Music

This course explores how scholars and practitioners use musical data, both in audio and notated formats. Students are given the opportunity to develop skills in encoding, analyzing, categorizing, and curating music recordings and notated music. These skills are developed by encouraging an intimate understanding of the nature of different musical formats, an appreciation of their uses, and approaches to computational analyses of their electronic manifestations.

This course examines the intersection of music, AI, and creativity, drawing from the rapidly expanding critical scholarship on AI. While the class prioritizes musicological, sociocultural, and philosophical approaches to critiquing AI, it will also engage with other genres of writings from media studies, music information retrieval (MIR), computational creativity, and from within the music industry. 

This course introduces students to a rich variety of often unfamiliar sonic expressions, musics, and contextualized musical case studies that highlight (or question the limits of) music’s relationship with particular physical (or natural) environments. It also introduces students to, and encourage critical engagement with, music specific and interdisciplinary literature relating to the environment, place, landscape, acoustic ecology, and indigeneity.

This course introduces students to the socio-cultural contexts, functions, philosophies, techniques, and organizing principles of a variety of musics of the world; musics from at least three continents are studied. These musical traditions are approached from both theoretical and practical perspectives, also giving a variety of opportunities for hands-on experience. Course content varies from year to year according to staff interests, availability of musicians to provide workshops, and to ensure freshness of approach. A typical curriculum might cover the following regions and theoretical themes: World Music - Introduction (culture, contact & concepts) South America: Andes to Amazon (exchange) Africa: Jaliya and Mbira (the musician) Indonesia: Sundanese Gamelan (temporal organization) North India: The Classical Tradition (improvisation) Papua New Guinea: The Kaluli (music and ecology) Iran: The Persian Classical Tradition (music & religion).

This course is for private lessons of the qanun instrument. It involves twelve one-hour lessons in the semester. Students are expected to practice a minimum of one hour every day. Students perform before a jury of teachers for the final examination. Students may register for more than one section of MUSC 1800 in the same semester. 

This course examines popular musical culture with an emphasis on musicological, sociological, and anthropological aspects. Other topics include: comparative folklore; how and why popular music should be studied; the songbooks and folklore missions in Spain; methods and procedures in ethnomusicological research; anthropology of music-- music in culture; reformulation of folklore; processes of transit and cultural contact. Pre-requisites: Musicology students with prior musical knowledge

This course is for private lessons in Arab Voice. It involves twelve one-hour lessons in the semester. Students are expected to practice a minimum of one hour every day. Students perform before a jury of teachers for the final examination. Students may register for more than one section of MUSC 1800 in the same semester. 
 

This course introduces the knowledge and tools to record and arrange popular music. Using one of the most ubiquitous music-making tools in the market, GarageBand, this practical based course allows students the opportunities to explore recording and editing of melodies, harmonies, and basic bass & drum patterns using software instruments. Students explore the use of Apple Loops to enhance arrangement ideas. In addition, students learn about the specific musical terms and concepts to better understand and describe music arrangements. This course deepens technological content knowledge and improves self-efficacy in the development of students' musical abilities. No audition is required.

The course provides an introduction to a particular aspect of sonic practices with the moving image. It focuses on a particular film sound context or approach defined chronologically, generically, or by composer (where appropriate). The exact content of the course varies from year to year, but might include one or more of the following: the sounds of early cinema; narrative film music and Hollywood; contemporary theory and analysis of music and the moving image; • auteur film music; the Hollywood musical; the sounds of television; music and animation; the sounds of video games; recontextualized music; opera and screen; European film music; and Hindi film.

In this course, students explore the musical rudiments that underpin their practical activities of singing, playing, and listening; how to listen to music tentatively; and how to hear and aurally analyze the musical parameters of meter, rhythm, pitch, timber, dynamics, expression, and structure.