100K Views!

Sometime this afternoon, assuming that the Internet doesn't abruptly shut down, my Periodic Table Song is going to hit one hundred thousand views! I'm glad that so many people have discovered it, and I hope teachers and students continue to find it useful. For what it's worth, I have now posted a revised version that includes the "placeholder names" and shows each element's position in the table. (As I had with the karaoke version.)

I haven't figured out what to do about the two new elements that should be approved in a few months, though... it may require an addendum rather than a rewrite. In the meantime, they are mentioned in the video (but not the song) of the revised version:


For the original 100,000 views version, see Memorizing the Periodic Table of Elements, which also has a link to my Periodic Table Symbols Song. (I find the latter an invaluable help in remembering what comes next.)

I Want to Sing About Science!

It's been awhile since I posted any new science songs. But they've been on my mind again and with good reason.

Back in the fall, I had written a song called "I want to sing about science." It was inspired by a conversation with Greg Crowther, who manages the website Sing About Science... and Math. I had just finished recording Greg's song "Scientific State of Mind" for the 2012 USA Science and Engineering Festival Song Contest. We spent about an hour on the phone talking about science and music and what we wanted out of educational songs. He told me he wished there were more songs about actual great discoveries and how they were made, presented in a way that made people want to make discoveries themselves, too. Songs that would be about the process of science, rather than just the data we've derived by using it.

As we hung up the phone, I resolved to rise to the challenge. I thought I'd see if I could write a "theme song" for his site, using these ideas. We had also just talked about how hard it would be to fit heliocentrism into a song, so that was where I started. Within a day or two, I had the basic ideas of the song, and I finally sent him a rough draft. I think he was pleased, but he also came back to me with some really helpful criticism, and suggestions for improvement. I took these into account, and it made a big difference in the quality of the song.

Though my usual practice with these songs has been to write and record them in a single evening, I took several weeks to "finish" the song, and paid more attention to the recording quality this time. When I presented Greg with the final result, he not only featured it on his blog, but suggested that I enter it into the aforementioned contest as well. With his blessing, I did so.

Months passed, but in early December, I was notified that my song was a finalist in the contest! I was pleased, and shared the news with my friends, not knowing what to expect next. Both of the other songs in the category were also really good.

I had plenty of things to distract me in the meantime, as I sang in a performance of Amahl and the Night Visitors with Opera Roanoke and prepared for my role in "Le Roi et Le Fermier" with Opera Lafayette that was presented in the Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center, and then for two performances at the Opera Royale in Versailles. It was a magical journey, and I brought my family along with me to France, staying in Paris for several days after the last performance.

It was on one of my last days in Paris that I received the email that my song had been named one of the winners of the contest!

I'm looking forward to attending the festival in April. Meanwhile, here is the song... I hope you enjoy it!



Lyrics after the jump...

Demonstrating or just showing off?

I'm not entirely sure whether I did this video to demonstrate the value of the two elements songs I wrote, or just to show off that I can do it. Either way, here it is as a record that even a lowly musician who hasn't taken a science course in at least 20 years can use a pair of mnemonic songs to recreate a periodic table from memory. (And have some fun in the process.) Of course, the songs I used were my own, which I posted about last month.

To record the video, I just stayed after class one day and put my iPhone on a music stand. Since I teach in a school of music, the staff lines on the blackboard made it that much easier to draw the framework. After that, I just started the camera and went to work. In any case, you can see that the main time limiting factor in filling in the table is how long it takes to draw the letters.

All this leaves us with a question. Is it worthwhile to memorize the table, when we can easily pull one up anytime we need one? Perhaps not. But it is a fun exercise, a chance to practice one's memory skills, and a reason to spend a nice little chunk of time with the elements and how they relate to each other. It can also help to reinforce the connection between symbols and names.

And heck, sometimes it's just fun to show off!

More Ear Training Songs

I've been slow to post recently, but I've been trying to keep up with my teaching duties and my muse.

Lately, the latter has been urging me towards songs that help teach or reinforce concepts in ear training. This involves math and proportion, and thus is perhaps not entirely out of place on this site. I've already posted others of my music education songs.

So, here are a few of my more recent endeavors in that regard. The first came to me as I was studying an old ear training text, which asserted that one of the first things one ought to teach students was to hear intervals with their inversions. There are several good arguments for this, including the fact that if you can quickly identify the inversion of a larger interval, you essentially halve the number of intervals you need to be able to hear to transcribe them.

As I read through the list of intervals, I started singing them in my head. And I started with the minor third, which often implies to me, if heard out of context, the interval between "mi" and "so." And then I followed it with the leap from "so" up to "mi," and it immediately asserted itself as a song. It only took a few minutes to map out how the rest of the song should go. Sometimes what is obvious is also what is best:





I didn't imagine another song would come so soon on it's heels, but my ear training class reached the part of the course where they have to hear the V7 chord in harmonic progressions. For some students, picking out that added 7 is difficult, especially if they haven't already mastered hearing progressions of plain triads. And I had been kicking around a "hook" in my head without being sure how it would fit into a song: "Sol-ti-re-fa, it's a Dominant 7, and brings us home to I." As we started the new section, I played this snippet in class, and one student suggested that I make a deceptive cadence instead. (That's when V or V7 leads to vi instead of I.) That triggered a burst of creative energy, and this song was born, which delves into much more than the V7 chord, but hammers home that sol-ti-re-fa are the notes in a V7.

Note for the curious: "so" and "sol" are interchangeable in my lexicon. I actually prefer the former nomenclature, but many of my students use the latter. I used the latter in this song because we've come up with several mnemonic jokes that rely on the latter pronunciation. ie "How do you know it's a diminished 7 chord?" "It is sol-less." (A diminished 7 chord often sounds spooky.) And for the Dominant 7 chord, "sol-ti-re-fa" sounds a bit like it could be a fictional snack food.





There are still other ear training songs (and science songs) to share here, but I'll save them for another post.

Erosion: A love song for soil

This was the third (and so far, final) song in the "soil cycle."

I intended this to be cheesier than it turned out. Judging from a few comments I received, I really needed to be a bit more over the top. It's on my agenda to redo this song at some point with drums and a string section, and really make it as sappy as possible. (And if I could find a great videographer to make an equally cheesy music video to accompany it, all the better!)

I was pleased with this one as an educational song. I like how it parodies a love song as it explains the ideas of erosion and conservation, and once again names the components of soil. And I still like the way the music and lyrics worked together. Nothing in this song felt forced.



Lyrics after the jump:

Scientific State of Mind

Almost all of the videos I've posted to my YouTube channels are ones I wrote and recorded myself, occasionally with help from my wife and kids.

This summer, however, I got an email from Greg Crowther, who is a scientist and songwriter who also maintains the website/database/blog Sing About Science. (Greg and I had communicated earlier in the year, and we were already familiar with each other's work.) He had a song which he wanted to record for a songwriting competition... could I help out?

I was busy, and away from home, and wouldn't be near my instruments for weeks, so naturally I said yes! (I love a challenge.) I realized that the only way I'd be able to do it justice would be to create an acapella arrangement of it. And though I was able to rerecord some of the vocals when I got home, most of it was just recorded through my macbook's built in mic into Garageband.

He had sent me the lyrics and the melody, which I liked right away. I could already envision the harmonic underpinning to the tune. As I began to put together the arrangement, we realized it needed an intro and a bridge, which I added, with some additional thematic elements that tied the opening of the song to the ending.

I'm mostly pleased with the result, although Garageband's autotune leaves much to be desired. (And it's a necessary effect for this style.)

You can read more about the creation of the song from Greg's point of view on his blog.

Here is a video of Scientific State of Mind:



Lyrics after the jump:

How to hear augmented six chords

In my "real" job, I teach, among other things, a subject called "ear training." Ear training, as I think I explained in a previous post, is meant to develop the skill of looking at music and knowing what it sounds like without having to play it on an instrument, with the complementary skill of being able to hear music and then write it down in various forms.

Though it is not science per se, I thought I'd take this opportunity to bring two of my YouTube channels together and share another side of my teaching through song. (I maintain a separate channel for my supplementary learning videos for my ear training class.)

Last spring, I wrote several songs for this class. Some were just silly. But I was really proud of my "International Chords Song," which was written to help understand and remember how to hear what we call German, French, and Neapolitan 6 chords. Sure enough, my class did better on the harmony section of that test than on any previous test, despite the fact that the material was more challenging.

So, unless you already have some training in music theory and know what these chords are, this song may make no sense to you, but please enjoy the International Chords Song:



Lyrics after the jump: