Use Music to Teach K12 Science
Interdisciplinary Science Resources
Rappin' about CERN's Large Hadron Collider!
The most important scientific instrument in decades was just turned on yesterday. We will finally be able to split subatomic particles and get a glimpse of the stuff that makes our universe work.
HIGH SCHOOL
- Planning an Integrated Thematic Curriculum Unit (some great suggestions)
- Wilton High School Chemistry by Bob Jacobs
- We hope to develop and inspire poets as well as scientists.
- The language of mathematics and whether or not the language is spoken by man, god, or nature.
- Studying the Language Barriers Among Different Disciplines -- Focus on Translation: Mathematics is generally not taught as a language, how should students learn to speak it?
- Teach students to translate among the languages of English, mathematics, and chemistry.
- Integrating Math, Science and
Language
Arts (many examples of lesson plans)
MUSIC ABOUT SCIENCE
3rd - 12th
-
"The Elements" Song by Tom Lehrer - MUST SEE
- AstroCappella: Noctilucent Cloud Words and Music by
Patricia Boyd Boyd's group used national science curriculum standards to write songs about the
sun, planets and sound waves.
The a cappella astronomy songs of the Chromatics (hear the song that triggered the RIAA's cease-and-desist letter) lyrics and sound files - Songs About Colors and the Electromagnetic Spectrum
- Songs About Electricity & Magnetism and Optics
- Songs About Quantum Mechanics
- Science Songs free for the downloading.
- Astronomer's Songbook PDF: A collection of most of the songs about astronomy which are set to familiar tunes by Jon U. Bell.
- The Twelve Days of Christmas: Music meets math in a popular Christmas song
- SPACE TRAVEL - Mission Control by Carmina Ravosa
- Computing Lyrics - A selection of songs moaning about just how irritating computers are.
Musical Inventions
K-12 TEACH Science-themed material, ranging from:
SCIENCE OF MUSIC - Study Shows iPods Help Doctors Hear the Beat of your heart.
"You Can Tell It's a Cell" by J.P. Taylor offers a nice overview of cellular structures Flandersand Swann's "First and Second Law" serves as a lead-in to lectures on thermodynamics.
Phil Tulga great interdisciplinary activities
Art and Science Collaborations
Clara Rockmore Who First Rocked the Theremin in the Early 1920s Born in Russia, March 9, 1911, Clara inherited the family trait of perfect pitch and could pick out melodies on the piano at age two," says the Nadia Reisberg and Clara Rockmore Foundation's biography. Her performances, sometimes accompanied by Nadia and sometimes as a part of an orchestra, led to the release of her first album (recorded by Robert Moog, whose name also echoes down the halls of electronic music), The Art of the Theremin in 1977. Hear Seven Hours of Women Making Electronic Music (1938-2014)
The theremin or thereminvox is one of the earliest fully electronic musical instruments. Invented in 1919 by Russian Lev Sergeivitch Termen (also Termin, later gallicized to Léon Theremin), the theremin is unique in that it requires no physical contact in order to produce music and was, in fact, the first musical instrument designed to be played without being touched. The instrument consists of a box with two projecting radio antennas around which the user moves his or her hands to play.
The Mathematics of Musical Instruments
From Crypto to Jazz
To the uninitiated, modern jazz can sound like a secret language, full of unpredictable melodies and
unexpected rhythms. For alto saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa, however, the idea of jazz as code is more than
just a metaphor.
Mahanthappa is best known for combining avant-garde jazz with Indian classical music. But for his latest
release, Codebook [1], from Pi Recordings, the artist looked instead to cryptography and number theory for
inspiration. (The album's title pays homage to The Code Book, a history of cryptography by the British
science writer Simon Singh.)
The very first track, "The Decider," is a groovy primer on how to turn math into music. Its
bristling melody (.mp3) [2] is derived from the Fibonacci sequence, an infinite series of integers that
governs the structure of everything from pineapples to the Parthenon.
Fibonacci's fingerprints can be found in the work of classical composers from Bach to Bartok, but
intentionally basing a composition on the series is hardly standard practice in jazz. What's most
striking
about "The Decider," however, is how closely its written melody resembles one
of Mahanthappa's improvised solos, a correspondence that reveals just how deeply the saxophonist has
internalized what might have remained an abstruse, pencil-and-paper exercise.
Later on in the piece, drummer Dan Weiss spells his own name in Morse code, using short durations to
represent
dots and long ones to represent dashes. ("Play It Again Sam" begins in similar fashion, with every
member of Mahanthappa's quartet dotting and dashing (.mp3) [3] his
name.)
Returning to the realm of number theory, the tune "Further and In Between" is based on the
cyclical
number 142857. Like all cyclical numbers, this one has some very strange properties; for example, if you
multiply it by 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6, you get the same digits in a different configuration (for example, 2 x
142857
= 285714).
By mapping particular musical pitches to each digit and running through his multiplication tables,
Mahanthappa
came up with a winding, circuitous melody (.mp3) [4] that makes a surprising amount of sense. That's
partly because he wedded it to a strong, swinging rhythm, and partly because he gave himself permission to
fudge things a bit in order to prevent the math from overwhelming the music.
"Frontburner," based on a heavily encrypted form of John Coltrane's classic "Giant
Steps," demonstrates a similar balance between musicality and mathematical rigor.
Cryptonerds will be pleased to know that Mahanthappa used a portion of the "Giant Steps" melody as
a
musical keyword in conjunction with several different scales to encipher the original tune (.mp3) [5]. He
used
a similar method to generate the melody for "Play It Again Sam,"
further complicating matters by throwing in a biblical Hebrew cipher known as "atbash".
In cryptographic circles, this is known as a polyalphabetic substitution cipher, and it was the preferred
form
of military encryption right up through World War II.
In this particular case, it may have been too effective: The first, properly encrypted form of
"Frontburner" didn't quite work from a musical perspective, so Mahanthappa massaged the
results
until he got something that did. The end result (.mp3) [6] is a tune that will keep both sides of your brain
buzzing happily away.
Making avant-garde jazz accessible to the general public is no mean feat. Making math-based music easy on
the
ears is even harder. Yet somehow Mahanthappa has managed to do both. And that's a code many musicians
would doubtless like to crack.
[1] amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000H5TURC/c4iorg
[2] http://sonibyte.com/audio/1117.mp3
[3] http://sonibyte.com/audio/1119.mp3
[4] http://sonibyte.com/audio/1120.mp3
[5] http://sonibyte.com/audio/1118.mp3