MUS 511

Music Perception and Cognition

Class presentation

The idea behind this project is to intimately get to know at least one experiment in the area of Music Cognition/Perception/Psychoacoustics, and present it to the class.

Ani Patel's book, Music, Language, and the Brain, is in some ways a massive compendium of experiments that ultimately tell a complex story. Many of these experiments (unlike in Chemistry or Physics or Medicine) can be replicated fairly easily, depending on the exact details of the experiment. The book contains hundreds of references, almost 70 pages of them. They are mostly experimental, on topics that range very widely.

Choose two references that intrigue you, read about them (find the original articles/citations), and prepare a presentation for the class. Do you think it was a good experiment (or argument)? What did you learn from it? How difficlut was it to replicate? One or both of these two references should include listening experiment(s) that you can do yourself, and present to the class. You are welcome to use the class as "guinea pigs" and get more test data that way to use for your Final Project (writeup).

To that end, create listening experiment(s) that duplicate as closely as you can one of the experiments in the book. Then present/explain your work to the class, with listening examples and (at least) data from your own "ears."

If you would like to use an experiment that is not in the book, this is possible, but please contact me to discuss.

To clarify, you should report on two experiments, but you only need to try to replicate one of them yourself.