Back to Music as Biology: What We Like to Hear and Why
Learner Reviews & Feedback for Music as Biology: What We Like to Hear and Why by Duke University
700 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
TS
May 17, 2020
This course helped me to see music from a different angle i.e through history and biology. Prof. Dales is a wonderful human being and has a beautiful gift of explaining things in a much simpler way.
MM
Sep 22, 2016
This course has helped me to understand biological psychology of humans towards music. Based on this knowledge i am confident to create music which will seem good to the ears of humans.
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176 - 178 of 178 Reviews for Music as Biology: What We Like to Hear and Why
By Ronald J B
•Apr 23, 2016
I am dropping this course as it is too elementary. I had hoped for something at a more advanced university level.
By Mary W
•Aug 3, 2023
Extremely difficult courae. Should be listed as Advamced
By Jacobo M P
•Sep 30, 2020
Boring