Music 693 examines music as a phenomenon of human behavior and psyche. Topics include auditory and musical perception, music cognition, creativity and esthetic experience, listening styles and strategies, music and human emotions, and the social psychology of musical activities. In addition, the course will touch on aspects related to performance, music and the brain, and methodological issues in music research.
The four credit-hour Music 693 is taught concurrently with a graduate course in music cognition, Music 838. The undergraduate and graduate versions of the course have different workloads and different methods of evaluation.
For further web information concerning the field of music cognition at the Ohio State University see http://csml.som.ohio-state.edu/index.html.
Music 693 has no pre-requisites.
The next offering for this course is scheduled for Spring 2007. Classes are held in Hughes Hall Room 110 on the Ohio State University Campus in Columbus, Ohio. For the Spring 2007 quarter, the class will be meeting from 3:30 to 4:18 PM, Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.
Three special meetings are scheduled to provide question & answer opportunities, as well as discussion of the course material. Attendance is encouraged but not required. All discussions are held immediately following the scheduled Friday class in weeks 2, 4, and 7: Friday April 6, Friday April 20, and Friday May 11.
The registration call number for the Spring 2007 offering of this course is 14657-3.
The primary objective of Music 693 is to help students to become more aware of the psychological processes by which music affects them. A second objective is to encourage students to become better observers of their own musical behaviors, and of the behaviors of others.
Specifically, this course will endeavor to provide a general understanding of the hearing process; of how musical skills are acquired from infancy to adulthood; of physiological and psychological responses to sound and music; the percepual organization of melody, rhythm, tonality, and atonality; an understanding of how perceptual and cognitive factors have shaped music-making; the social contexts of music-making and music reception; the formation of musical taste; and of music and the emotions. In addition, attention will be drawn to those aspects of musical behavior of which little is known.
For practising musicians, this course will provide new insights into the processes of listening, performing, improvising and composing. It will offer psychological accounts for phenomena such as consonance and dissonance, scales, tonality, timbre, musical expectation, attention, voice-leading and harmony, the origins of stage fright, and various other phenomena. Musicians will discover that individual responses to music differ from person to person, but that many responses are broadly shared and predictable. Differences of musical taste may reflect differences in musical culture, differences in listening experiences, differences in personality, as well as differences in cognitive style between individuals. Cross-cultural differences and similarities will also be highlighted.
For students of psychology, this course will provide an opportunity to examine a domain of human behavior that is, in many ways, distinct from other types of mental experience and competence. Despite music-specific idiosyncracies, the course will stress and reinforce classic lessons pertaining to the formation of empirically testable hypotheses, the need for careful design and execution of experiments, and the critical analysis and interpretation of various experimental results.
The course objectives are pursued through classroom lectures, demonstrations, experiments, and readings. The lecture material will be drawn primarily from published experimental studies. However, the course will also deal with subjective and introspective accounts concerning the experience of sound and music.
The course is built around a set of course notes:
David Huron, An Ear for Music: A Course in Psychomusicology. Columbus, OH, 1998/2006; 426pp. The first five chapters are available on the web at http://csml.som.ohio-state.edu/Music838/course.notes/ear.toc.html.
For students interested in pursuing additional background reading beyond the course requirements, the following books are recommended:
John Sloboda, The Musical Mind. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985.
Bob Snyder, Music and Memory: An Introduction. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2000.
David Huron, Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2006.
Music 693 students may also consider reading the supplementary readings required of the graduate students (Music 838).
A list of additional recommended reading is also available.Students who wish to pursue selected readings in a given topic should refer to the course bibliography at http://csml.som.ohio-state.edu/Music838/music838.bibliography.html.
Resources for this course can be found on the world-wide web at: http://www.music-cog.ohio-state.edu/Music838/
Web-based resources include a course bibliography, assignment details, sample examination questions, answers to sample examination questions, international music cognition resource center, and other materials.
The workload for Music 693 entails three hours of lecture/demonstrations each week, plus approximately three hours of additional reading (roughly 36 pages) per week.
Music 693 is evaluated on a Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory basis. A student will receive a satisfactory grade (S) only if the final course tally amounts to 60% or greater.
Mid-term Examination 50% Week 6 Friday May 4, 2007 Final Examination 50% TBA
Dr. David Huron
Mershon Auditorium, Room 502
Telephone: 688-4753 (Wk.) 487-8502 (Hm.)
E-mail: huron.1@osü.edü [Ignore the umlauts; they are present to foil web crawlers.]
Students are encouraged to arrange to discuss any aspect of their course work. No appointments are necessary, however meeting times can be assured by telephoning Prof. Huron to make an appointment. If you are unable to reach the instructor on the telephone, remember to leave a message giving your name and telephone number.
Any student who feels s/he may need an accommodation based on the impact of a disability should contact me privately to discuss your specific needs. The Office for Disability Services at 614-292-3307 in room 150 Pomerene Hall will coordinate reasonable accommodations for students with documented disabilities.
Students are expected to behavior in accordance with the university Code of Student Conduct (available on the web at http://studentaffairs.osu.edu/resource_csc.asp). Helpful information regarding plagiarism and other forms of academic misconduct can be found on the web at: http://oaa.osu.edu/coam/home.html.