Originally Posted by
davewerden
They recognized that musicians' minds are very compatible with computer logic. After all, we are trained to respond to a symbolic language, which is a good start, but I think there is also a strong "math" connection in the brain as well.
I have to dispute this, despite the offered empirical evidence. Your point about the symbolic language is a good one. And for many musicians it goes deeper than than in their understanding and use of music "theory". But I've run into way too many musicians who seem simply incapable of logical thought. They're (very much) like football players: highly trained in certain very specific ways, but completely adrift outside of that narrow context. So in my experience, a lot of musicians' minds aren't compatible with computer logic at all.
If you start with the idea of "Let's look for musicians who have some sort of mathematical inclination and see how many we can find ... Wow, there seem to be a lot of these." Then you may incorrectly conclude that there's a strong correlation between being a musician and mathematical ability (very vaguely characterized!).
If instead, you start with "Let's look at the population of all musicians, see what categories (Careful there! How do you decide on how many categories and which ones?), and then see if any obviously high and unusual correlations pop out," then you may get a very different result. And it depends not just on how you slice and dice the categories -- and what counts as demonstrating mathematical ability/interest, but how you determine the "reference set" of what counts as a musician.
I think that a casual and admittedly non-scientific survey of several other musical instrument forums will very quickly demonstrate a significant population of musicians (self-described, amateur, academic, and professional) who appear to have little ability (or even tolerance) of mathematical or logical reasoning or thought.
Gary Merrill
Wessex EEb Bass tuba (DW 3XL or 2XL)
Mack Brass Compensating Euph (DE N106, Euph J, J9 euph)
Amati Oval Euph (DE 104, Euph J, J6 euph)
1924 Buescher 3-valve Eb tuba (with std US receiver), Kelly 25
Schiller American Heritage 7B clone bass trombone (DE LB K/K10/112/14 Lexan, Brass Ark MV50R)
1947 Olds "Standard" trombone (Olds #3)