Music involves understanding certain images and symbols, determining the relationship between these symbols and translating them into musical notes. This interpretation of mental images reinforces the neurological process of image and symbol recognition, which improves students' math skills. This is particularly useful when it comes to calculus and geometry, because both involve finding the volume, perimeter and area of shapes. The areas of the brain used in these exercises are the corpus callosum and the right motor cortex.
Music also involves patterns and series. For example, a pop song might alternate between verse and chorus, and a classical song might repeat codas or melodies throughout the piece. The recognition of these patterns makes a musician good, but it also proves useful in mathematical exercises, such as writing proofs. Writing proofs involves understanding patterns and being able to think ahead and predict what steps will lead to other subsequent steps. Practicing music reinforces a person's intuitive sense of patterns and sequences.
Musicians also understand musical symbols with a temporal context. For example, rhythms and notes have a particular duration and take place within a tempo. The right motor cortex of the brain learns to situate notes within a temporal context when playing music. This helps the brain learn to perform spatial-temporal functions, such as calculating velocity, vectors or acceleration in mathematical exercises.
Some argue that music not only improves functionality in portions of the brain through practice and repetition, but it also introduces fundamental math ideas to students, which helps them apply certain mathematical theories. For example, a teacher might want to teach students about harmonics and frequency. The teach can build on students' knowledge of musical terms, such as pitch, tone or scales, and reinforce these terms with their mathematical foundation. In this way, music helps concretize certain abstract mathematical ideas.