remembers/plays it after listening just once sometimes even years later.

baristaGeek 12y ago

This is a specific case which is part of a broader fundamental principle. This principle might sound reduntant, and it's basically that "people who learn how to learn are better learners". Learning how to play a musical instrument is something that never permeated our general culture as much as it should've had, which implies that doing so requires the acquisition of -in some level- unconventional skills. This ability to acquire unconventional skills can be extrapolated to any other area of knowledge. For example in my case, the shift was from music to CS. EDIT: BTW, I speak 3 languages.

new8754 12y ago

But this be fixed by taking sodium valproate? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6973842 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6973842

flyinghamster 12y ago

Looking at my own history, it makes sense. As a kindergartner, I was playing a toy organ with play-by-number song books, and later in grade school I played clarinet. Big mistake: quitting in eight grade. As a side note, whenever I looked up words in the dictionary, I always paid attention to the etymology as well as the definition. The only subject that I aced in college was Spanish, and the teacher was very good (and a native speaker), but not easy. We started Spanish 101 with 30 students, and ended Spanish 104 with just seven. Now, 30+ years later, it's a bit rusty, but I can still read it pretty well, and can sort-of understand written Portuguese as well. I can drive down Collins St. in Joliet and easily read the signs on the businesses. But wait, there's more! One Sunday, in 1993, I walked down to a neighborhood church that I had never visited before, and sat down, as it turned out, behind the music director. She heard me singing the hymns, and asked me immediately after the service if I'd be interested in joining the choir. Then, the next week, the handbell choir was playing, and I was hooked -- I ended up joining both. More recently, I joined a community chorus that sings a wide range of pieces, and a great many of the old masterworks are not in English. I've found that I could pretty readily pick up pronunciation for a variety of languages, and even though I've never taken German lessons, I can almost figure out what's being sung in Bach or Mozart works -- and when I read an English translation, the relationships between English and German almost jump off the page for me. I still wouldn't be able to put together a coherent sentence in German, though. If I had the time and money, I'd consider taking German, and maybe even Russian (I taught myself the Cyrillic alphabet at one point, so the alphabet would be the least of my problems).

replicant 12y ago
> Now, 30+ years later, it's a bit rusty, but I can still read it pretty well, and can sort-of understand written Portuguese as well. I don't want to be picky. But I would not attribute your ability to read Portuguese to your musical background, but to your Spanish. My experience is that most Spanish speakers can read Portuguese to a certain degree and vice-versa. Never having studied French, I was able to read some child comics.
- gothenburg 12y ago
  This is true. I'm Portuguese and I can read full texts (even books) and I never had a course, or even a lesson, of Spanish. I can understand Italian at some degree as well, due to the same reason.

cjbprime 12y ago

Yes, there seems to be a massive obvious correlation here: people who are good at learning difficult skills over time (an instrument and musicianship) are good at learning difficult skills over time (a new language). I doubt there's any real link/cross-sharing between music and language here. Some people enjoy investing time into something that they will be bad at for a very long time and then become good at, and some people hate it. If you went through that with music as a child, you're probably more likely to have the confidence to want to go through it again as an adult with a language, because you know that it's something you've done before successfully. Programming's in the same category.

6stringmerc 12y ago
Well, I did check into this as part of advanced study, and your doubts are misplaced - there is a real link/cross-sharing between music and language...because there's an observable link/cross-sharing between music and overall intellectual development. Here's a quick summary citing the study that I think I used in my own inquiry[1]: Confirming the belief that the relationship between music and academic performance is positive, “researchers have found that music instruction actually enhances student achievement in areas outside music” (Kelstrom, 1998, para. 12). It is believed that “music develops critical thinking skills and improves skills in reading, writing, and math. Music develops and improves spatial intelligence, which transfers to high-level math and science. It develops perceptual skills necessary in many academic areas” (Kelstrom, 1998, para. 31-32). According to this study, music has a strong influence, because it produces and develops skills needed for many academic processes. [1]http://www.kon.org/urc/v5/fujita.html http://www.kon.org/urc/v5/fujita.html Personally, as both a musician, person who successfully learned a foreign language, and was, for a time, on a professional track to become a programmer, I can say that programming is very low on the totem pole. It is predominately mechanical in nature deriving from logic comprehension, compared to music, which is a highly expressive and dynamic format. Or, to put it another way, I've never seen a "collaborative jam session" in programming that wasn't anything but chaos, because the format simply doesn't allow for it. Programming is great to understand how machines work, but to build the machines, the mind should be expanded via music and the arts to enable practical creativity.

ianamartin 12y ago

Both my parents are/were (dad is retired now, mother still teaches) University German professors for over 40 years each. Both of them have claimed for years that they can spot the music majors in the first day of class just by noticing how much better at pronunciation they are than the other students. Neither of them have done anything serious with their observations beyond notice that their musician students are often far better in the language than the non-musicians. It's anecdotal for sure. But it's quite a lot of anecdotes, for whatever that's worth. It's also worth pointing out that a better pronunciation from a set of students can skew the teacher's view of the students' actual abilities in the language. That is, two students could have roughly identical mechanics, vocabulary, etc., but the student with better pronunciation will be perceived as having a better grasp of the language. You can argue that the way the words sound is a part of the language, so this isn't really a skew. But you get my point. On paper, they are the same; in speech one comes across as better.

agumonkey 12y ago
Pronunciation, spelling or grammar shows an ability to discriminate and classify things with precision. It's not a strong case, dyslexia for instance deceptively fooled caretakers into thinking one was subpar when he/she was not, but it still is a very good sign.
mapleoin 12y ago
My personal experience definitely agrees with this. I think it might have something to do with a "trained" ear or a better discernment or attention paid to small variations in sound.
yodsanklai 12y ago
> they can spot the music majors in the first day of class just by noticing how much better at pronunciation they are than the other students It makes sense. I can see at least two explanations. First musicians are used to listening to sounds in order to reproduce them accurately. Second, less obvious reason, is that they are less shy to "perform". Maybe I'm wrong and generalizing my own case, but I think that sometimes people are just too shy to work on their accent. As kids, we used to make fun of those that were trying to have a correct accent.

bwanab 12y ago

This doesn't match my personal experience. I learned music at five and have been an active musician all my life, but languages have always bee hard for me. I believe that music is much more related to computer languages - just instructional notations as opposed to natural languages.

hessenwolf 12y ago
But do you play by ear? I don't think sight reading would help at all. I had been playing music for years, sight reading, and had picked up no musical ear. Now, I can happily play along with the radio, and pick up languages by sound quite well. Except for German. And I live in Germany. German is just... schmooshy.
ionforce 12y ago
I'm not down with your link between music and computer languages. Music is performative while what makes success with computer languages is the ability to juggle abstractions at different levels of zoom. I don't see an overlap there other than the nominal "they are both langauges".
- bwanab 12y ago
  I think there's a disconnect in our statements. By music, you seem to refer to the artistic, creative, performance oriented activity. My reference, as I thought TFA was about, was to the notational aspect of written music. Listen to Bach if you want an example of "juggling abstractions at different levels of zoom".
frost_knight 12y ago
It matches my experience too, much to my frustration. I've studied music theory and composition for years and have composed a fair number of pieces. I can play piano and sing but have no interest in being a performer. My instrument is pen and paper (or midi controller, Finale, and Ableton). I'm 3 credits short of a bachelor's degree because I've never been able to pass any foreign language course. 10 attempts. Languages go through my head like sand through a sieve. I even took a language proficiency test and the proctor said I did so badly that I could have achieved a better score through blind chance, randomly selecting answers. I'm now married to a fluent Japanese speaker. Even with her help it doesn't make any difference, it just won't "stick" no matter how hard I try. She tells me my pronounciation is excellent, however. The college I went to will not accept any substitutions, thus the frustration. And yet I learn programming languages quickly.

phabian 12y ago

As a professional musician, classicaly trained, who just recently (I wasted a lot of time living in terminal and emacs while playing with linux distros) started learning programming from ground up I find Lisp, S-expressions and more functional approach attractive and comparable to music composition. If we take for example Bach fugues of Beethoven Sonatas we can see functional approach of may I say multiparadigm: development of motives, objects, augmentation, expanding themes(functions) that contain smaller themes (closures) etc.. The beauty and magic of SICP lectures and their may I say musical approach to composing higher abstractions is just plain better than pure python or javascript tutorials that I tried learning from. Not to mention amazing talks and writings from Alan Kay, Guy Steele, Pg, Norvig and other hackers who for me define the essence of hacking and programming. The whole point of writing lisp in itself is like some strange Bach or Mozart read/eval loop that never stops. I am far from being an average user of lisp but I keep doing it day and night. It is not easy though. The only sad thing is so many people dismiss lisp and I see finding a job will also not be an easy thing. By the way I am open for internships in some lisp shops, I would work for free. I dont know how much I can contribute but I could at least clean extra parentheses (thats a joke! :)))

raincom 12y ago

Yes, if you are good at singing in various styles. Singing in various styles teach a few things about voice quality and tunes. 1. Every language has its voice quality. So, learning phonemes alone does not help us one to acquire a new accent or language. Voice qualities vary within a language itself: compare the southern accents, midwestern accents, New York accent, British accents. Yes, there are phonemic differences between accents within a language: but there is a change in the voice quality. 2. Academic research about the voice quality in languages have not reached beyond what John Laver had said (check his phonetic description of voice quality). And of coure, IPA has incorporated some symbols like 'breathy voice', etc, which you can see in the extended IPA. To me, voice quality should be the first thing one shud master before getting into phonemes, lexical stress, intonational stress, etc. Academics are too busy with their instrumental (acoustic) phonetics. Even majority of phoneticians are just into instrumental phonetics. Ian Catford, a great phonetician, advised students of linguistics in general to master how to use their vocal apparatus. 3. Joe Estill, an opera singer turned a voice teacher, did a great research on how to train anyone to sing. Her focus is on how to acquire voice quality. She calls such steps as 'figures'. They are like thin voice, thick voice, breathy voice; then adding other combinations to them: high larynx, low larynx, Aryepiglottic sphincter, etc. Such skills help a singer to sing in various styles. Even if you want to do pitch match properly, you should do it in a thin voice (not with the speaking voice, which is thick voice for Americans, kinda semi-thick(breathy) for Indians in the south Asia, etc. 4. There is another thing singers and instrument players are good at: how to remember tunes. Even though speech is not like a song, you can find possible tunes of a language. In linguistics, it is called "intonational phrase". So, one does not need to master phonemes of a target language in order to imitate the tune units (tunits or intonational phrase) of any language. How many language training materials teach this? Most, if not all, language training materials subordinate the voice quality and the tunits to phonemes and lexical stress/lexical tone. Whereever they touch about tunits, they spend 4 pages on the intonation of the target language.

riot504 12y ago

From personal experience/observation. I have zero musical talent, my wife gives me a hard time for not being able to hold a beat by simply tapping the table. However, I can pick-up foreign languages with relative ease. I have never become fluent any foreign language, but have been able to read/conversant in Turkish, Russian, Italian, French and Spanish. I will admit East Asian languages are extremely difficult reference their tonal aspects; I have a hard time understanding/speaking those types of languages.