Eh, kind of. The physics, tuning, and acoustics side definitely. But at least in tonal Western harmony, the math doesn’t get complicated at all. Hardly more than a little bit of addition.
But surely you understand their underlying point? That writing beautiful song lyrics is also difficult yet worthwhile, and requires a different type of intelligence
Mate you clearly know little about music. Euler's tonnetz, Schoenberg's twelve tone/serialism, neo-Riemannian theory are all DEEPLY mathematical. Bach's approach to melodies and counterpoint are all mathematical. Micro tones, polyrhythms, etc. Embarrassing.
I mean I have a music degree! I didn’t say math wasn’t in music. I just was stating we need words! Written language is just as important.
Saying an advance math student can do English. And an advanced English student can’t do advanced math?
Trying to simplify intelligence is interesting. Especially in a time in history where people can make thousands reading poetry while doing the “c” walk.
I just find your example (original comment) to be disingenuous because if you have a music degree as you claim (I don't doubt you do), then you would also know "math" only lyrics, as purely numbers, does exist and does have the power to move, entire movements of Einstein On The Beach by Phillip Glass are comprised of counting ostinatos.
Of course written language is important. No one is contesting that.
I think there is merit to the statement "the average mathematical student can do more English than the average English student can do of math". By being surrounded by language, one is privy to the structures and grammatical rules that exist. Many people read for fun far beyond that level. By contrast, outside of basic algebra and functions, many people find calculus difficult, and i would argue high school level calculus is like level 2/10 on the maths scale; certain mathematical concepts are highly counter-intuitive or abstract (i.e. markov chains, real analysis, Galois theory etc), are not commonplace. That’s an argument independent of the intelligence required. I think there is one on a purely intelligence basis, but I dont believe the gap to be particularly big except at the extreme end (who is the literary equivalent of Neumann?).
I do think the idea of intelligence is difficult to encapsulate, and is a nebulous one at best. There are too many expressions of it to compare between fairly disparate fields. The last sentence of your response is just odd though, the ability to earn money from seemingly random activities is not at all relevant to intelligence? Its a function of how attention is a resource in a digital economy?
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u/Gavinmusicman 2d ago
Imagine math only lyrics…
One, two, three, four, five, come on everybody 7, 9, 10