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.
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Music as Biology: What We Like to Hear and Why
Duke UniversityAbout this Course
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- Biology
- Music
- Evolution
- Neurobiology
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Syllabus - What you will learn from this course
Course Introduction
Sound Signals, Sound Stimuli, and the Human Auditory System
The Perception of Sound Stimuli
Vocalization and Vocal Tones
Defining Music and Exploring Why We Like It
Reviews
- 5 stars57.27%
- 4 stars24.84%
- 3 stars12.42%
- 2 stars3.48%
- 1 star1.96%
TOP REVIEWS FROM MUSIC AS BIOLOGY: WHAT WE LIKE TO HEAR AND WHY
This course was fairly interesting. The argument that the notes of our scale are linked to human vocalisation, not just in the West, but the whole world.
This course helped me to see music from a different angle i.e through history and biology. Prof. Dales is a wonderful human being and has a beautiful gift of explaining things in a much simpler way.
Very clearly laid out in lecture and slides. Was able to learn a great deal, even though I have little previous knowledge of this area.
Great course. I enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed his previous course "Visual Perception and the Brain".
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