Music 838 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.
Music 838 is available for five credit hours (call number 14897-1). With permission of the instructor, undergraduates may participate in the class under an Individual Studies 693 (call number 14698-1). Undergraduates should sign up for 5 hours of credit.
Further web information is available concerning the field of music cognition at the Ohio State University.
The course has no formal pre-requisites. Graduate standing is required.
The next offering for this course is scheduled for Spring 2009. Classes are held in Hughes Hall Room 318 on the Ohio State University Campus. For the Spring 2009 quarter, the class will be meet from 3:30 to 4:18 PM, Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.
For graduate students, three special meetings are scheduled to provide discussion periods for some of the reading materials. Attendance is encouraged but not required. All discussions are held immediately following the scheduled Friday class in weeks 3, 6 and 10: Friday April 17, Friday May 1, and Friday June 5.
The registration call number for the Spring 2009 offering of this course is 14897-1.
The primary objective of Music 838 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. Psychology students will also be reminded of some of the limits to an empirical study of human behavior.
The course objectives are pursued through classroom lectures, demonstrations, and supplementary 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, an unpublished manuscript, and a published book: Both graduates and undergraduates will need to purchase the course notes ("An Ear for Music"). Only graduate students need purchase Sweet Anticipation. Copies of Voice Leading will be loaned to graduate students.
David Huron, An Ear for Music: A Course in Psychomusicology. Columbus, OH, 1998/2009; 426pp. The first five chapters are available on the web at http://csml.som.ohio-state.edu/Music838/course.notes/ear.toc.html.
David Huron, Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation. MIT Press, 2006.
David Huron, Voice Leading: The Science Behind a Musical Art. Unpublished manuscript.
For students interested in pursuing additional background reading beyond the course requirements, the following books are recommended:
Bob Snyder, Music and Memory: An Introduction. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2000.
John Sloboda, The Musical Mind. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985.
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, details of assignments, sample examination questions, answers to sample examination questions, international music cognition resource center, and other materials.
The workload for Music 838 entails three hours of lecture/demonstrations each week, plus approximately five hours of additional reading (roughly 80 pages) per week.
The final course grade will be based on the following:
Introspective Essay 5% Week 2 Friday April 10, 2009 Mid-term Examination 40% Week 6 Friday May 15, 2009 Critical Review 15% Week 8 Friday May 22, 2009 Final Examination 40% TBA
Dr. David Huron
Mershon Auditorium, Room 502
Telephone: 688-4753 (Wk.)
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.