 2016 - 2017 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| 0845-4126-01 | Seeing Voices: Cross-Modal Correspondences and the Meanings of Music | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| FACULTY OF VISUAL AND PERFORMING ARTS | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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University credit hours: 2.0
Course description
Recent research in experimental psychology has revealed that people consistently associate auditory features, like pitch height, loudness, or timbre, with aspects of sight, motion, touch--and evn taste and smell. These cross-modal correspondences (for instance, between pitch height and spatial height, or loudness and size), often perceived automatically and subconsciously, may provide a key to the understanding of aspects of musical meaning. In particular, they may shed light on the ways music associates with text, narrative and descriptive program. In this seminar we shall survey the empirical research of cross-modal correspondences, and investigate, through analyses of music by Haydn, Schubert, Mussorgsky, Schoenberg, Czernowin, and Ligeti, how such correspondences are shaped in music, and how they shape the relationships of music with text, narrative and program. In their presentations and papers, students will explore specific aspects of cross-modal correspondence in musical contexts.