![]() ![]() Others have compared the explorations of Charles Darwin and Felix Mendelssohn, astronomy and Gustav Holst’s “The Planets,” and the relationship between neuroscience and the music of Johann Sebastian Bach.Emphasising the steady beat by clapping or moving to the music aids in the development of one-to-one correspondence in children. This presentation is the fourth in a series of “Voyages of Discovery” programs put together by the symphony and the Santa Fe Institute. “It’s a great age for them to start seeing the deeper beauty of math,” Moore said, adding that he is unhappy with the way math is taught, geared toward testing and right-wrong answers, rather than the ideas that underlie the numbers. The two student performances are “packed,” he added. Thanks to a donation from the Andrew and Sydney Davis Foundation, a truncated version of this presentation will be performed at no cost for middle-school students, both from public (“all of Capshaw Middle School”) and private schools, from Santa Fe and even a few from Albuquerque, Heltman said. Prime numbers, sine waves and more will enter the conversation. He will talk about resonance in music, both in a way that a singer can break a glass and in the intervals of moons orbiting Jupiter. We’re surprised all the time.”Īnd while Western musicians use a 12-tone scale and a lot of Eastern music relies on a five-tone scale, sounding very different to our ears, they are still based on some very simple fractions, Moore said. ![]() “It’s how every scientist and mathematician is trying to understand the natural world …. “It’s the tension between order and chaos, predictability and surprise,” Moore said. The best music – and this can be said about a number of things – offers a pattern, but also some unanticipated breaks in that pattern. That repeating pattern in different scales, Moore added, “is what a fractal is,” physically reflected in the shape of a fern or pattern of a coastline. Moore will use these bits to demonstrate how certain ratios of musical notes are used to tune instruments and sound more pleasing to us than others how composers use symmetry, repeating themes, but sometimes echoing them on different scales. “We could have used music just from the last 50 years, but I think we would have had lots of resistance as far as attracting an audience, simply because people are not familiar with it.”Īs it is, the selections chosen to illustrate mathematical concepts in music range across 3,000 years, from “an ancient hymn found on a cuneiform tablet” to Bach and Tchaikovsky to John Williams and the soundtracks from “Harry Potter” and “Mission Impossible,” Heltman said. “We had far more possibilities for the repertoire than we had time,” Heltman said in explaining the choice of musical bits. Oh, yes, and there will be a 40,000-year-old flute, a ceramic trumpet from Peru that was played long before Europeans came to the continent, and an 84-year-old theremin – you know, that instrument that produces sounds suited for a haunted house or, oddly enough, the sunnier music of the Beach Boys. You’ll be shown how different mathematical relationships among notes can evoke different emotions. You can see how the rich tonal variations of an instrument are reflected in sand vibrating across the surface of a vibrating plate, or how PVC pipes of different lengths produce different notes. ![]() He’s hoping to reveal the different colors of music that go beyond notes on a page.Īll this will be done, they hope, with live music by the symphony orchestra, a narration by Moore, visuals on a screen and active demonstrations. He’s looking for discovery, whether it’s people leaving saying, “I never knew pi went on forever,” or “I didn’t know Ravel’s ‘Bolero’ could be played like that.” Santa Fe Symphony Orchestra and Chorus Founder and General Director Greg Heltman. Heltman, founder and general director of the Santa Fe Symphony, equates music with drama, so he’s going for the “wow factor,” he said. I think it’s really true that the part of the brain that is excited by music is the same part excited by mathematics.” ![]() “I wanted to take the opportunity to try to get across to people what math means to someone like me, what it’s like under the surface, under the crust of just doing arithmetic,” said Moore, a mathematician at the Santa Fe Institute. Cris Moore is a mathematician and professor at the Santa Fe Institute. ![]()
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