Introducing acoustics as music in the interdisciplinary and inclusive classroom through ski-hill graph pedagogy to teach the meter fundamentals as sound (psychoacoustics)

Abstract

Although music is sound (acoustics) and listeners experience the physics of acoustics as music, the meter of most music textbooks is the notated meter signature and group of beats notated in ‘measures’ on the page with vertical bar lines. Notation-based representation of the meter is antiquated music theory because new research in acoustics, cognitive neuroscience, and critically music theory (Cohn, 2020) informs otherwise. Cohn’s modern meter theory, a distillation of contemporary meter theory from North America, is the first comprehensive meter theory that acknowledges the meter's psychoacoustic experience and augments notation-based understandings of the meter through the meter the fundamental mathematics of the Ski-hill graph. This paper is a music teacher’s response to the availability of modern meter theory’s Ski-hill graph to represent the meter's psychoacoustic (mind and body) experience. The paper illustrates how listeners articulate their quantification of low meter frequencies such as the duple meter in sets of pulses in ratio 2:1 initiated by 1.2 hz and 2.4 hz experienced concurrently. Also, the triple meter sets of pulses in ratios 3:1 0.8 hz and 2.4 hz (Nozaradan et al., 2011).