Entry #12: Geometry & Eurovision 🎤

Geometry & Eurovision

Eurovision is back in 2021 after the cancellation in 2020 due to COVID-19. Year after year, this music festival attracts millions of people around the world, even in Spain! Thousands of families and friends gather at home to watch this spectacle together. As a consequence, as Eurovision is such a well-known event we could reflect on how to use it in the classroom for our students to learn geometry, couldn't we? 👧👦 The reality is that in the song festival there are also numerous examples of how geometry can be essential to give extra meaning to songs with creative and original stagings. In fact, every Eurovision fan knows that a good song can often go unnoticed if the staging isn't right, so... why don't we do some research on the presence of geometry in Eurovision? 🎤🎵

Arcade (The Netherlands - Eurovision 2019)

The first example that I want to tell you is the winner of the last edition before COVID-19: Duncan Laurence, who sang the song "Arcade". In this song, the singer told a personal story about how the person he loved died due to an illness. In this case, geometry plays a fundamental role in the staging of the song, as in one of the most emotional moments of it, an illuminated sphere comes down, representing the person previously mentioned. At that moment, the singer speaks directly to the sphere. As can be seen, thanks to this song, students can work on a body of revolution such as the sphere itself, so that they could reflect on how to use this element in other contexts to provide some meaning. Here is the video of the song if you want to listen to it! 🎧

10 Years (Iceland - Eurovision 2021)

Of course, the use of geometry in Eurovision does not only have to be linked to conveying strong and very sentimental emotions, as in the previous example, but can also be used to convey fun! This is something that the Icelandic group Daði og Gagnamagnið understood very well this year, as their performance is characterised by a lot of fun. First of all, we can see how they used a lot of rectangular parallelepipeds, which in many cases were cubes, to bring a lot of colour to the performance. This is very important, as it helps to keep the attention. Also, you can see these solids from different perspectives, so it can be quite interesting to work on these polyhedra with our students! 👨‍🏫👩‍🏫

Now, let's look at the following picture! 👀

Let me ask you a question! What is the shape of the support of the pianos? A circle or a circumference? Answer it in the comments! 💻 Well, one difficulty we often have is that we don't properly differentiate a circumference from a circle, and they are not the same thing! The circumference is a curved line that is continuous and whose points are equidistant from another point called the centre, while the circle is the inner area. Colloquially, we could say that the circumference is the edge of the circle. So, knowing this, and taking into account that in the picture we can only see the curved line and its interior is hollow... the answer to the previous question was circumference! 😁 Well, here you have the video so you can hear the song! 🎧

I stand (Czech Republic - Eurovision 2016)

This is the final example of this entry, can you guess what is going on here apart from seeing a huge amount of triangles? 👀 If you said a regular tessellation... you are right! As it can be seen, this country decided to base its staging on a regular tessellation formed by triangles, and the result is, of course, quite elegant. Therefore, they also tessellate the back of the stage, although that is not visible in this image. Here you have the video to listen to this song! ✌

Other aspects to work on...

Thanks to Eurovision, we can also work on other aspects apart from geometry. During voting periods, we can work on mental calculation by adding up the scores that each country gives to other countries. Apart from this, we can also work on geography by locating each of the countries on a map and we can also know their culture by hearing their songs. 

So, in order to finish, I want to challenge you! Can you tell me how many geometric elements are in the following performance of Iceland of the year 2014? 😜

Thanks for reading this post! 😀