This Specialization is about building a songwriting practice: a weekly habit of writing, sharing, and listening to what others wrote. Across three courses, we take up the core craft elements through listening, structural analysis, recording, and performance. Listening ranges widely by design, through pop, rock, folk, jazz, classical art song, music from Brazil and Venezuela, and the occasional avant-garde detour. The more you've heard, the more you have to work with.
The first course begins with melody and chords. You'll learn how melodic shape and rhythm interact, and how to build chord progressions in major and minor keys and over descending basslines. The second course expands into song structure, lyric writing, and home production. You'll work with classic and contemporary forms and write lyrics using rhyme schemes, prosody, and narrative. You'll also learn a DAW by using it: audio editing, simple mixing with EQ and panning, effects, and rhythmic energy from backbeats, syncopation, and odd time signatures. The final course turns to voice, with vocal arrangement, text setting, and performance. It closes with an analysis of one song by a songwriter you love and a Final Concert where you perform or record an original song.
Throughout, weekly prompts and song sharing keep the work moving. Beyond Coursera, you're encouraged to post your songs on Song Share, a platform for songwriters to hear each other's works-in-progress and respond. Songs get better when others hear them.
Applied Learning Project
Throughout the Specialization, you will write original songs in response to weekly creative prompts and share them with the other songwriters in the course, on Coursera and on Song Share. You will also record multitracked demos in a DAW, arrange multi-part vocals, complete a song analysis presentation on a song by a songwriter you love, and produce a performance video or music video of one of your own songs for the final concert project.
