Abstract:

Music and Mathematics could be seen as separate curricular areas. However some common concepts like harmony, symmetry or rhythm indicate a close relation between both disciplines. What will happen if music students develop mathematical analysis in order to understand the inner structure of a composition? And, what will happen if mathematics students will use music as data for its calculations?

The interdisciplinary project “Música Matemática” has been realised by students of the degree in Primary Education, joining students from second and fourth year from the subjects “Music Education and Teaching” and “Mathematics and Teaching III” respectively.

“Música Matemática” is composed of two planning stages. Firstly, a stage of creation of musicograms based on songs or musical pieces chosen by the students. These musicograms are a kind of schematic score in which units of sound or rhythms are represented through drawings or geometrical symbols allowing children to accompany the listening of music. Secondly, those musicograms are interpreted as a compilation of graphical and musical information that becomes the source to design problems and mathematical activities to work statistics and data representation considering each symbol as a qualitative value of a graphical variable.

The final objective of the two planning stages is the development of a double class session for Primary Education, first for music and then mathematics, for which undergraduate students have to design the sessions and create the materials that will be used in them. Additional teaching methodologies develop in the sessions include active listening, cooperative work and problem based work.

Attitude of pre-service teachers after developing the project was assessed trough survey gathering quantitative and qualitative data. The first results analysed support the benefits of combining both areas for an improved cross learning: students become aware of many relations between music and mathematics; were able to suggest many other possibilities to teach both subjects together apart from statistics; and could propose other possible subjects in which music could play a beneficial role.

Additional data were collected through the observation of the sessions carried out in two Primary Schools, these related with the engagement of children in activities, classroom collaboration between music and maths undergraduate students and attitude of the tutors of the classes participating in the project.

Keywords:

Music and teaching, Mathematics and teaching, Musicograms, Statistics, Pre-service teachers, Interdisciplinarity.