MUS 106 CC: MUSICAL ACOUSTICS

The Science of Sound:  How do musical instruments produce sound?  How can sounds be captured, recorded, and reproduced?  What makes some sounds pleasing to the ear, and others painful?  Acoustics, the physics of sound, explores these and other questions.  The course explores how musical instruments (including the human voice) produce music, reveals the mathematical relationships between the construction of these instruments and the resulting sound waves, considers how the listening environment can alter sound, and explores techniques for capturing, recording, and reproducing sound.  The course also explores the anatomy and physiology of the human ear, how it collects and transmits sound to the brain, and how the human mind perceives these signals as sound and music.  Students will learn the fundamentals of sound engineering, microphone choice and placement, digital recording, editing and playback, and will put their knowledge to use as they conduct an acoustical study of a specific space on campus to improve the room’s acoustics.  As an introduction to musical acoustics, the course requires no background in either science or music.