MUS 511 Fall 2022

Dr. Andrew Schloss
Office: MacLaurin A177 Local: 721-7931
Office hours: Tues 4:30-5:30 pm or by appointment (email to confirm)
email: aschloss at uvic dot ca

Text: Music, Language and the Brain, by Aniruddh Patel, Oxford University Press
Also available online via the UVic Library (completely free for enrolled students -- if you don't mind reading online)

Class participation 15%
Video journal 15%
Cultural autobiography and music examples 15%
Class presentation/experimental replication 25%
Final Project/paper 30% (includes writeup of class presentation)

Counselling Services - Counselling Services can help you make the most of your university experience.They offer free professional, confidential, inclusive support to currently registered UVic students. A note to remind you to take care of yourself. Do your best to maintain a healthy lifestyle this semester by eating well, exercising, getting enough sleep and taking some time to relax. This will help you achieve your goals and cope with stress. All of us benefit from support during times of struggle. You are not alone.

Health Services - University Health Services (UHS) provides a full service primary health clinic for students, and coordinates healthy student and campus initiatives. We encourage students to use UHS as their primary point of health care while at UVic. We are located at the Petersen Health Centre.

Centre for Accessible Learning - The CAL staff are available by appointment to assess specific needs, provide referrals and arrange appropriate accommodations . The sooner you let us know your needs the quicker we can assist you in achieving your learning goals in this course.

Elders' Voices - The Office of Indigenous Academic and Community Engagement (IACE) has the privilege of assembling a group of Elders from local communities to guide students, staff, faculty and administration in Indigenous ways of knowing and being.

We will investigate music (and language) from cognitive, perceptual, neurological and evolutionary perspectives, following a highly multidisciplinary path through aspects of music cognition, psychoacoustics, ethnomusicology, systematic musicology, computational ethnomusicology, cultural anthropology, linguistics and auditory neursoscience. We will discuss the origins of music, the nature of rhythm, perception of time, and the use of music and dance to enhance trance, altered states and ritual. Geographic areas of study will include: Europe, Africa, Latin America, India, Eastern Europe.

1. As cognitive and neural systems, music and language are closely related.
2. Comparing music and language provides a powerful way to study the mechanisms that the mind uses to make sense out of sound.

Music, Language and the Brain,by Aniruddh Patel, Oxford University Press
Auditory neuroscience : making sense of sound / Jan Schnupp, Israel Nelken, and Andrew King (plus the associated website)
Musicophilia, Oliver Sacks
Hearing in Time, Justin London
Ethnomusicology, Jaap Kunst
The Technique of my Musical Language, Olivier Messiaen
The Music of Africa, J. Kwabena Nketia 1974
Musique et Trance (Music and Trance, Rouget)
African Rhythm and African Sensibility, Chernoff
Flash of the Spirit, RF Thompson
How Musical is Man? J Blacking
World History of the Dance, K. Sachs
Divine Horsemen, M. Deren
Drumming at the Edge of Magic, M Hart
Popular Music of the World, Peter Manuel
Speech surrogates : drum and whistle systems, Thomas A. Sebeok and Donna Jean Umiker-Sebeok
Whistled Languages: A Worldwide Inquiry on Human Whistled Speech, Julian Meyer

Introduction and Overview; what to expect, grading, who is in the class?
What is sound? What makes sound? Why do animals need to hear it? How do they use it? How do we identify sound sources? Why is this important?
What is ethnomusicology, and where did it come from? (vergleichende Musikwissenschaft). Why is it valuable as a tool to study music cognition?
What is computational ethnomusicology?
What is cultural anthropology?
What is consciousness? perception? cognition?
What is auditory neuroscience?
Why we (and all animals) have ears—Darwin and natural selection. What is reality, anyway?

QUESTIONS
"Language and music define us as human." or do they? What other animals have music? Language?
"Our ears were not designed to listen to music — rather, music was designed for our ears to listen to."
Is there such a thing as playing music with an "accent" that is analogous to speaking with an accent?

Week 2 Sept 15 Sound Elements --Why things sound the way they do.
Reading: Chapter 1 and 2 (up to section 2.3.1) of Music, Language and the Brain
and (optional) Chapter 1, Auditory neuroscience: making sense of sound (ebook: Full Text Online via UVic Library)
video: How audition works

Week 4 Sept 29 Rhythm
Reading: Chapt. 3 (up to section 3.2.5) and The Illiterate Listener by Henkjan Honing
What is the difference between pulse, meter, periodicity, rhythm and sycnopation?
Some initial musical examples from Africa, Cuba, Bulgaria, India.
Demo: What is a "random" rhythm and what does it sound like? (on a continuous time-scale vs quantized time)
Chant: is this non-rhythmic or arhythmic?
Where is one? Or is there a one? Perhaps this is our Western approach that assumes there is a "one."
How can we ever know (or prove) that notation of a rhythm is correct?

Week 5 Oct 6 Rhythm cont'd
Reading: Chapt. 3 (up to section 3.3.4) and Investigating the human-specificity of synchronization to music Patel, et alia, 2008 (Which nonhuman animals, if any, can follow a "beat"? How unique is the human capacity for rhythm and entrainment to a pulse—why can't dogs dance?)

Mother AFRICA - origin of our species? The African aesthetic vs the European aesthetic
The profound influence of Africa on Western popular music, and therefore/thereby on popular music around the world. Also the pervasiveness of the African aesthetic in EDM (electronic dance music): LOOPS are an African musical influence.

Options for notating rhythm:
--Traditional musical notation (shows the meter and its relation to a pulse, which is useful and familiar to musicians)
--TUBS notation ("Time Unit Box Sytsem) shows the "layout" of the rhythm, is useful for showing polyrhythmic relationships, and is easier for non-musicians to understand)
--Digital notation is useful for computer manipulations and testing: [1 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 0 1 0 0 0] is son clave, for example
--Geometric notation (this option shows various spacial aspects like symmety, rotation, etc)

Specificity: There are links between specific sounds (instruments like drums) and specific rhythms; traditional rhythms are usually played on particular instruments. In a way, this is a global version of orchestration/timbre-specific patterns.
There are tabla patterns and vocal isomorphism in Indian music; this is a sonic isomorphism, but not a semantic or linguistic one. More surprising is the actual ability to speak using non-linguistic sound sources: whistles, drums, idiophones. It seems intuitively obvious that tonal languages would lend themselves more to tonal representations using musical instruments, but there are whistled versions of Spanish (a non-tonal language like English) in Gomera. Other whistled languages (in Mexico for example) are of the local (tonal) languages:
Speech Surrogates: Yoruba talking drum
Whistles in the Mist: Whistled Speech in Oaxaca
A Lesson in Silbo Gomero
The Talking Balafon of the Sambla:Grammatical Principles and Documentary Implications
Demonstration of tabla bols in jhaptal

Week 7 Oct 20 Melody
Reading: Chapt. 4 (up to section 4.5)
"Hearing a melody is hearing, having heard, and being about to hear, all at once. Every melody declares to us that the past can be there without being remembered, the future without being foreknown." –Victor Zuckerkandl

Week 8 Oct 27 Melody (cont'd)
Reading: Chapt. 4 (finish chapter)
"Time is always new; cannot possibly be anything but new." –V. Zuckerkandl

Week 11 Nov 17 Meaning
Chapt. 6 (entire capter)
ORION Lecture at UVic: Peter Golub -- Film music and Emotion
Peter Golub lecture 1 Peter Golub lecture 2 (these lectures are optional)

Week 12 Nov 24 Evolution
Reading: Chapt. 7 (entire chapter)
Altered states of consciousness, shamanism, how much can we learn from EEG and other physiological measurements of brain activity?
Minimalism: Steve Reich's trip to Ghana / aesthetic foundations of minimalism / experiential (the description of the music differs completely from the experience of listening)
Listening experiments, improvisations
Contemporary composers and rhythmic approaches (Messiaan, Ligeti, Reich)
Music Visualization: Visualization of Rite of Spring vs. musical score: appealing or appalling? That is to say, does it enhance your listening experience, or simply distract you?

Demos
Music software: Max/MSP/Jitter, Pro Tools, sndpeek, Audacity, spectrogram
Randomness in pitch and rhythm: what does it actually sound like? (Max patch)
Auditory Demonstrations CD (Acoustical Society)
Steve Reich

Listening examples:
Edgard Varese: Ionization
Steve Reich: Drumming, Clapping Music, Music for 18 Musicians
Olivier Messiaen: Quartet for the End of Time,
Georgy Ligeti: Piano Etudes
Conjunto Folklórico Nacional de Cuba
Ilú Añá, Sacred Rhythms of Cuba
Cuban percussion, rumba tonada
Ghana: Ewe, Ashanti music

Guest Lecturer: Dr. Ives Chor "Cognitive Frameworks of Rhythm"
Guest lecturer: Dr. Anthony Tan: "Psychoacoustics and Music Composition"
Guest lecturer: Dr. Alona Fyshe: "Neuroscience and Computational Linguistics"