A tutorial and assignment on the analysis and syntheis of music to provide acoustic foundations for courses in the Psychology of Music and in Music Cognition

Abstract

Students in courses in the Psychology of Music and in Music Cognition benefit from an understanding of aspects of musical acoustics. A tutorial assignment has been developed to provide hands-on experience in synthesizing acoustic elements and analyzing real music using Audacity®, freely downloadable software. The tutorial emphasizes visualizing waveforms and spectrographs of target sounds. For the synthesis component, students generate sine tones related by small integers on separate tracks and combine the tracks to create complex waves. Students must answer questions regarding frequency, amplitude, pitch, loudness, and sound quality. They are also asked to synthesize a sequence of successive notes of the chromatic scale, so as to understand the significance of the semitone ratio 21/12 (i.e., 1.05946), and they are asked to synthesize a sequence of successive notes from the diatonic scale. For the analysis component of the tutorial, students download a favourite piece of music, provide waveform and spectrographic representations, and answer questions about the representation of pitch, loudness, time and timbre. They also locate auditory repetitions and identify different sections of their piece. The students are asked to summarize what they have learned from the assignment. The assignment can be adapted for work in teams, and a detailed grading rubric facilitates student evaluation.