11/14/2023 0 Comments Math songs![]() Todd Snider sings the Statistician Blues, amusingly describing the manipulation of numbers and how this can end up screwing with your head. Now to the problems mathematics can cause us. Binary is everywhere, there’s no getting away from it – or, in their words “it can’t be ignored”. In their song All Ones and Zeros, the Early Years make reference to the binary numerical system. I’m pretty sure she’s made some of these up, but if you get past the very odd middle bit it’s quite a sweet tune. Linda Perhacs’s Parallelograms is a psychedelic folk track created by her repeating the names of various geometric shapes. DaddyPig described in the comments the problems musicians encountered with this theory and how Bach went some way to solve the conundrum of inconsistent tuning in his Prelude and Fugue No1 in C major. He surmised the ideal of perfect ratios derived from the sound of hammer strikes at a blacksmith’s forge to create different musical notes. Pythagoras was another who applied mathematics to music. If I understood the equation, I’m sure I’d appreciate it’s beauty, but unfortunately just looking at the Wikipedia page gives me a headache – nominator BeltwayBandit explained it very succinctly in his justification. Instead I chose just VDGG’s Mathematics, a song about Leonhard Euler’s Identity Equation, which it describes as a thing of mathematical beauty. I could have created a playlist entirely from Van der Graaf Generator tracks or Peter Hammill nominations. The basis of this work is a series of complex number sets which do not diverge when iterated, hence creating complex fractal geometric symmetrical shapes … It’s worth checking some of this out more because it is a great reminder of the importance of maths in art. He’s certainly passionate about the work of the mathematician he namechecks in Mandelbrot Set. ![]() doi: 10.1093/jahist/jau371.Jonathan Coulton must be the ultimate geek musician. "The New Math and Midcentury American Politics". "The original new math: Storytelling versus history". ^ "Tom Lehrer: a comical, musical, mathematical genius". ![]() ^ Frederick, Prince (29 November 2018)."Mathematical music theory pedagogy and the 'New Math' ". Phillips writes that, by including this song among other songs of great political and social import on That Was the Year That Was, Lehrer "seamlessly-and accurately-placed the new math among the major events of the mid-twentieth-century United States". enjoyed by new math proponents and critics alike". Lehrer's song has been described as "well-informed and literate. The same book states that by the time of the song's release in 1965, the concept was at its peak in American education. According to the book The New Math: A Political History, the song "purported to be a lesson for parents confused by recent changes in their children's arithmetic textbook". Lehrer, at the time a doctoral student of mathematics at Harvard University, used the song to satirize the then-new educational concept of New Math, introduced in American schools in the late 1950s and early 1960s as an attempt to reform education of mathematics. ![]() The song features a spoken-word intro by Lehrer, followed by "piano played at a quick tempo and brisk lines". It correctly describes the step-by-step process for subtracting 173 from 342 in decimal and then subtracting the numbers 173 8 and 342 8 having the same digits in octal. The song is composed in the key of C major in a 2/4 time signature. Found on his album That Was the Year That Was, the song is a satire of the then-contemporary educational concept of New Math. New Math is a 1965 song by American musician Tom Lehrer. "New Math"įrom the album That Was the Year That Was For the Bo Burnham song, see Bo Burnham (album).
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