MUS2640

One of my main goals while teaching MUS2640 – Sensing Sound and Music last semester was the integration of perspectives from musicology, psychology, and technology. The main point is to introduce the basics of music psychology and music technology, two disciplines that are quite distinct in most places, but which we at the University of Oslo have a tradition of combining. In this post, I explain the rationale. Three “logies” One of my main arguments is that we should consider the three “logies” involved in this course: ...

This semester, I have written a book with AI. I should emphasize the with in the previous sentence, because this has been an experience of co-creation between various large language models (LLMs) and me. This post details my approach to co-writing Sensing Sound and Music and reflects on the process. The need for a book The reason for my AI-based writing experiment was the need for a textbook for the course MUS2640 – Sensing Sound and Music at the University of Oslo. This is an introductory course for the bachelor’s students in our musicology program who want to major in music psychology and/or music technology. These are two distinct directions that are usually taught separately. However, at UiO, we have a strong tradition of combining psychological and technological perspectives on and with music (in the fourMs Lab and at RITMO), so I have argued that we need a foundation course showing the connections between the two disciplines. ...

One of my MUS2640 students asked which AI tool I had used to create the illustration on top of the textbook I have been developing for the course. The fact is, it isn’t AI-generated; it is a photo! I took the photo holding a 360-degree camera on my head while visiting the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) a couple of years ago. I was standing inside Olafur Eliasson’s One-way colour tunnel, located on a bridge inside the gallery. It is a fascinating three-dimensional light sculpture that no photo could capture. However, the 360-degree photo gives an impression of what it looks like: ...

In the second compulsory assignment in MUS2640 Sensing Sound and music, the students were tasked with a foundational exercise in audio analysis: creating spectrograms. Here I summarize how it went. The Assignment The core task was straightforward: Choose two distinct sound recordings. Students selected everything from musical instrument sounds and songs to environmental sounds like thunderstorms, boiling water, and animal calls. Generate visualizations in Sonic Visualiser. For each sound, they created a waveform (showing amplitude over time) and two types of spectrograms (showing frequency content over time). Compare linear and logarithmic scales. One spectrogram had to use a linear frequency axis and the other a logarithmic one. Write a reflection. Students described what they did and what they learned from comparing the sounds and the different visualizations. They were asked to do the exercise in the excellent open-source program Sonic Visualiser, but for those who wanted to do it in Python or MATLAB, that was fine. ...

I am teaching the course MUS2640 – Sensing Sound and Music again this semester. It is the second time I’ve run the course, and I can build on the experience I gained last year. One of the course’s aims is to encourage students to listen attentively and develop the capacity to discuss what they hear systematically. Last year, it worked very well to have students record a (any!) soundscape and reflect on the experience. More precisely, they were tasked to (1) listen to a sound(scape), (2) record it with any device available, (3) share it on Freesound, and (4) reflect on the difference between what they heard and the recorded sound. It is a simple task, but it has many layers that can contribute to the learning process. ...

This semester, I have taught a new course at the Department of Musicology at the University of Oslo: MUS2640 – Sensing Sound and Music. Since I have been “bought out” to run RITMO Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Rhythm, Time and Motion since 2018, I haven’t taught a regular class in many years. However, all my colleagues were busy with other things, and I thought it would be fun to engage with bachelor’s students again on a regular basis, so I took the challenge. ...