Syllabus: Can You Feel the Music?
Is music a universal language? Why does music so powerfully affect our emotions? Why do we like some genres of music better than others? Alexandra Kieffer, assistant professor of musicology, created this class as an elective for non-music majors.
MUSI 221
Music, Magic and Science in the Modern World
DEPARTMENT
Shepherd School of Music
DESCRIPTION
Is music a universal language? Why does music so powerfully affect our emotions? Why do we like some genres of music better than others? The goal in this class is to explore what scientific approaches to these questions can tell us about the place of science in the modern world — as well as how and why science has become so important to the imagining of ourselves as thinking, feeling and willing beings.
Can You Feel the Music?
Who is your top Spotify artist? Your most listened-to song? Your favorite music genre? A wide range of answers will come from these questions, but the real question is: What do those answers have to do with science? Alexandra Kieffer, assistant professor of musicology, created this class as an elective for non-music majors.
“Music has puzzled philosophers for literally thousands of years, and the attempt to figure out how music works and why it affects us has been a part of modern science from its inception. Thinking about these problems, and how different philosophers and scientists have approached them over time, gives us a unique and valuable perspective on how science became what it is today,” says Kieffer.
Her goal for the students is not to doubt what science has discovered about musical experience, but to discover how scientific methods are interwoven with common ideas about what musical experience is.
In any given class, students discuss an array of topics including historical observations about music, the cognitive basis of consonance and dissonance, and what experiencing music is like for animals compared to humans. For freshman Nick Harrison, a visual and dramatic arts major with a theater concentration, the readings and discussions in class give him a new perspective on musical history and how others perceive music. “I love that I get to research music on a level most people don’t get to,” Harrison says. Kieffer hopes that her class gives students outside the Shepherd School of Music a chance to explore music in the context of their own majors.
— Emma Korsmo ’24