We started this meeting with a warm-up question: What is something you are good at that you could teach someone else? It turned out we were a very talented group with skills ranging from kayaking to mountain climbing and from making enchiladas to reading and writing Egyptian hieroglyphs.
We took some time on our own to explore some demonstrations of the new music and sound features of Mathigon Polypad. (To learn more, go to Using Polypad: Music – Mathigon.)
Here are the Polypads we explored:
After some noticing and wondering (not reproduced here so that you can notice and wonder yourself), folks were interested in things like trying to recreate a tune using geometric shapes and programming a simple song. We also had questions about how the sounds were associated with different shapes, fraction bars, or number bars.
I demonstrated how to access the musical settings of an object in Polypad, and then we went into breakout rooms to explore further.
(To access the musical settings of an object, select the object and then click on the musical note in the action bar.)
Gina, Jeniah, and Eric explored creating a tune using the song tile (found under Music in the Games and Applications menu on the left of the screen). They looked up some sheet music to support their efforts and made connections between the lengths of the notes as fractions (half note, quarter note, eighth note, etc.) and the lengths of the number bars they were using to get Polypad to play the notes. They wowed the group with their creation, but it was sadly lost due to a Polypad glitch. Luckily, Jeniah was inspired and determined and recreated it even better than before. Here is her masterpiece: https://mathigon.org/polypad/8vzCtAKReq3Pw (Click the small play button at the bottom left of the top song tile to start the song.)
Roger, Edward, Khom, and Sarah experimented with the settings and sounds of different tiles, investigated the lengths and tempo of tones generated by different fraction bars, and had some general discussion of the big question of what music has to do with math.
In the closing discussion, we saw how playing with these musical features connected to mathematical objects involved a lot of mathematical thinking. And in addition to the multiple ways that math shows up in music, we also found that playing with music and finding fun and joy in it helped us to find some fun and joy in math. Specifically, fractions – which can feel scary – felt a lot friendlier when we were experiencing them in a musical context.
Present: Amy, David, Edward, Eric, Gina, Jeniah, Khom, Roger, Sarah
