Music, the Mind, and Artificial Intelligence

Catalog description

Music is universal to all human cultures. It has profound and demonstrated effects on everything from emotion to spirituality to healing to the cohesion of communities. This course will explore current research on the psychological, emotional, and therapeutic effects of music and what factors in the human body and brain are involved in producing them, with particular emphasis on cross-cultural study. Relevant research perspectives will include music theory and musicology; perception and cognition; neuroscience; and computational modeling. Students will learn methods of computational feature extraction and machine learning to develop artificial intelligence models that build on and articulate the conceptual frameworks of cognitive science and music cognition introduced in the initial phase of the class, and will learn generative AI tools that will allow them to produce an original musical work as their final project.