3.0

Average Course Rating

This class could help you become a rockstar neurosurgeon, using music to help dementia patients reconstruct the tunes to their lives. Or you could learn about Siren songs potent enough to lure back the aquatic life needed to revive our dying coral reef. Or maybe you’d just like to know how, in your dream café, to choose music to encourage diners (<$/customer) to depart and drinkers (>$/customer) to delay. Simply asking, “What Can Music Do?” students in this class pursue these sorts of possibilities by researching links between music and their other interests. Structured in three parts—Brain, Body, and Soul—the course begins by investigating groundbreaking uses of music in neuroscience. We then follow the music-laden neurons out to our limbs to see how they move us and others: emotionally, politically, and especially physically. At end, we consider the outer limits of our understanding – how music really only exists inside our heads (out there it’s just a bunch of longitudinal waves) and yet there seems to be no more powerful and transformative art than music, leaving little unaffected. So, to at least hint at some of these possibilities, at the beginning of each course sections and before students focus on their own research, we’ll investigate together model sources, have discussions, and examine paradigms for how to teach and to learn about music. Then students will flip the script, taking over leadership of the course to assign texts, direct discussions, and collaborate on “blue skies” projects where the dream is encouraged to be bigger than the reality.