Musical Fundamentals: Education, Sound, and Perception
E. Fundamentals of Music
Fundamentals of Music: Valoreduc.musica: Education develops abilities: perception (hearing), speech (voice, body, instrument) and communication. It should be part of the comprehensive education of the person.
Real Artistic Education: Practice live performances. Sound lab.
Available to all: Non-gifted, gifted adults, children, and people with disabilities.
Freedom and creativity, spontaneity, imagination, creative process are most important, not just results.
Learning process: Sequencing, from the simple to the complex, and parallel teaching psychological development.
Assets: Activity, experimentation, research, profession: counselor, student: protagonist.
Playful: A methodology used playfully, but musical games are not music itself.
Global: Interdisciplinary and related to other subjects.
Continuity: Classroom music, home, street, and institutions.
Variety: Audition, interpretation, analysis, and musical language.
Professionalism: Music as a profession requires specialized study and teachers.
Music in the Curriculum
LOE (2006): RD 1513/2006-Decreto 230/2007 of 31 July. Both documents emphasize skills development: cultural and artistic competence: appreciate, understand, and critically evaluate different art forms, using them as a source of enjoyment and personal enrichment and consider them as part of the cultural heritage of peoples.
How Many Blocks of Instruction Does the Area of Music Have?
Two blocks of content: Listening, interpretation, and musical creation.
Definition of Music
Art of arranging sounds of instruments and the human voice to produce delight, stirring the senses. Cage: Music is sound around us, whether in a concert hall or not.
Silence
We miss it; it’s more of a mystical concept than a physical one. J. Cage: Silence does not exist; we always have sound with us. It’s a feeling that occurs in our ear by the vibration of the body, transmitted by an elastic medium.
Phases of Sound
Production, propagation, and perception.
Types of Sound
Natural, artificial, and human.
Qualities of Sound
- Height-frequency-melody: Vibration of an object in a certain time (bass, treble, middle sounds). A sound will be more acute with more vibration. Three factors influence this: thickness, length, and pressure. Thresholds of hearing: 15 — 20000 (infrasound, ultrasound).
- Intensity: Dynamic-wave amplitude: soft to loud sounds. Factors: amplitude, density, distance, enhancers, sound amplifiers.
- Duration: Time-rhythm: long sounds, short sounds, intermittent sounds. Factors: damping and free will.
- Timbre: Waveform-color. We can recognize the object and its main sound harmonics. Factors: material, form of instrument, the sound production system, attack…
The Sound: Loud, Dissonant, and Aperiodic
Shafer: Undesirable acoustic sound signal: noise ratio. Transversal axes can be like music.
Auditory Discrimination and Hearing in the Classroom
(Flat-hearing definitions)
- Sensory-sensual (Subjective): The listener is guided by sensory stimuli and the sultry sound without thinking about analyzing them. Hearing.
- Emotional (Subjective): The listener projects their own feelings and emotions into the music they listen to (feeling).
- Imaginary-associative (Subjective): The listener forms a series of visual images to hear the music. Programmatic music. Hearing (imagine).
- Musical (Aim)-Examines: The listener examines the music in strictly musical terms (elements of musical language). Playing (understanding).