Various psychological and psychosocial aspects of human musical behavior, including introductory musical acoustics, perception and cognition of music, music and the brain, music processing across world cultures, music and emotions, music and human health, music in social contexts, and principles of experimental design.

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• 4. Global Citizenship and Multicultural Understanding
  • 2. Social Sciences/Cultural Identities
    Use the principles of the social sciences to explore diverse cultural identities and to analyze political and environmental issues.
    • A. Describe the course requirements through which students will be able to define problems and issues appropriate to the field, and to identify theoretical frameworks for interpreting, defining, analyzing, and evaluating these problems and issues.
      
      The course has a strong experimental design component. Students will learn about basic experimental design principles in an early module; then, they will get a chance to demonstrate their understanding of experimental design by completing two reviews of experiments on course-relevant topics published in the journal Psychology of Music. As the culminating project for the class, all students will create a formal proposal (prospectus) for an experiment focused on some aspect of musical behavior. To create this proposal, students will have to identify a problem and research the underlying theoretical framework by reviewing previous literature. Then, they will have to propose an experiment to examine the problem or issue at hand. The proposal will be submitted using an instructor-created template, which will scaffold their thinking (e.g., working title, review of previous literature, purpose statement, hypothesis [or hypotheses], independent variable(s), dependent variable(s), tools/instruments used to measure the dependent variable, sampling strategies, anticipated results, etc.). Although they will not actually collect data for the experiment, the process of creating an experimental proposal will encourage them to think like a social scientist and design an experiment that could be conducted to examine a personally-relevant issue related to human musical behavior.
    • B. Describe how students in this course will be required to demonstrate an awareness of and appreciation for the diversity of human experiences.
      
    • C. In what ways does the course require students to demonstrate an awareness of how social/behavioral processes and relationships take shape in, and vary across, particular regional or geographic contexts.
      
      All aspects of the course content are focused on how musical behaviors and music processing occur across cultures. In fact, the course textbook was chosen because of its unique focus on cross-cultural issues throughout each chapter. Rather than relegating the cultural topics to one discrete chapter, the topics are interwoven with course topics throughout the textbook. I have chosen to begin the course with a concentrated focus on cross-cultural issues in the first instructional module (Module 2, "Music Across World Cultures") so students are primed to think this way as they proceed throughout the remaining modules in the course. The discussion board prompts will require students to make a connection or transfer to some of these cross-cultural issues. For example, students will study the idea of "universals" in music processing to identify those aspects of music that transcend geographic boundaries. As another example, when we are studying musical preference, students will read about the concept of "open-earedness" and discuss how young children tend to be very "open-eared" in that they enjoy and respond favorably to many forms of music-making, even those of other cultures that use different tuning systems, timbres, etc. As they become enculturated in a given musical system, they tend to become less open-eared as they get older (around adolescence, especially). In the discussion board post, they might be asked to describe an experience when they listened to some music that initially struck them as strange/odd/unpleasant and propose why they perceived it negatively based on the concept of "open-earedness."
    • D. What specific assignments, projects, or student works will be used to measure successful student outcomes in this course?
      
      Students' mastery of Achievement 1 (A) will be evaluated based on their final project--the experimental proposal. This project will require them to identify a problem, describe the underlying theoretical framework, and apply the principles of experimental design to examine the chosen problem or issue. Their mastery of Achievement 3 (C) will be evaluated based on their performance on Module 2 ("Music Across World Cultures") and on their weekly discussion board responses, which will be focused on an application of the course topics across geographic boundaries.