Content, progress and pedagogy of the module

Music has held an important place in all cultures around the world for millennia, and recently technology has made music increasingly accessible in daily activities and integral in most digital media. Musical information may encode musical sound, perceived musical structure, the affective or semantic content of music, musical gestures or musical interactions. The ability to design and build effective and efficient computing systems for processing musical information requires an understanding of how music information is created, represented, communicated and processed by humans.

This course introduces experimental, theoretical, computational and neuroscientific work that has contributed to our understanding of how musical information is created, represented, communicated and processed, both in the brain and the body, when humans perform musical tasks such as listening, dancing, performing, composing and improvising.

Learning objectives

Knowledge

Students who complete this course must gain the following knowledge:

• understanding of the main paradigms, concepts and disciplines that contribute to music perception and cognition research and which have relevance for sound and music computing systems
• understanding of how perceptual constraints as well as cultural influence shape how musical information is communicated and experienced
• understanding of the basic cognitive and motoric mechanisms underlying human music performance and interactions

Skills

Students who complete this course must gain the following skills:

• apply knowledge on human music perception and cognition in the design of sound and music computing systems
• apply theories and models of music perception and cognition to evaluate sound and music computing systems
• apply experimental methodologies in the design and execution of appropriate experiments for testing hypotheses in the field of music perception and cognition

Competences

Students who complete this course must gain the following competencies:

• synthesize knowledge and theoretical frameworks from a variety of relevant sources and disciplines, which contribute to the study of technology-cognition interaction and apply this knowledge in the design of sound and music computing systems
• analyze and interpret current experimental, theoretical and computational research in music perception and cognition

Type of instruction

Refer to the overview of instruction types listed in § 17.

Exam

Exams