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Do Re Mi, 1-2-3, That's How  Easy Math Can Be (click to view article)

After reading the Mozart Effect by Don Campbell, I have had an interest in how music and the arts can help academic achievement.  It is also interesting to consider how musicians and psychologists design their studies and attempt to measure their results.  Certainly it seems like a stretch to think that passively listening to the music of Mozart will help your IQ.  I appreciated how Geist and Geist compiled the research and stated that it is active participation in music that can improve spatial reasoning and mathematical thinking.

Specifically, Geist and Geist referred to emergent mathematical thinking and how music is one of the first mathematical encounters children have. Emergent mathematics is the idea where through immersion, young children began to construct an understanding of mathematics.  Although children are not able to articulate mathematical concepts, they form fundamental mathematical understandings based on their interactions with the world. 

Music enhances mathematical thinking in various ways.  Each musical aspect - beat, rhythm, melody, tempo, dynamic, timbre, style - corresponds to a mathematical concept.  Beat and rhythm contribute to children's understanding of one-to-one correspondence, and lay the foundations for understanding numerical relationships.  Beat, rhythm, and melody also develop skills in recognizing patterns; the same brain mechanism that is used for pattern recognition in traditional mathematics tasks is also used when engaged in musical activity.

Overall, the article was somewhat shallow and only mildly helpful in a practical sense.  It did, however, connect the idea of emergent mathematical thinking to engagement in music with a fair degree of evidence.  Active participation in music can give students a head start in the math classroom.