MUSI2731: Music and Science

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• To provide a solid grounding in acoustics and psychoacoustics of use to musicians
• To develop critical understanding of the intersection of scientific research and music
• To acquire knowledge of methods for pursuing empirical research involving music.

• This module investigates the intersection of music and science, as manifested in such sub-disciplines as musical acoustics and psychoacoustics, music psychology, and empirical musicology. Topics will range from the physics of music and human auditory physiology, to higher level cognition of musical structure, and musical modelling inspired by scientific approaches to knowledge. Students will develop their independent research skills in a series of seminars focussed on methods, a replication study related to music and science that involves collecting data, analysing the data, and presenting their findings and writing a report. The emphasis of the project will be a replication and an expansion of an existing study to keep the task feasible, to promote good practices, and to emphasise the importance of replications in scholarship. Replication projects will be made in small groups.

Subject-specific Knowledge:

• Students will become familiar with scientific perspectives on music, from the underlying physics to psychological approaches to gathering and analysing empirical data (empirical experiments, surveys, corpus studies). They will appreciate the interaction of musicological and scientific world views, and the reconciliations of empirical musicology.

Subject-specific Skills:

• After taking the module, students will be able to critically evaluate scientific theories of music. They will gain experience in empirical music research, and will have developed their research skills and key learnt key methods for undertaking a project on an aspect of music and science.

Key Skills:

• The module will establish theoretical understanding of the science of music, while developing research skills pertinent to this cross-disciplinary field. The module will reinforce critical self-awareness key to broader practice in musicology.

• Core theoretical teaching will be delivered in lectures and seminars to discuss research literature and critically reflect on lecture themes. Students will receive a tutorial after each formative, that are preparations for submitting summatives.

Replication project topic proposals will be presented by groups in a seminar in the autumn term. Groups will also present a short summary of their replication project tduring seminar time to their fellow students. Individual students will also prepare a draft of the research report (introduction, aims and methods) to discuss in a tutorial.

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