Teaching Science, Art with Music
Schoolhouse Rock, The Elements, and Music Lessons for Math & History
Music provides some amazing multidisciplinary educational opportunities. How song lyrics, melody and musical structure can be used to improve retention in other subjects.
There's more to music than meets the ear. Music provides an engaging way to understand science, math, history, art and more.
Music is Science
Since the days of Pythagoras, music and science have been inextricably linked. At its most fundamental, science is what makes music music instead of just noise.
But not only is there science in music, there is music in science. The Kronos Quartet was commissioned by NASA to create a musical performance called Sun Rings , based on signals recorded from space over the past 40 years. They’ve transposed the music of nature -- vibrations of charged particles in a planet or star's atmosphere or magnetic field intercepted by radio antennas -- into a string performance accompanying a visual presentation.
We also use the science of music’s ability to carve a trench in our brains, where it runs endlessly sometimes, to help us learn and remember all sorts of things. Schoolhouse Rock has taken advantage of this phenomenon for years, teaching children everything from grammar to anatomy. And Tom Lehrer’s “The Elements” is a classic mnemonic for memorizing, for whatever reasons, the contents of the periodic table of elements.
Music is Mathematical
The website, Mathematics and Music, examines, among other things, the “Mozart Effect,” a phenomenon shown to create a statistically significant increase in test scores within an hour of listening to ten minutes of classical music.
The fact that we can even recognize music as separate from noise is due to a frequency ratio of 2:1, what we recognize as octaves. The ratio changes with the music, but can be mathematically accounted for as the Golden Mean, which becomes the Golden Section in music and can generate rhythm sections and develop melody lines.
Music is a Foreign Language
If you can’t read music, it certainly seems like a foreign language. But it’s also another language in the sense that it transcends the spoken word. The written notation of music can be read by anyone who reads music, regardless of what language they speak.
In the real sense of foreign languages, most musical terms are Italian, German, or French, all of which lead to the next thing music is…
Music is History
Music often reflects culture, environment, and the historical times and places of its creation. In Popular Songs in American History , you can learn about the tunes, lyrics and historical background of popular American music from the 17th to the early 20th centuries. Each song says something about our past – and the music and songs of every country tell their history as well.
History can be a pretty dry subject – explore it through music and it comes alive. It’s one thing to read about the Depression; it’s another thing entirely to hear the music of the Depression and to hear the words and rhythms used to describe it.
Music is Art
That music is art requires almost no explanation. Clearly it is the aural representation of beauty, love, anger, sadness, joy. Vivaldi painted pictures of seasons; cowboy ballads illustrated days of loneliness made tolerable because of memories of love and greener pastures.
Children (and adults) who listen only to popular music hear only a tiny part of a rich and remarkable story that spans back to the beginnings of time. The lessons of music are many and resonant. “Where words fail, music speaks,” said Hans Christian Anderson (“Thirty-second Evening,” in Picturebook Without Pictures, by Hans Christian Anderson, 1847).
Turn the radio dial and explore, or visit the library for a truly eclectic collection, and listen to what the music truly has to say.
