Mathematics and Music is a 3-credit online course, taught during the summer at UWEC. It provides 3 GE credits, and 3 mathematics elective credits for all Liberal Arts math emphases, for math teaching majors, and for comprehensive math/physics teaching emphasis. Note: The CampS system lists on-campus meetings every week. That is incorrect. There will be on-campus tests given every other week. You may also take those tests off-campus, given by a proctor approved by the Math Dept. If you take off-campus tests, then you can work at your own pace (even finishing early). Please email me if you have any questions about the course.
The course covers a variety of music, including classical, popular, jazz, rock, and world music. Like everyone else I have my preferences, but my goal is to teach methods that you can use to analyze your own favorites in music. There will be plenty of time for students to present analyses of their own using the methods we describe in the course. We will use a variety of free musical software, with lots of hands-on audio processing of music. Some attention will be paid to methods of creating new music, and analyzing performance (for those students who play an instrument). Last summer, we had a day of performances for those students who wished to record themselves in performance, and we used those performances as examples in the class. It was great fun, and I intend to do it again.
Do you need to be able to read music or play an instrument to do well in this class? The answer is No. We will go over some basics of musical notation, just enough to read some basic scores. There is a lot more to math and music than reading music. The course will mostly emphasize other techniques, such as computer diagrams of pitch changes in time, that everyone can learn and correspond well with the music that we hear. Most of what I know about math and music relates to analyzing the sound that we hear, rather than the notes written for musicians to play. I have taught the course 3 times already, and while less than half the students could play an instrument or read music, everyone still did very well.
To get a better idea of what we do, please look at the syllabus and examples below.
Examples
What
do Ludwig Van Beethoven, Benny Goodman, and Jimi Hendrix have in
common?
Who
is a better singer, Luciano Pavarotti or Alicia Keys?
Patterns
in Musical Scores
This
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