The slow and fast song

(a song about tempo)

This song brings tempo to life by showing the same melody played at slow, medium, and fast speeds, with movement and visual events tightly matched to the beat. Children experience how changing speed creates a different feeling in the body, while the steady underlying beat remains constant throughout.

Videos

Full animation (with gestures)

This is a bespoke video made to help illustrate the mathematical ideas in the song. It also contains a picture-in-picture view of one of our team demonstrating the gestures in the song.

Gestures only

This is a close-up video of one of our team demonstrating the gestures for the song.

Audio

Full version (with vocals)

This is a recording of both the instrumental and the vocal parts of the song so you can learn it, or to sing along to.

Instrumental (backing track)

This is a recording of the instrumental parts of the song so you can sing along. It doesn’t have any vocals apart from backing vocals.

Documents

Sheet music

The slow and fast song – Sheet Music

This is the music for the song (vocal line and backing) written out on the stave. We have included chords so that instruments like the guitar can be used. The music may be slightly simplified in parts to help with ease of playing.

Lyric sheet

The slow and fast song – Lyric Sheet

This is the lyrics for the song written out in verses and choruses for ease of learning.

Support materials (song notes)

The slow and fast song – Song Notes

This is some background on the mathematics and vocabulary in the song and our suggestions as to how to use it in the classroom and at home to help bring out the mathematics. There are suggested activities to enrich some of the ideas from the song.

Copyright & attribution

© 2026 Tappy Math(s) project.

You can find more details about using our work on the using our work page.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution–Non-commercial–Share Alike 4.0 International Licence (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). You are free to copy, redistribute, adapt, and build upon this work for non-commercial purposes, provided that appropriate credit is given, a link to the licence is provided, and any derivative works are distributed under the same licence.

Licence: Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Licence.