Resource Review: Making Music Count

Striking Gold with Resources

This week I found something really, really cool that I would like to share with you. I have already mentioned in my first post about how math always confused me, and even though I am musically inclined, I struggled with music theory as well. But what if you could learn them together and explicitly see the relationship between them without having to do a lot of inference? Maybe that would have helped me make the connections I somehow missed.

In practicum yesterday, I observed an awesome grade 4/5 music lesson. As part of it, we were singing a song that was very similar to the Christmas carol, “Angels We Have Heard on High”. The music book pointed out in a footnote to notice the translated pattern in the melody of “gloria”.

As you probably know, the word “gloria” is sung to a melisma comprised of a series of notes repeated 3 times, each time one whole tone lower. Okay, not everyone understands it in those terms, but you probably realize there is a repeated pattern in notes and rhythm. The idea of patterning in music stayed with me when I started to think of what to blog about this week, so it was a natural inclination to decide to research how to teach patterns and algebra with music.

However, I was disappointed. I spend almost 6 hours researching, and while I found countless articles and studies alluding and supporting a link to music and algebra, I found little actual lesson plans or activities to actually teach the link. I found a few activities for patterning and music, but much of it was suited for primary curriculum. Anything else I found was for high school algebra or really complicated university level math. Why couldn’t I find anything for middle school algebra that was comprehensive yet easy to teach? I almost gave up to write a boring blog post on a text book activity. They always say it looks darkest before dawn, and today I rung true. I finally struck gold and came across an innovative program that is quickly becoming a prevalent method of teaching algebra and music.

Make Music Count

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Mathematician and pianist Marcus Blackwell Jr. discovered how he had learnt to play the piano by ear by constructing the pitch relationships in mathematical terms. Using this euphony, he has created an entire curriculum using algebra to teach musical pitches and chords to current pop songs by artists like Justin Timberlake and Taylor Swift. He likens a scale on piano keys to a number line. After explaining the relationship between a semitone and whole tone, students practice figuring out the relationship of note a to note b. For example, a whole tone is 1 step in pitch. So D natural is 1 step/whole tone away from E, and one whole tone away from C. To figure this out, students are encouraged to use the piano scale/number line to find the related pitch. This can be put into an equation such as D + 1 = E, or D – 1 = C. Once this is concept is established, students can then find out the new note that is 2 or 3 whole tones away from D. Then comes the algebra. In order to find the first chord to a selected song, the student has to figure out the whole tone amount (the variable) towards each pitch. To do this, students are given x = 2. They must substitute the variable to find the note in the chord. Once they have figured this out, they have the chord. After doing this 3-5 times, they have the basic chords for a full pop song (honestly, you can play so many pop songs with a limited amount of basic chord progressions it’s laughable).

By reading articles, watching videos, and combing the website, all I can really pull out concretely without reading the actual workbooks is using the musical scale to represent and describe relationships between numbers, which can be useful to explain adding and subtraction, but also as a tool to introduce functions. In Making Math Meaningful, Small defines a function as “a relationship that leads to a particular output for a particular input”. In the Make Music Count program, the function would be +/- (# of whole tones) = (Pitch). The input would be the number of whole tones, labeled x, and the output with be the note/pitch. From the demos I have found, students practice substituting a given number into the input variable to find the pitches.

Make Music Count - Lesson 3 from Jarvis Addison on Vimeo.

Christmas List

I have asked for these work books for Christmas and am extremely excited to get to the details and extensions this program offers. Looking at their store, they also have a book on graphing and one on fractions. Needless to say, it’s a creative and exciting way to math, and as a reward for using math, students learn music. Can’t get much better than that!

Stay tuned for after Christmas for another post describing this program in detail. Has anyone used this program in their school? Can you explain how it works a little more deeply? Let us know in the comments!