Chevron Left
Back to Music as Biology: What We Like to Hear and Why

Learner Reviews & Feedback for Music as Biology: What We Like to Hear and Why by Duke University

4.3
stars
676 ratings

About the Course

The course will explore the tone combinations that humans consider consonant or dissonant, the scales we use, and the emotions music elicits, all of which provide a rich set of data for exploring music and auditory aesthetics in a biological framework. Analyses of speech and musical databases are consistent with the idea that the chromatic scale (the set of tones used by humans to create music), consonance and dissonance, worldwide preferences for a few dozen scales from the billions that are possible, and the emotions elicited by music in different cultures all stem from the relative similarity of musical tonalities and the characteristics of voiced (tonal) speech. Like the phenomenology of visual perception, these aspects of auditory perception appear to have arisen from the need to contend with sensory stimuli that are inherently unable to specify their physical sources, leading to the evolution of a common strategy to deal with this fundamental challenge....

Top reviews

TS

May 16, 2020

This course helped me to see music from a different angle i.e through history and biology. Prof. Dales is a wonderful human being and has a beautiful gift of explaining things in a much simpler way.

MM

Sep 21, 2016

This course has helped me to understand biological psychology of humans towards music. Based on this knowledge i am confident to create music which will seem good to the ears of humans.

Filter by:

151 - 170 of 170 Reviews for Music as Biology: What We Like to Hear and Why

By Lillian L

Feb 5, 2018

Interesting, but has an evolutionary basis which was a bit disappointing. The piano and mbira demonstrations were both enjoyable and interesting.

By Adam L

Jun 27, 2017

Quiz choices should be more carefully put together. I noticed typos, erroneous grading, and MANY answers that are not mutually exclusive.

By Mieke D B

Jun 28, 2016

I did enjoy the course enough to see it through but it could use help on presentation correlation of lessons and tests

By Willian d S L

Jun 21, 2016

The second part of the course is very good. But first part, with introductions and definitions were very "heavy".

By Александра П

Sep 26, 2017

An overview of lots of topics, but the answer to the question in the title can be given without any of that.

By Lianis O

Mar 18, 2017

It was an interesting class but the quizzes did not reflect the class material.

By Jecca J

Feb 25, 2019

Great Professor and content but poorly designed quizzes.

By Grace M

Aug 8, 2016

The instructor is very dry and the mat

By Dave S

Nov 30, 2017

Caveat: I am not a music major or minor, and have no music theory background...I'm a computer scientist and polymath, but not deep in music. My low rating is due to unclear and rambling lectures, many small errors in the text and one very large one in week 5 lesson 1. This isn't up to the par of other Coursera courses I've taken. He could use more visuals to present the concepts, and speak more concisely to make the points. There are tons of materials available in this area of knowledge, and he didn't use that many of them, so it wasn't that great of a learning experience for me since I learn visually and he used only a small set of visuals.

By Seane C

Jul 20, 2020

The analyses presented in the course are excellent... to some extent. It fails to provide a more complex explanation to why we like music on a biological point of view, considering they only talk about how human vocalization affects music. I think there should be more modules trying to address the subject...

By Luis A

Oct 12, 2016

This class isn't very good. It is confusing and not well explained, and the quizzes are too short and badly written. I gave up on week 5 (of 6) because I just didn't feel i was learning very much, particularly about what the title of the course would suggest you'd be learning about.

By sara a

Nov 16, 2017

I found that this course requires at least a basic knowledge of music and sound, which i did not have , making the classes a bit tedious. I would recommend it to musicians though, who might find it more interesting than I did.

By Richard G

Dec 1, 2019

Very dull lecturers. Most material is poorly presented

By Joao P R d S

May 12, 2017

too boring

By Jon B

Sep 29, 2018

.

By Jennifer E

Jun 17, 2016

I felt more like I was part of some experiment to see how long I could tolerate boredom than that I was in class where someone was trying to share knowledge with me. Needless to say I did not make it to the end which is sad because I was genuinely interested in the content. The instructor's delivery was absolutely monotone and he did not seem to emphasize the key points in any way so I found it very difficult to retain any information or to even stay awake at times.

By Deleted A

Jun 21, 2016

I slogged through it and got an 89, but the videos were boring and the quizzes were poorly worded and should have had greater correlation with the course content.

By Ronald J B

Apr 23, 2016

I am dropping this course as it is too elementary. I had hoped for something at a more advanced university level.

By Mary W

Aug 3, 2023

Extremely difficult courae. Should be listed as Advamced

By Jacobo M P

Sep 30, 2020

Boring