Functional Melodies: Finding Mathematical Relationships in Music

This Book has some good ideas but it is completely useless if you don't have the CD that suppose to come with the book with it doesn't come with it, and they don't even sell it or anything,so it is useless. a waste of money. and the writing is so mediocre. in overall this book represents mediocrity at its highest.

This is an exciting book, filled with really fascinating ways to approach both music and mathematics. Though the author is a high school teacher, he has included suggestions for using this approach with primary level students as well as more advanced ones. There is also a CD of musical passages to use.The first activity in the book, for example, has students listen to certain tracks from the CD and decide what geometry term each could metaphorically represent. This could be a great way to approach the idea of teaching metaphors, as well as geometry. I can imagine spirited discussions of why a musical phrase might be considered oblique or parallel.Unfortunately, unless you have a strong background in both music and math, you will find this book very hard to read, let alone use. Busy elementary school teachers are not going to slog through it, even though the gems hidden there are worth the effort.

I use this book for my secondary math classes, and share ideas with my colleagues. One excellent activity we just did in class had to do with transformations of functions. It's been so great to continuously refer back to this activity when kids struggle with a new parent function.