How This Musician Turned Entrepreneur Helps Students Strike A Chord With Math Learning

Math learning need not be traditional anymore (learn a concept, mug up the formulae and solve questions). Topics such as counting in 7s, chord progression, and set theory can be taught with the help of music and math.

This World Music Day, Prachotan D L has proved how math learning can be fun and memorable and improves the cognitive skills of young children through music and art forms.

Prachotan is a trained musician, a world record holder, and an entrepreneur. Through the math ed-tech startup Bhanzu, he has created the 'math in music' curriculum, which introduces the artistic point of view of the subject. Students learn about how math, as they know, has direct implications on the way they can look and perceive music.

Eradicating Math Phobia

Bhanzu-a Hyderabad-based ed-tech company aims to eradicate math phobia and encourage careers in math and STEM fields among learners through art forms. It was founded by Neelakantha Bhanu, who is known as the World's Fastest Human Calculator.

Coming from a background where people have excelled academically, Prachotan has been an artist his whole life and, to be specific, a singer, a vocalist and a professional Carnatic vocalist. At the age of 3, he identified 144' raagas' (a collection of pitches) and went to the Limca book of records.

"Since then, it has been a roller coaster ride for me as a performer and someone who just took up music and as something which is very serious," Prachotan, co-founder of Bhanzu, told The Logical Indian. "For me, art is very personal and extremely human and something which is vital for human existence," he said.

How Bhanzu Teaches Math Through Music

Making something more perceivable and more ubiquitous and how children look at the academic world through art forms was something Prachotan has always been passionate about.

Math is always looked at as an academic stint by students and something which is restricted in its sense in terms of its learning, Prachotan said. However, he believes that the subject is beyond it, and as an artist, he has always found it to be way more functional than what students actually think it is.

"The applications of math are extended way beyond what people see it to be, and it is way more intertwined into real life than what people make it to be," he shared. "More importantly, I have seen that having a good acumen as an artist and while learning an art form has a huge unfair advantage in terms of understanding things beyond their realms," he added.

The entrepreneur said that music has a lot to do with recurring patterns, which children actively see around them daily. The fusion of art and something as foundational as math, the synergy between method and madness, something intuitional and logical, is what math in music stands for.

"The transition from listening to music to perceiving music as sound is something which is absolutely beneficial and vital for students who are learning math through music," Prachotan said, adding that inculcation of good abstract thought process is started by learning a few concepts of music and looking at the math through a similar lens.

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