“Rhythm depends on arithmetic, harmony draws from basic numerical relationships, and the development of musical themes reflects the world of symmetry and geometry. As Stravinsky once said: “The musician should find in mathematics a study as useful to him as the learning of another language is to a poet. Mathematics swims seductively just below the surface.” Du Sautoy 2011
Prior to starting the discovering mathematics module, maths and music are very different subjects. I see mathematics as an academic subject whereas music is more creative; which highlights how closed-minded I was.
We were asked at the beginning of the input to think as many links that we could think of between music and maths. After struggling for a few minutes, I think in all we managed to come up with 3 links. We were then shown the list of connections and the list was endless –
- Note values/rhythms
- Beats in a bar
- Tuning/Pitch
- Chords
- Counting songs
- Fingering on music
- Time signature
- Figured bass
- Scales
- Musical Intervals
- Fibonacci sequence
This video explores how the famous composer Beethoven was able to create spectacular pieces of music despite spending most of his career being deaf. Beethoven discovered that he was able to see the patterns in the music, therefore was able to know what the music was going to sound like. The clip also explores how our ears are able to detect whether a piece of music is nice sounding (consonance) or not (dissonant) – and how maths is used to determine this.
Wave lengths also provide us with the answer to why it is impossible to tune a piano. The video explains that a when the string of the vibrates, it can only vibrate in certain waves (sin waves) due to the strings being fixed to the end of the instrument. The more bumps in the wave, the higher the pitch and the faster the string has to vibrate. The reason why it is impossible to tune a piano is due to the fact that the instrument has too many strings. The video then goes onto explain in depth why having too many strings is an issue and how they use mathematical equations to solve why it is impossible to tune a piano.
I have found it very fascinating discovering the links between mathematics and music. I will definitely consider combining both subjects together when teaching concepts such as sequence and patterns within my teaching practice.
Du Sautoy, M. (2011). ‘Listen by numbers: music and maths’ Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2011/jun/27/music-mathematics-fibonacci (Accessed: 7 November 2017)
