Easy Listening

By B. J. Almond

A free online introductory course in music appreciation from Rice University offers adults a new way to learn how to listen to music.

The course, titled Sound Reasoning, comes complete with onscreen audio samples that demonstrate concepts explained in the text and interactive exercises that offer immediate feedback on why a response is correct or incorrect. Designed to be as user-friendly as possible, the course does not require the ability to read music, and the audio samples can be accessed quickly with the click of a mouse.

“The goal of Sound Reasoning is to equip the learner with questions they might ask of any piece of music, thereby creating a richer and more comprehensive understanding of music both familiar and unfamiliar,” says Anthony Brandt, associate professor of composition and theory at Rice’s Shepherd School of Music.

Brandt created the course for several reasons. He wanted a resource that would be easily accessible to university classes, musical performing groups, and the general public. He also wanted to address several drawbacks he encounters in conventional music appreciation.

“We often are taught details first instead of the music’s bigger picture,” Brandt says. “At a food-tasting, you sample something, and if you don’t like it, you don’t eat it. In music, the risk of that approach is that if you don’t like the ‘taste’ of an unfamiliar and unexpected sound, you may turn away from the rest of the piece.” In the modules Musical Form and Overall Destiny, Brandt adopts a top-down approach to listening that encourages listeners to take in the whole expanse of a composition.

Brandt also wanted to bridge the gap between classical and modern music. Major museums routinely house both traditional and contemporary art, dance and theater companies regularly present both historic and modern works, and bookstores have classical literature and the latest fiction on their shelves. However, concert music is much more segregated between new and old. “Conventional musical training frequently reinforces this by presenting a historic, style-specific approach to listening,” Brandt says. Sound Reasoning avoids such segregation by focusing on style-independent concepts, each illustrated with side-by-side examples from the classical and modern repertoires. More than 30 modern composers are represented.

Sound Reasoning offers 10 learning modules, and each is accompanied by audio examples, such as excerpts from works as diverse as Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 5, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, and Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw. The modules can be studied in sequence or individually at the user’s own pace. People who feel more comfortable with a textbook can print hard copies of the lessons.

Although the course concentrates on Western classical and modern music, the concepts taught in each lesson can be applied to jazz, folk music, popular music, and other styles. “Music is a time-art,” Brandt says. “It is abstract and nonverbal. Its sounds do not have literal or fixed meanings. A musical performance generally flows and cannot be interrupted.”

In Brandt’s view, what makes music intelligible is the use of repetition. “Pop music tends to rely on literal repetition, because intelligibility is most immediate,” Brandt explains, “whereas art music focuses on varied and transformed repetition.” The modules How Music Makes Sense and Time’s Effect on the Material show how repetition creates musical coherence and drama. Various other modules teach the listener to analyze changes in speed, pitch, range, and duration and to pay attention to orchestration, dynamics, density, fragmentation, and other features.

Brandt is hopeful his innovative approach will help listeners become more confident and self-reliant. “Music is an invitation to listen with our full attention,” he says. “Listening actively to music changes the way we hear our lives. When it is most meaningful, music shows us how to recognize the rhythms, patterns, and recurrences of our experience.”

The course, which is posted on the website for Rice’s Connexions project, was made possible by an Artistic Excellence grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and an Innovation Grant from Rice’s Computer and Information Technology Institute.

Sound Reasoning can be found at cnx.org.