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Subject: Music Education (Grad) (GMUS)
CRN: 21810
Directed Study
St Paul: No Room
This course explores the cognitive foundations of music. The course will examine the full range of physical, psychophysical, and cognitive mechanisms that lead to musical experience. The course begins with the physics of musical instruments and the physical qualities of musical pitch. This leads to the psychophysics of hearing and why some sounds are experienced as consonant and others as dissonant. The course will then turn to perceptual organization and develop the sense in which music is an emergent phenomenon. Finally we examine the structures in working memory that allow individual pitch events to be organized into musical expressions. Along the way we will look at the general principles that govern the structure of music and also investigate the extent to which other species understand and hear music as music. The course will also include a deep analysis of musical expectancy in terms of fractal structure and dynamic systems.
3 Credits