Free online course teaches music appreciation to adults

CONTACT: B.J. Almond
PHONE: (713) 348-6770
E-MAIL: balmond@rice.edu

Free online course teaches music appreciation to adults
  Rice University professor wants to share how to listen to music

A free online introductory course in music appreciation from Rice University offers adults a new way to learn how to listen to music.

Titled “Sound Reasoning,” the course comes complete with on-screen audio samples that demonstrate concepts explained in the text and interactive exercises that offer immediate feedback on why a response is correct or incorrect. Designed to be as user-friendly as possible, the course does not require the ability to read music, and the audio samples can be accessed quickly with the click of a mouse.

“The goal of Sound Reasoning is to equip the learner with questions they might ask of any piece of music, thereby creating a richer and more comprehensive understanding of music both familiar and unfamiliar,” said Anthony Brandt, associate professor of composition and theory at Rice’s Shepherd School of Music.

Brandt felt a need to create this course for several reasons.   He wanted a resource that would be easily accessible to university classes, musical performing groups and the general public.   He also wanted to address several drawbacks he has encountered in conventional music appreciation.

“We are often taught details first instead of the music’s bigger picture,” Brandt said. “At a food-tasting, you sample something, and if you don’t like it, you don’t eat it.   In music, the risk of that approach is that if you don’t ‘like the taste’ of an unfamiliar and unexpected sound, you may turn away from the rest of the piece.” In modules such as “Musical Form” and “Overall Destiny,” Sound Reasoning adopts a top-down approach to listening that encourages listeners to take in the whole expanse of a composition.

Brandt also wanted to bridge the gap between classical and modern music. Major museums routinely house both traditional and contemporary art, dance and theater companies regularly present both historic and modern works, and bookstores have both classical literature and the latest fiction on their shelves. However, concert music is much more segregated between new and old. “Conventional musical training frequently reinforces this by presenting a historic, style-specific approach to listening,” Brandt said. Sound Reasoning avoids such segregation by focusing on style-independent concepts, each illustrated with side-by-side examples from the classical and modern repertoires.   More than 30 modern composers are represented.

Sound Reasoning offers 10 learning modules on topics such as “Musical Emphasis” and “What Music is Trying to Express, ” and they’re accompanied by audible examples, such as excerpts from works as diverse as Bach’s “Brandenburg Concerto No. 5,” Beethoven’s “Symphony No. 9” and Schoenberg’s “A Survivor from Warsaw.” The modules can be studied in sequence or individually at the user’s own pace. People who feel more comfortable with a textbook can print hard copies of the lessons.

Although the course concentrates on Western classical and modern music, Brandt said the concepts taught in each lesson can be applied to jazz, folk music, popular music and other styles.

“Music is a time-art,” he said. “It is abstract and nonverbal. Its sounds do not have literal or fixed meanings. A musical performance generally flows unstoppably and cannot be interrupted.”   In Brandt’s view, what makes music “intelligible,” or understandable, is the use of repetition. “Pop music tends to rely on literal repetition, because intelligibility is most immediate, whereas art music focuses on varied and transformed repetition,” Brandt said. In modules such as “How Music Makes Sense” and “Time’s Effect on the Material,” Sound Reasoning shows how repetition creates musical coherence and drama.

The various modules in Sound Reasoning teach the listener to analyze changes in speed, pitch, range and duration and to pay attention to orchestration, dynamics, density, fragmentation and other features.

Brandt is hopeful that his innovative approach will help listeners become more confident and self-reliant.   “Music is an invitation to listen with our full attention,” he said. “Listening actively to music changes the way we hear our lives. When it is most meaningful, music shows us how to recognize the rhythms, patterns and recurrences of our experience.”

Sound Reasoning is posted at http://cnx.org/content/col10214/latest/ on the website for Rice’s Connexions, an e-publishing platform that adapts open-source software to scholarly academic content. Users around the world who have access to a computer and the Internet can view the course 24/7.

The course was made possible by an Artistic Excellence Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and an Innovation Grant from Rice’s Computer and Information Technology Institute.