CARIANI: HST.725 is a course really aimed at surveying music
perception and cognition. Much of our curriculum nowadays
in neuroscience and biology and psychology is very specialized.
We look at very small problems, very compartmentalized
problems. The knowledge is parcelized
into very small pieces. And the big picture gets lost.
So an important part, I think, of any pedagogy,
in any university really is to get students to think
synthetically, to think about what is the
nature of our auditory systems and our brains such that music
has the effects that it does. So a typical class would be a
lecture. And we had many demonstrations.
I would often use my computer oscilloscope.
We would look at the structure of sounds.
We used animations from the music animation machine to
illustrate both the horizontal and vertical structure of music.
We would listen to musical pieces that illustrated
particular aspects of music perception and cognition.
I would talk for about an hour going over the area of the topic
of the day which could be something like the perception of
pitch or tambour or consonance or harmony or scene analysis,
grouping processes, something like that.
And the course was small enough so that we could have a back and
forth. And many of the students,
it is a graduate course, and we had some undergraduates
also. Many of the students already
were dealing with these issues in their own work.
Well, it is a small elective course and it was an
experimental course, as I said, that we taught for
the first time last spring. And what I wanted to do was to
structure the course in a way that we would both
systematically cover the perception and cognition of
music, music psychology, but that would allow the
students a great deal of freedom in choosing their own aspect of
music psychology that they wanted to look into.
So the main work that the students do is their own term
project. And that can be a review paper
that covers extensively some area of music perception and
cognition. It can be an experimental
project where students can go and actually do experiments or
surveys, psychology of music, or it could be a music project,
a music composition that illustrates the principles of
music perception and talks about those.
Or a simulation or a model, scientific model that
illuminates and explores some aspect of the mechanisms that
are involved. So the bulk of the student work
in this case was a term project. We also had an oral
presentation students gave on a paper that they chose in the
course. And we also had a large problem
set and take-home test. And what I had in mind was to
systematically look at auditory perception and auditory
cognition with music as the object of that perception and
cognition. So the intension is very much
kind of in the spirit of Hermann von Helmholtz's on the
sensations of tone as a basis for a psychology of music,
in that spirit to systematically go through,
look at the structure of the musical stimulus,
the structure of music as a sound object.
And then look at the perception, how do we perceive
music, what are the qualities of the sounds that we hear,
how do they interact? And then look at the underlying
neural representations and computations that allow us to
apprehend that structure and appreciate it.