🎙 The Actuarial Angle - Music and Mathematics: Why So Many Actuaries Play an Instrument

Music is (Literally) Math

Leonardo Stincone, Senior Actuarial Data Scientist at Akur8, puts it plainly: 

"Music is math. If you look at it with an actuarial eye, you basically have rhythm, harmonies, they are all based on proportions."

He is not speaking metaphorically. An octave is a 2:1 frequency ratio. A perfect fifth is 3:2. A time signature is a fraction. 6/8 means six eighth notes per measure, grouped in twos of three. The brain parses that pattern before the hands ever move. Music and mathematics do not merely rhyme; they are the same language. Music theory is that language written in sound.

And for a mind drawn to quantitative structure, that is not a surprising place to feel at home.

The Practice Room Mentality: Discipline as an Actuarial Skill

Thomas Holmes, Chief Actuarial Officer at Akur8, offers a second angle that is perhaps less obvious but equally compelling. He points to the exam process, that famously grueling rite of passage that every actuary knows all too well.

"When people get into the actuarial career, the downside is that you have to take a lot of exams. And what do you tell a musician? Well, you have to study. You have to be in a room for hours a day studying. They say, 'I've already done this. That's what I do every day as a musician. I go into the room and I practice.'"

The overlap here is not superficial. The actuarial path is famously long. Most candidates sit the exams while working full time. Each exam means hundreds of hours of solitary study, and the willingness to fail and retake.

That is a punishing task for most people, but it maps almost exactly onto a musician's daily reality: hours alone in a room, the same passage repeated until it finally clicks. For someone who has lived that routine with an instrument, exam preparation asks for nothing unfamiliar.

Comfortable with Ambiguity

Thomas raises a second point that moves past discipline and into something more fundamental: the ability to make sound decisions when there is no single right answer.

"Musicians tend to be good actuaries because they’re okay with ambiguity. What is written on the page isn't always the truth. It isn't the full truth. Kind of like you look at your data, it's never going to tell you the full truth. You need to interpret it, and there are many different ways to interpret it, and that interpretation really parallels actuarial judgment. There's a lot of reasonable solutions, a lot of ranges of reasonability in actuarial work. There are ranges of reasonability in interpreting music."

A score defines the notes, but never the performance. Two musicians can read the same page and produce something unrecognizably different, and both can be right. Every actuary lives in the gap between the data and the decision. That gap is what actuary skills are built for: the numbers narrow the range, they seldom close it, and judgment fills the rest.

Where Science Meets Art: Pattern Recognition in Actuarial Work

Mateus Tannous and Suguru Fujita, both Actuarial Data Scientists, land on the same idea from slightly different directions: music and mathematics each live where structure meets creativity.

Mateus puts it simply: "I think it's mainly because music brings together patterns and creativity, and actuarial work has a similar creative dimension." Pattern recognition runs through everything an actuary does, from spotting a trend to catching an anomaly to sensing the moment a model drifts away from reality. A trained musical ear works much the same way. A familiar progression hints at where the music wants to resolve, and an unexpected turn calls for a response in the moment.

Suguru widens the lens: "Music sits right at the intersection of science and art. You have key elements like rhythm, harmony and melody. And you also need to add on your own judgment, interpretation and creativity. That's very similar to actuarial work. Basically you follow the technical methods but still make professional decisions as a team."

Leonardo carries that final thought into the rehearsal space: "When you play in a band, when you do a jam session, you play with other people. You need to listen to them, have a common vision and play your part. This is not so different from working in an actual team." In both worlds, technical skill is only the starting point. The rest comes down to listening, knowing when to lead and when to hold back, and building toward something no single player could reach alone.

That spirit was on full display at International Week, the annual gathering that brings every Akur8 employee together in France to celebrate the year's victories and bond as a team. At the 2026 edition, Leonardo, Mateus, and Suguru took the stage and played for the entire company.

So, Why Do Actuaries Play Instruments?

Maybe the better question is why one ever expected them not to. Mathematical fluency, disciplined practice, comfort with ambiguity, an ear for patterns, judgment exercised inside a structured framework: these actuarial skills are the raw materials of a good actuary, and they happen to be the raw materials of a good musician too.

This August, you might have an instrument in hand and some summer time to spare. If so, treat it less as a break from the day job than as another expression of it. The skills are already there. You are just playing them in another key.

Do you play an instrument? Comment with yours, and whether you see the same connection between music and actuarial work.

Until next time,

The Akur8 Team

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