Devin’s Travels in Japan

I woke up at 4 a.m. to finish some last minute business in Boston, and then scooped up my things and jumped into the taxi for the airport.

Since the end of November I had been preparing the translation of Music Blocks for a Japanese audience. I also had been busy contacting interested groups in Japan and scheduling meetings beforehand. One very noteworthy person I was excited to meet was Sachiko Nakajima who works to bring “Math, Music, and STEAM Education” to schools in Japan. I had seen her TEDx video and also received some help looking over my initial translations of Music Blocks. She also went out of her way to include me in a few of her meetings in Japan, including a presentation at a High School in Yokohama scheduled for the day after I arrived in the country. Because of the time difference, I arrived in Japan the following day, on December 15th.

Less than 24 hours after landing in Japan I had the opportunity to attend the Yokohama Frontier Science High School’s monthly open house. Furthermore, this particular open house was a special once a year “Science Saturday”. I successfully navigated my way to Yokohama and then to the local train station, which I was a little worried about given Japan’s complex train and bus system and my jet lag, and followed a large group of children accompanied by their parents to the school. After a brief “behind the scenes” introduction of what was to come, I sat in the audience of a very nice lecture/concert hall and listened to three high school students present their findings in the subject of mathematics. The students all did very well. One student presented on Vedic math, which I have always found to be fascinating. When the students’ presentations were over, Sachiko began her lecture.

Sachiko’s lecture intersected at many places where we have been experimenting with for Music Blocks. For example, she showed and performed Bach’s famous “Crab Canon” whose single written staff is suppose to be played forwards and backwards simultaneously to create a two part counterpoint piece. She also explored questions like “Why is the octave (for the common chromatic scale) split into 12?” These explorations are ones that we have in some of our examples.

Sachiko presented on various tuning systems (In the slide above: Pythagorean (top), Just Intonation (middle), and 12 tone equal temperament (bottom)). She finds the prospect of exploring tuning using a programming language such as Music Blocks exciting since it makes experimentation much easier to do than with physical objects.

After Sachiko was finished, I got the opportunity to show Music Blocks to the open house attendees. I showed some of the basics of the language first (i.e. note value and pitch). Then I went on to showcase some of the same examples Sachiko gave, this time as Music Blocks code. First, I showed what dividing the octave into various divisions looks like in Music Blocks (the image above is a screenshot of the code).

Since Sachiko had demonstrated Bach’s famous “Crab Canon”, I thought it appropriate to show the output of the Music Blocks Crab Canon as its Lilypond output.

After the talk, a group of ten or so interested High School students came to the stage. I handed them my contact information as well as a few USB’s with copies of Music Blocks’ source code so that they may try Music Blocks at any time as well as study the source code if they so choose to do so.

To read a translation of the Yokohama Frontier Science School Blog Article abut the event, click here.