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MUSI2059 Music, mind, and body
Course Type: disciplinary elective for music majors/minors, free elective for others
Prerequisite: NIL
Instructor: Dr. Youn KIM
Semester: Second Semester 2023/24
Time: 1:30pm-3:20pm, Thursday
Venue: CPD-LG!.22 Rehearsal Room
This course considers music as a phenomenon of human behavior and examines various aspects of the relationship between music, mind, and body. We will explore questions such as how humans came to be musical, how people listen to, understand, and perform music, and why we listen to and make music. Following the evolutionary bases for musicality and the psychoacoustic/physiological foundation of auditory perception, we will move to the cognitive issues of how the mind represents musical structures and how expectation works in the process of listening to music. We will also consider the role of the multimodal body in performing and listening, music and emotion, and music and the brain. The significance of social and cultural contexts for musical experience will be underlined, and the embodied approach will be introduced in the discussion of music, mind, and body. Students will have the opportunity to pursue their own interests in-depth within the individual project.
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Course Learning Outcomes
Assessment Methods
Topics
Text & Resource Materials
Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:
  • describe the mechanisms involved in music perception and cognition;
  • demonstrate a basic understanding of the subjects, methodologies, and findings in music psychology;
  • reflect our own musical experience, formulate a question in a scholarly way, and develop it into a research topic;
  • critically examine and integrate literature and research into a logical argument.
Short Assignment 25%
Individual Research Project 65%
- critical review of readings (15%)
- presentation (20%)
- final research proposal (30%)
Participation 10%
  • getting started: music and the mind; what is music psychology?
  • music matters
  • origins of music: “In the beginning was …”
  • building blocks: from sound to tone
  • listening the tune: from tone to music
  • sounding together
  • “only in the anticipation”
  • composing and performing
  • music and movement
  • music in the heart; music in the brain
  • music and mind in our lives today
  • Clarke, Eric, and Nicholas Cook, eds. 2004. Empirical Musicology: Aims,Methods, Prospects. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Deutsch, Diana, ed. 2013. The Psychology of Music. Third edition. New York: Academic Press.
  • Van Der Schyff, Dylan, Andrea Schiavio, and David J Elliott. 2022. Musical Bodies, Musical Minds: Enactive Cognitive Science and the Meaning of Human Musicality. Cambridge: The MIT Press.  
  • Hallam, Susan, Ian Cross, and Michael Thaut, eds. 2009. The Oxford Handbook of Music Psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Kim, Youn, Sander Gilman, eds. 2019. The Oxford Handbook of Music and the Body. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Parncutt, Richard, and Gary E.McPherson, eds. 2002. The Science and Psychology of Music Performance: Creative Strategies for Teaching and Learning. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Tan, Siu-Lan, Peter Pfordresher, and Rom Harré. 2010. Psychology of Music: From Sound to Significance. Hove, East Sussex: Psychology Press.
  • Thompson, Bill. 2014. Music,Thought & Feeling: Understanding the Psychology of Music. Second Edition. New York: Oxford University Press.