I learned a lot from this course! So interesting! Not having a scientific background, I found some concepts a bit challenging and took some effort to get. But once understood I was amazed and was well worth the time put in!

Quite an interesting course connecting various fields such as mathematics, physics, brain science, music and music theory. I am giving it 4 stars as I feel that some explanations are weak and need more elaboration.

This is a very fascinating view of the origins of musical intervals and scales and harmonies that I had never considered before. There is a lot I will follow up. Thanks to Dale Purves for making this available.

This course works fairly well for those who look forward to quenching their thirst of knowledge. It is not only useful for those who study a program related to the are, but also for inquisitive people

It's a really good curse to learn and discover different facts about, music,biology (sense of hearing) and emotions. How is the mood sense affected by music.

This course was fairly interesting. The argument that the notes of our scale are linked to human vocalisation, not just in the West, but the whole world.

The very dull voice of the teacher makes him sound as if he is bothered about teaching the course.

interesting info otherwise.

An interesting course about some biological aspects in music as well as some comparing examples between cultural styles.

It was an interesting course and thought something novel. There was some difficulty in understanding scales.

Very interesting, specially in evaluating how necessary the complexity in music is for composers.

Very informative and interesting. However the quizzes didn't coincide well with the lectures.

I enjoyed learning this class. I was interested in the scientific aspect of music.

Good video content, but quizzes need to be revised.

Thank you for this course.

Muy bueno

Good course, and a very interesting overview of the human auditory system, the significance of the harmonic series, and a biological perspective on what attracts us to music and how we have developed a musical language. The instructor is very narrative in his lecture style, so I found it helpful to follow along with the transcriptions - he tends to talk on about a point, and it is easy to miss the main point in all of his clarification. I was not a fan of the quizzes; I found them to be confusing in verbiage, often focusing on obscure points within the lectures, or using terminology not addressed in the lectures at all. I also think the course would benefit by the inclusion of a Music Theorist to explain the musical concepts, as the Instructor is a Neuroscientist, and misspoke on music theory a few times; it also would have broken up the uniformity of mostly one speaker throughout a 6-week course. But overall, I thought that this course was very good, and covered some very interesting material, and that the Instructor was very knowledgeable on a variety of topics, and very engaging. He did a great job explaining difficult concepts until you GOT it, even without a scientific background.

I feel this course is designed in a way that may be too challenging to those who know nothing about music, sound, or biology. The quizzes dont really match the material covered and some of the questions are too ambiguous. The explanations are a little hard to follow as well. It does cover some interesting information about the relationship of music to speech. However, for someone a little more advanced in music and biology, I was hoping for more to be covered. I would have enjoyed more discussion of the history of modes and tuning systems, including more discussion of the Pythagorean comma (and how adjusted need to be made to intervals, especially in a chorus) and Kepler's work. I also would have enjoyed more discussion of rhythmic entrainment, the social cohesion hypothesis of the evolution of music, the roles music plays in human life, the way that bodies synchronize, and more about the relationship of music to emotional regulation, meaning, and personality. Im sure there is more as well. Giving this course 3 stars is generous in my opinion.

A five-week class on biological mechanisms of perception of speech and music by humans. The topics include sound signals and sound stimuli and their perception with the human auditory system, differences and likelihood in the perception of vocalization and vocal tones in speech and of music, biological interpretation of scales, and the impact of cultural differences onto music.

The course is rather a prolonged description of the research field than a proper part of general education. Its real subject is certain topics in biology, not music. Only a number facts discussed may be of interest for most music student, and these are contained in any decent introductory textbook of music anyhow.

For the hypothesis regarding biological explaination of consonance, it would have been useful to present detailed statistical analysis. Without that, the theory presented was not very convincing. According to the theory presened (slide 17 in defining music...), notes m2, M2 and M7 should not be consonant at all. However, they are wonderfully consonant, at least in Hindustani Classical Music. Secondly, the theory does not explain why notes in the lower octave (less than 256 Hz) sound consonant in vocal music though such frequencies are almost absent in normal speech. As far as I am concerned, the course, while making an honest attempt, does not answer many questions.

Great topic, great information, poor structure design. IMHO this course should focus more on the theory of how biology explains music, and not in music theory itself. I think it was done in a way to allow people with no music knowledge to take the course, but i also think that is ambitious to pretend that these people follow up from ground up until modes and scales in a 6 week course, and for those who already know the music theory, it gets slow and cumbersome. However, i got some really good info on the topic, and is a good appetizer to start digging in the field. Thanks.

The course was alright in the sense that it was descriptive, however, the level of critical thinking suggested for the course was not actually indicative of the material presented.

A lot of the material presented was great, but when the quiz came around, questions regarding the material were unequal. For example, in one quiz, there was a question about Galileo, but there was no mention of Galileo in the lecture for that week, and, a lot of the PDF'S were repetitive and not diverse in the material being taught.

The video lessons weren't very helpful except in the case of where a certain musical concept was explained and demonstrated. The quiz questions weren't always answered very clearly in the lessons so it would come down to my inferences most of the time. The fact that I am a student who studies music in high school helped me, but if you don't have an advanced understanding of music before you start the course you may find it more challenging.

The material in this course is very interesting, and many of the musical demonstrations are extremely helpful. I am glad I took it. However, much of the most interesting material is poorly explained; I would loved if fewer ideas were covered in more depth. The quizzes were for the most part poorly written, and only somewhat correlated with the presentation of material in the lectures. So there is definitely much room for improvement.

The whole course is beneficial for someone with just rudimentary knowledge of physics of sound. The physics modules and some music theory parts were not useful for me, because I already had enough knowledge. I expected the course to deliver more biological information - as the title indicates - so that I could learn professional methods of interpretation of music from biological viewpoint.

The content of the course itself was engaging and presented well-enough, with some interesting data analysis whether or not you find the ultimate interpretations convincing. From a logistical perspective though, there were serious issues with the coherency of the quizzes and some minor issues with the organization and editing of video content (i.e. segments repeated multiple times).