Nowadays, a musician is commonly regarded as someone who performs or composes music, or both. Music is largely seen as a form entertainment. However, there is more to this art form.
Have you heard of the International Association for Music & Medicine? Or the British Association for Music Therapy? And scholarly journals such as Music and Medicine, Psychology of Music, Computer Music Journal and Music & Science? Such alliances highlight a musician’s role in the health professions, engineering and the sciences.
It is only recently that music became the preserve of entertainment. In Medieval times, music was an integral component of higher education. Together with the topics of arithmetic, geometry and astronomy, music formed the must-have thinking skills set of the time, referred to as the Quadrivium. In this context, music was the study of the behaviour of numbers in time and correlations between quantities. Playing music was not a subject matter for scholarship until the Renaissance. From then on, music progressed into becoming an art form, increasingly disconnected from the exact sciences. But this is not a bad thing.
Fundamentally, music still is mathematics. However, now music has the added bonus of creativity, subjectivity and emotions. In order to handle music, we deploy a wide range of problem-solving brain functions that would not have been engaged together otherwise.
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