HOT SPRINGS — Last week, 15 students were hard at work in their music class.
There was no singing, instruments or sheet music in the class. Instead, students were stretching weighted strings across lab tables. One kind of equipment caused the strings to vibrate at precise frequencies, while other electronic instruments measured the pitches produced at different positions along the strings.
This is the physics of sound and music, saidBrian Monson, a physicist who teaches a class called Folk Music and Acoustics at the Arkansas School of Mathematics, Sciences and the Arts in Hot Springs. The class is primarily high school juniors at the school, which attracts academically advanced students from around the state.
“The class learns how tension and the length of the strings affect the frequency of the sound and the production of harmonics,” Monson said. “Harmonics are required by the brain to recognize the pitch as music.”
The study of harmonics will be helpful when students build their own musical instruments at the end of the school year.
“This will help where to place frets on a board or how to make a piece of pipe the right pitch,” said James Katowich, who co-teaches the music class with Monson. “We had someone make a Peruvian pipe flute from PVC pipe last year. That took a lot of math.”
Katowich, who has a Master of Fine Arts degree, teaches the class on alternate days. His classes are more like a traditional music class, but still unique.
“We teach folk music as a historical form,” he said. “It is a social tool for telling stories.Each song has a background story - an origin. We also teach it in the traditional way, by i mitat ion a nd by ear.”
T he teachers sa id t hat kind of training could be intimidating for the classically trained musician.
“You should see the look of pa nic when I say t hey have to put their sheet music away,” Monson said.
Katow ich, who was for a time in a successful rock band, plays guitar, and most of the students in the class learn that instrument.
Monson said he learned to play the mandolin so he could demonstrate the instrument for the class.
As for the students, some are already skilled players. The teachers admit there are some who are better performers than they are, while some students have never touched a musical instrument. Katowich said he will give some of those students individual lessons to get them up to speed with the rest of the class.
The class also uses folk music because it can have a special connection to the Arkansas students.
He said since many of the school’s students come from rural areas in Arkansas, the folk music of the Ozarks and Delta regions gives students a
better appreciation of the rural,
Southern culture they share.
“These songs are a form of
culture that has been widely
ignored and almost forgotten
before [the songs were] cap
tured and then recorded in
the 1930s,” Katowich said.
The class also gets to per
form. The students and their
teachers played during the
Hot Water Hills Music and
Arts Festival on Oct. 7.
Alex Shell of Benton, a
member of t he class, has
been playing the guitar since
he was a second-grader.
“I have learned so much
about math, science and mu
sic as history; it blows my
mind,” said Shell, 16, who
was trained in jazz. “I have
learned a lot of new stuff and
listened to styles of music I
had not listened to before.”Anot her student, Zack
Randolph, 17, of Hot Springs,
said he has enjoyed the class.
“It’s about being creative
and scientific,” he said. “We
are learning how music works,
and that’s interesting.” Randolph said he wants to
study biology in college, earn
a doctorate and work for the
U.S. Park Service.
“Then I can be outside,
with my guitar,” he said with a
smile.
The multidiscipline ap
proach to music and the sci
ence of sound fit into Mon
son’s mission for the class.
“I want the students to see
that science applies to every
thing in everyday life, including the arts,” he said.
Later in the year, lessons will touch on music theory and the investigation of pitch, tone and timbre.
“Those things are important for tuning [instruments] and for transposing music to another key,” Katowich said.
The students earn their grades from their lab work, tests, class participation, a research paper and the quality and creativity of the instrument they build.
Katowich said some amazing instruments have been made by the class. Last year, a student made a banjo with a wooden top. Banjos normally have a skin or plastic top that resonates the sounds of the picked or strummed strings.
“It sounded like a regular banjo,” Katowich said. “It is not supposed to work like that.”
The final phase of the class is more like wood-shop class than physics or music studies.
That’s a good thing for the students, Katowich said.
“These students deal with abstract concepts all day,” he said. “Building the instruments, they are hands-on, learning about power tools. It gives them confidence in a new way and something they can hold.”
And they can use the instruments to make music, based on science.
Staff writer Wayne Bryan can be reached at (501) 244-4460 or wbryan@arkansasonline.
com.
Tri-Lakes, Pages 51 on 10/27/2011