About this course: The course will explore the tone combinations that humans consider consonant or dissonant, the scales we use, and the emotions music elicits, all of which provide a rich set of data for exploring music and auditory aesthetics in a biological framework. Analyses of speech and musical databases are consistent with the idea that the chromatic scale (the set of tones used by humans to create music), consonance and dissonance, worldwide preferences for a few dozen scales from the billions that are possible, and the emotions elicited by music in different cultures all stem from the relative similarity of musical tonalities and the characteristics of voiced (tonal) speech. Like the phenomenology of visual perception, these aspects of auditory perception appear to have arisen from the need to contend with sensory stimuli that are inherently unable to specify their physical sources, leading to the evolution of a common strategy to deal with this fundamental challenge.
Taught by: Dale Purves, M.D.
Duke Institute for Brain Sciences
| Language | English, Subtitles: Spanish |
| How To Pass | Pass all graded assignments to complete the course. |
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Very good!
Great course, very informative for anyone who wishes to explore deeper aspects of music that have to do with biology and psychology.
It was an interesting course and thought something novel. There was some difficulty in understanding scales.
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Amazing Course! Thank You!