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Mathematics, music, and hearing: Vi Hart does it again.

This, one of the videos from the remarkable Vi Hart, is absolutely brilliant.  It's twelve minutes long and worth every minute.  Watch with your kids.

(Incidentally, Vi Hart has recently been hired by Salman Khan to make videos for the Khan Academy.  Hard to imagine a better match.)

Math and music videos.

Remember a while back when I linked to the Music Animation Machine videos?  These animations visually represented some fairly complicated pieces of music, such as one of my favorites, Mozart's Symphony No. 40, as a series of colored bars scanning across the screen:

 

I loved the way the structure of the music was made visible; how I felt I could understand and grasp the music in a way I couldn't before.

At the time I posted that it reminded me of something, but I couldn't think what.  

Then this morning I saw a website that told me instantly what it was I had been reminded of:  Music boxes!

The above movie is from vihart.com, which is a treasure trove of videos about mathematical and musical recreations.  I can't recommend it highly enough.

Here's another video from vihart.com, this one about graph theory:

Enjoy!  My kids and I all did.

 

Good resource for movie/book/TV reviews.

I just stumbled across a website that was new to me that seemed worthy of sharing:  http://www.commonsensemedia.org .  It consolidates thousands of reviews of movies, books, TV shows, games, websites, and music, with notes about age-appropriateness and descriptions that ought to enable parents to make some judgments about whether the material is appropriate for their own children.  

Even better, there are many lists of recommended titles.  For example, here are the lists of recommended movies, (without regard to age-appropriateness), including such lists as "Best Offbeat Animated Movies" (Chicken Run, James and the Giant Peach) , "Best Anime Movies for Kids and Preteens" (Miyazaki holds the top five spots), and "Don't Mess With These Movie Moms" (The Incredibles, Spy Kids).  There are book lists too, which will help me as I am out of touch with any children's book published after about 1989.

 As usual, you can't let the judgment of the editors of any website substitute for your own judgment.  But it seems to me this site will be helpful in sifting through the huge volume of media aimed at kids.

Audiovisual.

So one of my homeschooling friends (hi Cathie!)  is really into the idea of different "learning modalities," you know, some people are auditory learners, some are tactile learners, that sort of thing.   She always tells me that I am a classic visual learner.  I admit I am not always sure that I buy it.

And then something comes along like this little YouTube gem.

And I think maybe there's something to it.  Because when I watch an animation like that, I feel like I'm really hearing the music properly for the first time.  It makes so much more sense to me.

(h/t Jimmy Akin)

ADDED:  Many, many more at the animator's YouTube page here.  I particularly got a lot out of his rendition of Mozart's Symphony No. 40, movement 1 -- the logic of the piece is made very obvious by the graphics.  You can see the countless places where that little three-note "da-da dum" rhythm that begins the piece, a musical bit almost too short to be called a theme, recurs and recurs and ties the whole thing together.    

My children were mesmerized by this.  Oh, also, his stuff is available for download and he sells a $25 DVD.  Could this be part of music education this year?

Running music #3.

1. "Beds Are Burning," Midnight Oil
2. "Big Time," Peter Gabriel
3. "Blister in the Sun," Violent Femmes
4. "Blue Sky Mine," Midnight Oil If the sugar refining company won't save me, who's gonna save me?
5. "Candy Everybody Wants," 10,000 Maniacs.  So their minds are dull and hazy/we give 'em what they want.
6. "Cut to the Chase," Rush
7. "Give It Away," Red Hot Chili Peppers What I got you got to give it to your daughter.
8. "End of the Line," The Traveling Wilburys
9. "Got To Get You Into My Life," The Beatles
10. "Honey Bee," Tom Petty
11. "Helter Skelter," The Beatles

Running playlist #2.

Still walking for a lot of it, of course.

1. "An American Girl" (Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers)  After all, it was a great big world/with lots of places to run to...
2. "Shock the Monkey" (Peter Gabriel)
3. "It's the End of the World As We Know It"(R.E.M.)  Time I had some time alone!
4. "The Lazy Boy" (Moxy Fruvous)  The cushion is comfy and the works don't rust...
5. "Chick Singers" (Dan Bern)  Kate Bush, Patsy Cline, Billie Holiday, Janis Joplin...
6. "Eat for Two" (10,000 Maniacs)  You know where this will lead/To hush and rock in the nursery...
7. "Go" (Indigo Girls) Use your years to psych you out/You're too old to care, you're too young to count...
8. "King of Spain"(Moxy Fruvous)  Hey Clinton, hey Yeltsin, got problems?  You call me!
9. "Cut to the Chase" (Rush)  
10. "Why Does the Sun Shine?" (They Might Be Giants)  Where hydrogen is built into helium at a temperature of millions of degrees!
11. "Hammer to Fall" (Queen)

This is one of four 40-minute lists on my iPod.   Do you have an exercise playlist?  What's on it, or what would be on it if you had one?

Groggy.

I didn't know it was possible, but as I walked around the 1-18th-mile track that circles the top of the basketball gym at the Y, I was dozing off on the straightaways.  Just for a couple seconds, in between rounding the corners, the music from my iPod floated me away into brief interludes of microsleep.  

I must be really tired, because I didn't think tunes like "Sledgehammer" are exactly, y'know, soothing.  "Mercy Street," maybe.  But generally, I don't put that sort of thing in playlists called "Running Music 2."

Here's to hoping the baby doesn't want to chat at 4 AM anymore.  Sooner or later he is going to discover that I am not much of a conversationalist at that hour.

Yoo-hoo.

Rich Leonardi gripes about On Eagles' Wings, this time pointing out that there are no eagles in Psalm 91.  

I, the ever-cheerful curmudgeon, join his gripe.  I also hate On Eagles' Wings, and am pretty sure that hatred of On Eagles' Wings is a prerequisite for membership in the orthodox-Catholic-blogosphere -- although come to think of it, if the orthodox-Catholic-blogosphere ever had an anthem, maybe it ought to BE On Eagles' Wings.  Because that would let us all be grumpy and curmudgeonly together.  What better way to cement the bonds among us?  We could all hold hands, sing On Eagles' Wings, and, I don't know, wave streamers or something.

For years I have thought of this as the "Yoo-hoo" song, based on a demonstration performed for me once when I was an alto in a "music ministry" at a parish that shall remain unnamed.  Try singing the first two notes and see what I mean. 

Actually, the main reason I hate OEW is because I love Ps. 91 so much.  I would go around singing it all day if it weren't for the fact that every time I try, I can't remember any other arrangement because the ingrained memory of OEW, which is an earworm if I ever met one, crowds it out.  (And I know that there are other compositions, including one I like, but I've been trying to remember any for the last 5 minutes and I can't.) 

I tried  to come up with a way to include Ps. 91 at my wedding.  It may seem an odd choice to others, but it expressed a lot of what I was feeling about entering into marriage at the time.

God will rescue you from the fowler's snare, from the destroying plague,

Will shelter you with pinions, spread wings that you may take refuge; God's faithfulness is a protecting shield.

You shall not fear the terror of the night nor the arrow that flies by day,

Nor the pestilence that roams in darkness, nor the plague that ravages at noon.

Though a thousand fall at your side, ten thousand at your right hand, near you it shall not come.

"Though a thousand fall... near you it shall not come."

History link of the day.

The Founding Fathers as big hair band.  Very fun video.

10,000 hours.

An interesting post on the interrelationship between talent and hard work.  The book that is mentioned in the post, about music and the brain, sounds like a good one.