Even Justin Bieber needs to know how to count.
On Friday, Grade 4 students at St. Bernard School learned why.
Legendary local folk musician Rodney Brown paid a visit to the school during lunch-hour to demonstrate to a group of mathematically inclined children just how intertwined the two disciplines are.
It made math a whole lot more fun, said Julian Di Giuseppe.
“Everything Rodney Brown said made sense – rhythm, bars, counting – it’s just the same thing as music,” he said.
“You never think math would have anything to do with music. In my opinion, music is more fun. I didn’t really think of that before.”
It has the youngster thinking now, about other ways math might be interesting and fun.
“It’s good to do math as a class, to write it down on paper and all, but I liked how we crossed music with that and it opened up a new dimension. There’s more to it than just multiplication and division. We can use it to be good musicians. If we know our math, then we’re pretty good in music sometimes.”
Classmate Katie Frederickson said she didn’t know music had anything to do with math.
“I just thought it was something you’d play for fun, for the music, and I didn’t think there was anything like math involved,” she said.
“Now I understand that there is a lot of math involved with the music.”
It was an eye-opener for Brown, who is focusing his music on the history of Northwestern Ontario, particularly as it relates to the fur trade.
Brown said creating more awareness about math and music sounded like a great idea to him. Though he uses math every day in his music, it wasn’t something he had really spent much time thinking about until Friday.
“It’s intrinsically there. You can’t avoid it. It’s something I think that most of us don’t really think about, the math that’s involved when you’re performing a song. If you’re a professional musician and you’re performing a song, obviously you’re doing that math,” Brown said.
“You have to know when your instrument is coming in, so you have to learn how to count bars. You have to know about the time signature, you have to know how many beats are in that bar, you have to know the value of the notes, which also tells you about the time signature.”
There’s also patterning involved, which also plays a heavy role in math class, he added.
Melanie Biesenthal is the math resource teacher for the Thunder Bay District Catholic School Board and called the program a plan to bridge the gap between the two subjects and put math to practical use.
As part of the board’s yearly mathematical challenge, students will be asked to vote for their favourite Rodney Brown song, with the data being displayed for all to see.
“It really ties in our data management and curriculum stand, plus it builds a community … Another aspect of that challenge is to see if students can pick out phrases of eight in music, so putting two bars of four together,” Biesenthal said.
