Math and Music Are Connected

The information for this post was shared by Lori Marino, music teacher at Shelburne Community School. 

A fourth grade class was learning musical notation. Specifically, the associated number of beats each note is “worth” in a 4/4 measure. I drew the diagram shown in the pictures below. The last student to leave class had left the class line and drawn a note with multiple flags with a number written beneath it in the first picture. The student knew to increase to the power of 2 each time a flag was added to the eighth note which is valued at 1/2 beat in a 4/4 measure.

Curious when I saw the large number written below the note the student had drawn, I called a colleague, Jodi Sanders, in to see if we could verify. Sure enough after we worked through each power of 2 (we did have to resort to a calculator!) we verified that the student (who did not have a calculator!) nailed the value!! 

This was a remarkable accomplishment! After acknowledging the student's achievement later this afternoon, they told me that they had memorized all of the powers of two through 300 something million and proceeded to rapidly rattle off all of the numbers Jodi had worked to figure out earlier in about 5 seconds!

I thought this was a great academic/artistic connection to share!

Note: The excitement spread to others and students continue to make these connections. Here's another photo of what they worked on 2 days later. 

Wow, thank you for sharing this with us, Lori!