What do you mean you can look at a plate of six cookies and just know there are six cookies?
I was in my 30s when I learned that the average person possesses this inherent ability to group things, and boy was I pissed. Since childhood I knew two things were true: I was bad at math, and I couldn’t play an instrument.
I don’t ever want to speak for an entire population of people (5% of the world has dyscalculia by current estimates) but I can describe what dyscalculia is like for me. I also feel compelled to share because this very real condition is so rarely discussed. I'll take any opportunity I have to help adults understand the perspective of kids who might be looking through a different lens.
As a kid having undiagnosed dyscalculia meant being incredibly bad at multiplication. This turns out to be a hallmark of the mathematics learning disability, which frequently involves severe, daily challenges with mental arithmetic alongside math anxiety and math avoidance. This avoidance typically develops because someone isn’t as fast to grasp concepts. I wouldn’t have any problem counting money, or telling time on a digital clock though, which would lead to skepticism when I couldn’t finish a multiplication time test. Every report card would read “Does not live up to potential.”
My first crushing clash with this invisible barrier in a musical sense happened a few years later in my 6th-grade band class. I had fought my parents hard to be able to play the alto saxophone – I thought it was a beautiful instrument, and I was excited to be just like Lisa Simpson. One day, my new band teacher looked at me not playing and asked what my problem was. Frozen, trying to understand what was happening, I told him I was having trouble with my "E's." His response? That I had "a lot more problems than that."
I quit playing the sax that semester. I was mortified. How could all these kids around me read what was on the page? What was I missing?
My experience perfectly mirrors the findings in Sheerin Hosseini's study, “The lived experiences of adult musicians with dyscalculia: A heuristic inquiry,” which identified the impact of teachers' actions and shrinking self-esteem as major emergent themes for musicians with this condition. Like many of the ten successful adult musicians studied by Hosseini, those early negative experiences with authority figures chipped away at my confidence. I wasn’t musical. I couldn’t be good. If anything, I could go to Solo & Ensemble to sing with my friends, and that would be the relationship I was allowed to have with music.
It would be six years before I picked up another instrument, this time a keyboard, strictly because I needed an elective. I knew from choir that my ear was decent and my memory wasn't terrible. I initially thought, “I was probably just lazy back then," but quickly realized I couldn't read the notes at the required tempo. Instead, I bypassed the sheet music entirely to get by. I memorized the noises that were supposed to happen when my teacher would play examples, recorded her playing, and let my hands learn to follow suit. It’s been 25 years since then and my hands and ears still remember how to play what I call “The Pony Song” which was the end of the semester tune we needed to get out.
I didn't know it at the time, but I was developing coping strategies that would follow me through years of corporate work. It's amazing what you can do when you accept that you sometimes must adapt what is given to reach an end goal. The study notes that musicians with dyscalculia frequently face specific challenges with reading and memorizing music, counting during resting periods, subdivision, and music theory. My absolute terror of sheet music wasn't a personal failure; it was a textbook symptom of dyscalculia. I was instinctively creating workarounds to bypass my brain's inability to process the musical math. The idea that you can know where that black dot on a line is without counting the lines or spaces to this day seems like a superpower.
As I got older, I kept trying to connect with music. I bought and sold guitars. I have a bass guitar gathering dust in my basement right now. Interestingly, the only times I felt successful with instruments were when I was playing Guitar Hero (which I was unreasonably good at) or using Rocksmith, a video game that acts as a music teacher. The visual, game-based interface completely removed the traditional math and theory of reading music, allowing me to bypass my dyscalculia.
For a long time, I didn't even know what dyscalculia was. But during my undergrad, an intense fascination with psychology and neuroscience led me to undergo a battery of psychometric tests. The results blew my mind and finally gave a name to the invisible wall I'd been hitting my whole life.
Since then, I've built a family, worked as an executive, and am graduating with my master's degree this fall. The stigma that I carried around with me from a childhood of “not living up to potential” made me afraid to go to college, afraid to do anything even a little related to math and really hindered my own belief in myself. However, like most stories with a happy ending, I met someone who believed in me (so I am marrying him, obviously). I started to accept that maybe I could do more: I got the degrees, read the literature, lowered my walls a little, and am much more comfortable being vulnerable in spaces that will hurt. As a former professional musician himself, when I discussed with him what it’s like to be unable to group items in my mind, he suddenly seemed to completely understand my fears around music. “You can’t subdivide, and you can’t group, obviously reading sheet music will be terrible for you." Sinfonia is one of the most vulnerable things I will do this year. I'd be lying if I said I hadn't considered quitting every day.
So, we color-code my music and remove anything from the sheet that will distract me from learning it. I have him play the music for me so I can hear what it is supposed to be. Most importantly, we alter the notation from a form that is dense (and convenient for printing) to a form that is arranged by color, shape and one dimension of space. No counting of lines necessary, no extra noise.
Having dyscalculia means the world isn't always built for how my brain processes information, whether that's multiplying numbers or reading a staff of music. One of the things I learned from the barrage of psychometric tests I took is that my processing speed far exceeds that of the average person, and if we could go back in time and do the same test, I can’t help but wonder if there wouldn’t be a gap there which would have us wondering if that processing speed wasn’t formed through the coping mechanisms created in my childhood experiences. A disability in one place always forces the hand of another place.
If someone out there feels terrified of sheet music or is convinced they aren't trying hard enough, know this: they might just be playing a different mental instrument than everyone else. If you’re a teacher, or musician, spend a few minutes perspective taking what it might be like to be in that 5% of the population. Adapt your tools. Share music with the world. Don't assume that reading sheet music printed in a particular fashion is required to be a successful musician.
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