Re: AUDITORY Digest - 11 Dec 2009 to 12 Dec 2009 (#2009-282)

["Watson, Charles S." <watson@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Matthew,

A psychology course for music majors would be a welcome offering here at Indiana University, where music is a major activity for a lot of people. We do not have such course at the undergraduate level (unless someone has snuck one in during the past couple of years when I was no longer teaching).  For a number of years Gary Kidd, Bob Port and I taught a graduate seminar called "The Perception of Complex Sounds:  Speech, Nonspeech, and Music" and we had a nice blend of students from linguistics, psychology, speech and hearing sciences, and our school of music. The students came with lots of different perspectives, knowledge, and intellectual goals, which made every new group a lot of fun. The three instructors attended every class and often got into discussions about various issues, and at least some students joined in these sometimes vigorous (heated?) exchanges. The only value in mentioning that class is that it convinced us that the topic (hearing of complex sounds...meaning most sounds of any evolutionary consequence) really demands multi-disciplinary treatment.  

Now, for what you may interpret as a commercial message.  We believed that to appreciate many of the issues discussed in that class and the research literature we had them read, that it would be of great value to have them do some "serious" listening, of a sort that musicians and linguists seldom do. If we had more time to devote to it we could have developed experiments for them to conduct, or even added a lab section to the course.  But we settled for having them all participate as subjects in a one-hour psychoacoustic test battery, in which their thresholds were determined for the frequency, intensity and duration of single tones, for changes in the rhythm of pulse trains, in the order of four-tone sequences, in the presence of components of word-length tonal patterns, in the order of four-syllable utterances, and lastly their accuracy in a four-alternative forced choice identification of nonsense syllables.  Doing that, and showing them where they ranked in percentile terms, among normal hearing college students, and their thresholds in physical units (msec, Hz and dB) seemed to improve their understanding of what the data points really represented in JASA articles.  The commercial message is that during the last couple of years we developed a computerized version of that test battery, that makes it easy to administer if one is interested in giving students that sort of experience. I have mentioned it (the TBAC battery) before on this list, so if you want to know any more about it either email me or check the details at comdistec.com.

Best,

Chuck Watson       

-----Original Message-----
From: AUDITORY - Research in Auditory Perception [mailto:AUDITORY@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of AUDITORY automatic digest system
Sent: Sunday, December 13, 2009 12:03 AM
To: AUDITORY@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: AUDITORY Digest - 11 Dec 2009 to 12 Dec 2009 (#2009-282)

There is 1 message totalling 54 lines in this issue.

Topics of the day:

  1. Materials for psychology course for Music Majors

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Date:    Sat, 12 Dec 2009 01:20:55 -0500
From:    Matthew McCabe <mccabem@xxxxxxx>
Subject: Materials for psychology course for Music Majors

hi all --

i'm in the process of developing my first music psychology class here at 
CSU for this coming Spring semester, and i thought i would ask a really 
loaded question:

can anyone recommend introductory-level materials (journal articles 
or online resources preferable) that i can use to bring undergraduate 
music majors up to speed on general psychology and auditory perception 
topics?

the reason i ask is this:  the majority of them will have never seen 
anything like this before since the course is for music majors.  our 
school is very performance-oriented, and it wouldn't surprise me if i had 
to explain things like the physics of a vibrating string and explain what 
an overtone is during the first week...  time i don't want to squander.

i'm looking for easy-to-understand articles on the fundamentals -- 
auditory perception, cognitive psychology, the scientific method, things 
like that.  we will be addressing a variety of topics, but i haven't quite 
nailed down specifically which yet.  in all likelihood we will do things 
like emotion, memory, and musical meaning, but i need to see how much time 
i have once we get past the basics.

if you've taught a course like this before, please let me know what you 
have used.  i've already chosen our textbook -- William Forde Thompson's 
"Music, Thought, and Feeling" -- which I like very much.  i think the 
students will enjoy it if i present it the right way!  many of them have 
never approached music in this way before and i'm looking forward to 
messing them up a bit :)

best,

m






---
matthew mccabe <mccabem@xxxxxxx>
visiting assistant professor / music tech :: columbus state university
ph.d. candidate :: music composition :: uf college of fine arts
lab member :: reilly cognition and language lab :: uf phhp

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End of AUDITORY Digest - 11 Dec 2009 to 12 Dec 2009 (#2009-282)
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