Welcome to this course called Music as Biology, subtitled What We Like to Hear and Why. I wanna begin by spending a few minutes telling you about myself as the instructor, and a little bit about the organization of the course and what you are in for here. So, first of all, about me. I'm a professor of neurobiology here at Duke University where I've been for the last 25 years. I'm what I think most people would describe for most of that period, and before, when I was at Washington University as a professor there, as a mainstream neurobiologist interested in a number of different issues in neuroscience and how the nervous system operates. For the last dozen or 15 years or so however, I have been very interested in music and the phenomenology of music, and how it can be explained In biological terms. And I should tell you, first of all, that I am not a music theorist, I've never taken a course in music theory. I am a very average musician. I've played the guitar for a long time, but as my music teacher would be the first to tell you, I'm not a very good musician. But like many of us who are fascinated by music, I'm more or less addicted to it as more than a hobby, as a professional interest. And I'm going to be telling you about how I've been thinking about music for that period of time, and how I think the phenomenology of music can be explained in terms of biology and evolutionary biology. The course is divided into six modules, each module will be about 45 minutes or so in length, and the modules are broken up into several lessons. Each lesson will be five minutes, ten minutes, and the utility of that is to have chunks that you can focus on so you know where you've been and where you're going, and so I know where I've been and where I'm going in this. There'll be incorporated into these modules very nicely, some demonstrations of musical issues preformed by and narrated by a singer songwriter from New York named Ruby Froom who's helped me organize and put together this course. She's also an undergraduate at Williams college in Massachusetts, and she'll augment what I have to say with some demonstrations. And there'll be some further examples that are available as supplements that Ruby narrates from her perspective as a very competent musician and someone steeped in music theory, that you can listen to in addition to what's being presented by me and by Ruby in the module. There's also a glossary of terms. I'm very sympathetic as a sort of self taught musical person that the terminology is arcane and often difficult especially for beginners to understand, so there's a glossary where you can look up terms that's available to you in the course. So that if you don't remember some phrase or term that I'm using, means you can readily look it up. Finally, the overall purpose of the course, as I already indicated, is to introduce you to a different way of thinking about music that's different from what you get in a usual music theory course that's biologically grounded. And I'm particularly interested in trying to, as I said, explain the phenomenology, the puzzles in music, and there are many of them, in terms of why it is that we human beings evolved not only the ability to hear music, but why we evolved a passion for it and how that passion and the esthetics that it implies what we like, what we don't like, can be explained, again, in biological rather than in simply music theoretical terms.
