♫ (Author 1 & Author 2 ) ♫
Introduction
For interesting sequences, it’s certainly hard to beat the Fibonacci numbers. People rightly marvel at the appearance of these numbers in nature (i.e. seed heads, pine cones, and petals on flowers), or the connections to art (i.e. the golden ratio), but how many people have heard the Fibonacci numbers transformed into music?
This article profiles the use of a freely-accessible online program called Music Algorithms, which was designed to accept an input of any sequence of integers and to generate an output of musical sounds based on those integers.
By exploring the two processes by which the Music Algorithms converts sequences into music, students can expand their ideas of transformations using division and modulo operations. While the activities described in this article are quite accessible to both middle or high school students, teachers should note that the requisite knowledge would include proportional reasoning and some basic ideas of modular arithmetic.
By having students use Music Algorithms even as they learn the mathematics by which it operates, they gain a new creative venue for exploring sequences of all types, a venue that links the musical world to that of numbers in a powerful and appealing way. So enjoy getting started with Fibonacci Scales & Melodies!
