Name: Music as Biology: What We Like to Hear and Why
Brand: Duke University
Availability: OnlineOnly
Rating: 4.3 (184 reviews)

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Learner Reviews & Feedback for Music as Biology: What We Like to Hear and Why by Duke University

4.3

stars

728 ratings

About the Course

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....

Top reviews

Jun 10, 2017

Great course, very informative for anyone who wishes to explore deeper aspects of music that have to do with biology and psychology.

Sep 16, 2016

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.

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176 - 184 of 184 Reviews for Music as Biology: What We Like to Hear and Why

By sara a

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Nov 16, 2017

I found that this course requires at least a basic knowledge of music and sound, which i did not have , making the classes a bit tedious. I would recommend it to musicians though, who might find it more interesting than I did.

By Richard G

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Dec 1, 2019

Very dull lecturers. Most material is poorly presented

By Joao P R d S

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May 12, 2017

too boring

By Jon B

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Sep 29, 2018

By Jennifer E

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Jun 17, 2016

I felt more like I was part of some experiment to see how long I could tolerate boredom than that I was in class where someone was trying to share knowledge with me. Needless to say I did not make it to the end which is sad because I was genuinely interested in the content. The instructor's delivery was absolutely monotone and he did not seem to emphasize the key points in any way so I found it very difficult to retain any information or to even stay awake at times.

By Deleted A

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Jun 21, 2016

I slogged through it and got an 89, but the videos were boring and the quizzes were poorly worded and should have had greater correlation with the course content.