Paulo On Picardy Profiles: Viral Street Performers, Vol. 1
What Does THIS Have To Do With Music?: Steve Harvey’s Family Feud
The Universal Language & Miss Universe: Catriona Gray’s Love For Music
Music Musings: Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You”
“A Star Is Born” 2018: A Musical Analysis
What Does THIS Have To Do With Music?: “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver”
Shin Lim’s “America’s Got Talent” Journey: A Musical Analysis
The Music of “Crazy Rich Asians”: A Cultural Sampler
The Best WWE Themes from SummerSlam 2018
The Musical Magic of Shin Lim

This Month in Music & Mathematics: March 2018

By Paulo Camacho

Now, here’s something a little different, but nonetheless, pretty cool — if you have around 12 minutes to spare:

In case you didn’t have the time (nor the patience) to watch the above video, that was basically the value π set to music — more specifically, each number of π set to a specific note of the C-major pentatonic scale. What you might expect as melodic chaos ends up being an interesting marriage of mathematics and music.

Interestingly enough, despite its study spanning centuries, the connection between math and music is not widely discussed in general education, or popular culture. As Boston University Research Neuroscientist Yohan John said in a 2013 Quora, “… it’s unfortunate that we don’t teach these connections to kids in school, because that might make them see mathematics in a new light.”

With that in mind, let us highlight some of the most recent instances where music and mathematics intertwine:


Jami Jorgensen is a middle-school teacher hailing from Hayward, in the East Bay Area. She teaches at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School, in 7th- and 8th-grade mathematics. Her students’ demographics see 75 percent coming from low-income families and 72 percent coming from students who speak English as a second language. In order to reach these students, and teach them more effectively, she uses something unexpected, yet surprisingly effective: song and dance.

Jorgensen uses music — specifically, a lesson plan involving a series of chants, dances and carols — to help students with remembering mathematical concepts. By employing music this way, Jorgensen succeeded in injecting a school subject most students would consider boring with a level of fun. According to her students, the songs that “the human jukebox of quadratic equations” had managed to conjure up — either arithmetical plays on popular songs, or tunes that the class jointly makes on the fly — help them remember mathematical formulas. They also instill in them a sense of enjoyment with math that gives them a desire to learn more.

On top of that, previous academic findings — like, for example, Petr Janata’s 2009 study published in the journal Cerebral Cortex — have found substantial evidence that a specific part of the brain that stores memories is found in the same region that processes music and emotion. It would explain why certain songs are capable of triggering specific memories in a given individual. This same process happens with Jorgensen’s students, as they have reported higher test scores.

(You can learn more by clicking here.)


Lamar Queen was once considered the “boring teacher” by his math students. Then the Grambling State University graduate decided to buck the label, using the power of music in the process. As co-founder of Music Notes, an education program dedicated to “[increasing] student engagement in school by providing high quality educational music and videos to educators and their students,” Queen has managed to, as they say, “make math cool.”

One of Queen’s staples, as part of Music Notes, is a series of educational DVDs, which feature his own brand of what they call “rap pedagogy.” Here is an example of Queen’s work from 2007, entitled “Slope Intercept”:

Much like Jorgensen’s teaching methods, Queen has resolved to use rap and hip-hop as an effective way to teach mathematics. And, as a way to remember mathematical concepts, it works. As one student put it:

The music helps me remember, because whenever I need help with a problem, I can sing it in my mind.

His colleagues, like Creekside Elementary School Principal Nadakia Neal, also agree with Queen’s pedagogical strategies, saying that the program “gets the teachers interested and it opens their eyes to new ways of teaching, and to kids it opens their eyes to new ways of learning.”

(You can learn more by clicking here, and by visiting Queen’s website here.)


The advent of advanced technology has allowed for some amazing innovations, and the music world is no exception.

Take this year’s Music Ally panel at the By:Larm Conference in Oslo, Norway. They were discussing the more sensitive issues regarding the relationship between A.I. and music — more specifically, how do traditional musicians approach the idea of the artificial intelligence threat of, for lack of a better term, “taking their jobs”? They featured an example of A.I.-generated music that recently came out of Sony’s Paris labs:

And so the argument goes: technology-generated music may eventually overtake music composed by human beings, in terms of style and quality. In fact, Amazon is already attempting to do this with their seminal product, Alexa, and a new “skill” called DeepMusic — it’s a song generator that is completely fabricated by the program’s artificial intelligence. This particular journalist tested out the program, and admitted that, while the generated song sounded decent, it is fairly obvious that the music is artificially fabricated, with a number of minor errors that humans simply wouldn’t make in basic composition.

And so, the counter-argument goes: A.I.-generated music — at least, as it is currently constructed — still needs humans to 1) partially control its algorithms in order to pump out its best content, and 2) judge whether or not the music, itself is actually good.

(You can learn more about this by clicking here [Warning: Contains NSFW language], and here)