Muzak to math by (2): the mourning after the note before

In November, we said that we were about to try a series of “Music and Maths” sessions aimed at 16-19 year old students, to culminate in a public performance.

We were looking for a program which would “listen” to a note and report its frequency, and at the time didn’t find one - though we have, with many thanks to Steven Pon who wrote in response to the original post, since discovered WavePort, from PASCO Scientific.

We ran a pilot with individuals, audibly matching frequency generated from a PC to plucked strings and pressed electronic organ keys, and got surprisingly good results with very close approximations to the theoretical curves. Unfortunately, when we extended this to a class it was much less successful.

We split the class into two groups, one with a guitar and one with an electronic organ, and set them to matching frequency to note in the same way, discussing amongst themselves the best match and coming to a consensus on the value to be entered into a spreadsheet log. For some reason, the results did not even remotely resemble the pilot with individuals. Some results followed the theoretical curve; some were completely out (including, interestingly, some which were almost exactly one octave adrift) and others which perversely followed a sequence in the wrong direction!

We’ve dropped the idea for the time being, pending more thought and trialling. On the positive side, however, we learnt  a lot - and the students were very coöperative in trying to make the experiment work. We’ll be back to it in due course.

[contributed by Ivor McGillivray and Felix Grant]

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