The link between music and math has been long known; musical notes are the representation of vibrations and frequencies, which math quantifies. The art of music—the way it makes us feel—is how our brains recognize and translate patterns and then translates them into feeling and emotion.
Adam Ribaudo, an artist and IT professional, said that he’s always felt an intuitive link between math and music, specifically when it comes to intuition and harmonies.
“There needs to be some sort of intuition and some mental map of how notes relate to each other,” Ribaudo said. “That mental map can then be transferred more easily to mathematical or some technical concepts where you’re searching in your brain for those harmonic registries.”
Technology, says composer, musician, and technologist Chester Jankowski, is about turning abstractions into patterns. So it’s not all too surprising, then, that musicians frequently make great technologists, coders, and IT professionals, according to SAP, Concept Technology, and Nashville Software School. Each organization points to how musical artists think and problem solve logically and mathematically.
Jankowski and Ribaudo, along with other musicians who work in IT, say that the overlaps between logic and creativity assist them in both composing code and music. In order to improvise in music, for example, you have to know the foundation of music—how notes and keys work, etc. The same holds true in IT: In order to fix a system, you have to know the infrastructure.
One less problem. When Wolfgang Wedemeyer, a ServiceNow senior staff software engineer and musician, is in the midst of working or composing, he doesn’t always see the connection between his expertise in music and software until later. Once he’s reflected on an experience, he can begin to connect the two.
“I get into a very similar flow state when I’m working creatively on music and when I’m also working on solving some of the harder software problems,” Wedemeyer said. “When it comes to theory and rules and patterns and all that sort of stuff, I find there’s similarities between doing parallel programming and working on harmonies, where you have to keep multiple things that are happening simultaneously in your head and make them work together in a logical way.”
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Jankowski pointed back to the intuition for problem-solving, and said that musicians are often skilled at seeing the “bigger picture.”
“If something’s broken…you could either just go through a checklist and check everything in order, or sometimes you just have this flash of insight,” Jankowski said. “You’re able to go there and retrace your steps.”
Talking in your sleep. Director of software engineering management at ServiceNow,Yaron Guez, told IT Brew that the translation of skills is more subtle. He believes that programming languages and music theory are the same in that both require certain rules to be followed.
“I haven’t had a moment where, because I know this circle of fifths or the way music modes work…that’s going to help me specifically on this programming challenge,” Guez said. “It’s just the same type of problem-solving, or rather, the same type of understanding another language.”
Guez said that in encountering different technologists who are also musicians, he finds that those individuals are often the ones where “this isn’t just math to them.”
“Not to say that math doesn’t have creative elements to it—of course, when it comes to proofs and whatnot—but still, they’re not just following a set of instructions and relying on their knowledge and expertise to do it,” Guez said. “They’re using creative problem-solving to figure it out.”