The Science of Making Music

Catalog description

What distinguishes noise from music, and why do the musical instruments that we love create just the right sound mixtures to achieve this? When organized properly, sound waves can have a profound emotional impact on the human mind, enabling artistic expression and connecting people within and across diverse cultures. But what does it mean to organize sound waves properly? In this course, we will examine ways that the fundamental physics underpinning sound and timbre contribute to the psychoacoustic principles of consonance, dissonance, and the emergence of musical systems. We will survey the modern music production toolkit, using a digital audio workstation for audio recording, spectral analysis, sound synthesis, and music production. We will analyze the music of a variety of cultures, seeking connections between the physics underpinning their unique harmonic structures with the acoustic characteristics of their musical instruments and the contexts in which their music is performed.