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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

4.3
stars
702 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 16, 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 21, 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 - 180 of 180 Reviews for Music as Biology: What We Like to Hear and Why

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.

By Ronald J B

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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

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Aug 3, 2023

Extremely difficult courae. Should be listed as Advamced

By Jacobo M P

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Sep 30, 2020

Boring