Functional Melodies
This book states that it is aimed at enrichment for primary/middle school. Its author exudes enthusiasm for his project of wanting to help students feel positive about mathematics by linking maths with music and he has much musical expertise. The book comes with its own CD, which is integral to the book’s content, with lots of clear photocopiable sheets and many ideas for instruction and learning. There is a lot of rich, original material in the book.
‘Primary’ is a bit misleading, for example, p122, refers to polar coordinates being studied as part of the primary curriculum! And, to give you a flavour of the content, the 11 chapters start with “Sound Shapes: hearing geometry as function and metaphor’ and the last chapter is called “Scaling the scale part II: a solution to the limitations of Pythagorean tuning”.
I started going through the book from the beginning and set up the CD so I could listen to the tracks. The tracks are short (between 17 and 44 seconds) sound sequences designed to ‘illustrate’ a feature that the listener/learner is supposed to spot; they are not really fun to listen to as they are so focussed on the feature. In the first chapter the learners, within a discussion group, are asked to match geometric terms from a given list (including, ‘even’, ‘oblique’, ‘congruent’) to each of 10 sound tracks. Answers are given for all the exercises and I got all of this matching wrong (well I am not very musical). It made me feel relieved that I’d learnt maths without music! The idea of group discussion might well work if you have students with good musical ears, but to my companion and myself this exercise was difficult to discuss and hard to predict what was wanted. Although the introduction says that the materials are “friendly for all mathematics teachers regardless of musical background”, I wouldn’t risk using it, yet I would use the Nuffield* A level text that incorporated music and mathematics (albeit with post 16 students).
Even though the course set out in the book is not for me – as teacher or student - I do think that it could be a useful resource for musical mathematics teachers with a musical student who would benefit from ‘enrichment’. You have to be musically confident to engage students with the contents particularly as there is emphasis on group discussion and if you cannot hear the features well, then it is hard to draw out students’ ideas.
* Nuffield (1994) Mathematics Music and Art, Harlow, Essex: Longman
Melissa Rodd teaches mathematics education at the Institute of Education, London and, temporarily, some maths at Wheatley Park School near Oxford
Functional Melodies
Beall, Scott (2000)
Emeryville, CA, USA
Key Curriculum Press
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