Your Mind on Music: Cognition, Theory, and Methods

Are you curious about the ways music compels us to feel, move, and imagine? In this course students will survey a range of topics to explore how the human mind engages with music, both during listening and performance. We will cover historically significant and influential studies in the field, including topics such as music and emotion, style transmission, social and group dynamics, and the perception of pitch, rhythm, and musical form. We will learn how to read and interpret empirical studies about music and discuss their impact on our understanding of music’s function in our lives. We will critically engage with the literature through writing assignments, in-class debates, experimental design, and computational methods. Students will also have the agency to select readings that align with their interests.