Math and Music - with some digression

My visit to the Land of Plenty and Prosperity 13 years ago, in San Antonio, considered to be the 9^th largest city in the USA, has been very enriching in many ways. My flexible hours of working enabled me to watch my small kids learn and grow to Music and with Music of all genres while she post-docked to hard and soft metal in her lab. We had the big boom box given by my wife’s sister who was in Austin at that time. Being just 4, Joji went to pre-Kinder at Glen Oaks Elementary School which was for a few hours each day. Preeti studied in Pat Neff Middle School and being an 8^th grader, she had full day school. Both dabbled in a lot of KTFM 102.7, from the boom box – fit for a theatre, sang all the possible songs they heard and learnt at the school choir and interestingly, Preeti sang and played practically all the tunes she knew on the Diano-Piano that we got for Joji from San Marcos. My sister-in-law once remarked to my wife: Why don’t you send Preeti for Piano lessons since she is so good? It did not take much time for my wife to put her thoughts into action. She had just started to drive the Honda Accord that I bought couple of months after our move to San Antonio, for a mere $3000-00. Ever since, escorting kids to after-school activities was hassle-free and driving was enjoyable too!

Preeti commended for her mathematical and musical aptitude in school as well, quickly enough got selected to sing for the Region Choir! Her foray into music was further propelled when she went to Taft’s High School for a year and joined the school choir while continuing to take piano lessons after school. Joji on the other hand, sang all the nursery rhymes learnt at The Tabernacles (Secunderabad) and Glen Oaks. She picked up Spanish quickly and sang Spanish songs taught at school. My wife is still amazed as to how a 4-year old could sing adult songs, heard over the radio, with great fervor and emotion. So it was Yamaha School of Music for the 5-year-old until our return to India in December 1997. Music has since then been ceaseless, seamless and an integral part of our life! We get nostalgic listening to the two compact discs of the Christmas program that thrills us to this day and a valued treasure in our chest!

While this is just one face of the diamond, the other phase of my life began soon after our return. Coping, caring and getting back to brass tacks took a while but as resilient humans, we survived spiritedly despite drop in haemoglobin levels of my three girls!  I found good piano teachers, thanks to my wife’s Dad who introduced us to Piano Mathews. There is no turning back since then and life has cascaded beautifully with ups and downs of musical notes from the Piano quickly complemented by violin strains from wee fingers.

This is an important milestone with LIVE Musical conversations!

There are numerous articles in addition to one in 1998 that showed that children, who learned piano at an early age, were able to better memorize. Is there a connection between the two “M’s”? Does one look for that consciously? My wife does not think so. Just follow your natural ability and passion with inputs from your local environs. Enjoy the purity of thought or idea. Hone your skills and talent is her general word of advice to the youngsters. She thinks that people with a musical bent of mind also have a deep fascination for natural beauty, discovery of truth and fascination of the vast expanse of our universe – the Cosmos!

During our house move last year, she located a printout of a very old email from her friend, in San Antonio, who wrote about Galileo in response to the last sentence of the above paragraph of her email. Galileo’s Dad was a violinist. Apparently, the mathematicians at that time were Pythagoreans who believed that prime numbers ruled the Universe and that tonal quality had to be based on prime numbers. Her friend also wrote that Galileo’s father considered Pythagorean harmony as some kind of heavy metal rock group and had a strong dislike for mathematicians. It seems that he forbade his son from becoming one and ensured that he become a musician.

Galileo watched his Dad spending hours to get the tonal quality and harmony from his violin by weighting his violin strings and laying them across the bow. He would add to the weight as he plucked the strings. Galileo would often sneak to seek his passion for math. You may know that several discoveries were made during his lifetime from these early observations! Galileo used the same method to prove to himself that two objects of different weight and equal size would reach the ground at the same time. 

“By weighting violin strings and placing them across a sloping board (a track so to speak), he made himself a high-tech instrument. He had an ear for a perfect beat, and thus he rolled his ball down the track and positioned the violin strings perfectly so that the balls made a bloop to his beat. Then he measured the distance between the strings and found that acceleration increased exponentially and that the balls rolled equally down the track. All this without a stopwatch! Thus Galileo was ready for his photo opportunity on the Tower of Pizza”.

Such is the humor of her friend at San Antiono who cared to write in great detail! My wife reconnected with her, thanks to facebook. Her friend being an avid reader of physics books wished she were in India to experience the apex of the leonids in December 1998. Obviously people at San Antonio would have missed the grand spectacle as it was under a ‘cloudbank’ for over a week at that time. Probably 25 inches of rain during this period of one month compensated for the denial of this view to the Texans in San Antonio. My three girls were lucky enough to witness this from our terrace at Durga Vihar! I joined them a little later and by then it was daylight!

These days one can go to the WWW for spectacular shows of the cosmos, real-time videos included. But can anything compensate for a live show, the cosmic shampoo, Live Music and the Math Olympiad? 

Can something that gives joy be such an ordeal? Implications of the Highest Mathematical or Musical Order! Care to comment?!