Resource: Math, Science, Music
Back in 2016, I was invited to Washington DC to attend the launch of an amazing project, sponsored by the US Department of Education, the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz, and the musedlab from the NYU Music Experience Design department. called Math, Science, Music. Essentially it is a collection of projects that focus on STEM integration, including projects by my dear friends Gena Greher from UMass Lowell and Alex Ruthmann from NYU. There are 11 projects altogether and they are all really well designed. Here are a few of my favorites:
Groove Pizza is a VERY cool project that came from the amazing musedlab at NYU. Ethan Hein and Adam November designed it. It is a fun, engaging way to compose rhythms using a circular interface - hence the pizza name. Users can start working with one of the pizza presets and add/remove "toppings" to adjust the groove, or click on the "Shapes" tab and drag various shapes onto the big circle to play and explore math-inspired grooves. Once you are finished with your pizza, you can download your work as audio or midi files, or continue your groove over at Soundtrap.com or Noteflight.com. You can also import your work into interactive music notation at Flat.io by following the directions here: https://blog.flat.io/experiment-generating-a-sheet-music-from-your-groove-pizza/.
This website includes activities that provide opportunities for teachers and students to develop and explore assumptions, intuitions and understandings regarding the mathematics inherent in music. In this way we hope that math class will be awakened by the sounds of music with a particular emphasis in this case on the rhythmic aspects of music. It can easily be used in both a math class AND a general music class. There are numerous lesson plans, including a VERY cool composition project, listening activities, and a link to download a software program called TuneBlocks Impromtu that helps users become active and engaged music listeners.
Perhaps the best known project included in Math, Science, Music is the Chrome Music Lab from Google. Chrome Music Lab is a website that makes learning music more accessible through fun, hands-on experiments - and it’s all FREE. Many teachers already use Chrome Music Lab as a tool in their classrooms to explore music and its connections to science, math, art, and more. There are 14 music experiments in all, and my personal favorites are Song Maker, Rhythm, and Oscillators.
For those of you that have heard me speak on the subject of STEM and/or STEAM, you probably know that I have VERY strong feelings about trying to “justify” the teaching of music in schools by connecting it to the more “important” subjects - science, math, engineering and technology. Music is and always has been the most important subject taught in schools in my opinion, and we shouldn’t have to connect ourselves to other subjects. That said, if you have administrators who push the idea of STEM/STEAM, this website is a perfect way to assuage them.
Perhaps the best part of attending the launch of Math, Science, Music was the opportunity to meet one of my all-time musical heroes - Herbie Hancock. It was a thrill to hear him speak about technology and music education.
Herbie Hancock & I - April 2016