Its surprising that the abstraction of music connects it’s musical chord with abstraction of mathematics.
We have conducted this unique experiment in Ladakh. In the background of fizzy mountains and beautiful cloud cover, the students of 8th ,9th and 10th standard were sitting with enthusiasm.
The session was started with clap rhythms and then it evolved into the particular ‘kaharva’ rhythm of classical music. Students participated in learning this rhythm styles and also identifying familiar local songs based on this rhythm.
Then the same rhythm which was coming in multiples of two is captured by me to introduce the concept of binary coding. Before that the concept of repetative rhythm is connected to modular mathematics. How we are surrounded by loops of modular maths ?example week is a modular maths of 7, month is a modular model of 30 and 31 ,time is modular model of 12 or 24.like this once they know modular model meaning, I introduced them the modular maths of binary where remainders can be 1 and 0. This introduction was used to teach them the coding in binary and also demonstrated the coding in 4 and 8 base numbers which is nothing but modular mathematics application.
The history of coding dates back to around 1000 years back when Pigalacharya first introduced this and his very own brother Panini ,used the coding system in linguistic approach to derive the ‘vrutta’ or science of poetry -making and also scientific approach of pronunciation ,which is surprisingly the common intersection point of mathematics and music.
We used the very same concept to give them the glimpses of coding in language. Language coding helps to hear the sounds of letters in better way and one must put extra attention to ‘ucchar shastra’ or science of pronunciation that is hearing the sounds of every alphabet and word very minutely.
I hope that if we further develop this approach then one day students can learn innovatively both these subjects and perspective of looking at mathematics may change globally
Really looking forward to many more opportunities to conduct such experiential workshops.
Prajakti Gokhale
(Innovative mathematics facilitator)
