Module 1 (M1) - Calculations – Order of operations

Bobby: Hi Berry, nice to meet you.

Berry: Hi, nice to meet you.

Bobby: So, you’re a musician, right?

Berry: Yeah, I’m a bassist in a band called Red Ivory.

Bobby: Exciting, so how long have you been with Red Ivory for?

Berry: We’ve been around for about a year but I’ve been playing bass and guitar for nearly two years.

Bobby: So, does your band go and perform in public?

Berry: Yeah, we gig around all of London.

Bobby: So, if people came to see your gigs, do you get paid for these?

Berry: Yeah, we get paid by how many people attend our shows and how much the tickets cost.

Bobby: So you've got money coming in but I presume you’ve also got expenses. So, how do you work out how much each member gets paid?

Berry: So, obviously, you have to subtract costs of damaged equipment, like a broken guitar string, and you also have to pay for the transportation of our equipment to and from the gigs. But after that, we can divide it equally between the four members.

Bobby: Ah! So to me, mathematically, that sounds like an ‘order of operations’. To get your pay per member, you need to multiply the ticket price by the number of tickets sold, and then subtract your expenses from that total. All before dividing by the number of band members. Since multiplication and division come before addition and subtraction in the order of operations, subtracting expenses would need to be inside the brackets.

Bobby: Does that play a part in other parts of your band or maybe even the future?

Berry: Well, we do want to release as much music that we can into the world and so, we have to save up for recording and then we have to save up for mastering those recordings, and then we can release it onto platforms.

Bobby: It sounds like you use maths quite regularly in your life as a musician.

Berry: Yeah, we do, definitely.