Summary of MUSI1025 Art of Listening

The article is written for my personal review and summary of the course: MUSI1025 Art of Listening at HKU. It is not intended for public sharing since the content is based on my understanding of the course materials and lectures, which may not be accurate or comprehensive. However, if these notes can help you in your studies, I'm glad to hear that.

This course is not about music theory or performance, but rather about developing a deeper appreciation and understanding of music through active listening. In other terms, you might have heared the word of "Music Analysis". This course is more about the "analysis" part: What is the form of the music? What are the elements that make up the music? How do these elements interact with each other? How does the music make you feel? What is the historical and cultural context of the music? These are some of the questions that we will explore in this course.

To build up the vocabulary for you to do proper music analysis, this course will cover the following topics:

Art of Listening

Think about what could be the difference between the ambient noise of a street, and a precise composition of symphony. We perceive both as sound, but you will only listen to the latter when you apply a specific set of cognitive skills and cultural knowledge.

In this course, we will define listening as a deliberate cultural practice, a skill that can be refined and even judged as True or False depending on the depth of understanding one brings to the music.

We could put these skills into use, try if you can hear these differences in the following two pieces of music:

The knife - Heartbeats (Original / Cover)

In populaar music, a "cover song" is a recording of a previously released track, and it is often used to pay tribute to the original artist or to reinterpret the song in a new way. The cover version of "Heartbeats" by José González is a stripped-down acoustic version that emphasizes the lyrics and melody, while the original version by The Knife is an electronic dance track with a more upbeat tempo and a different arrangement.

So you know there are differences, but we need to be more specific about what those differences are. Hence, we need to develop a vocabulary to describe these differences.

Musical Vocabulary

Rhythm

Rhythm can be understand as the organization of time in music. It is the pattern of sounds and silences in music, and it is what gives music its sense of movement and flow. In layman's terms, rhythm is the "beat" of the music, and it is what makes you want to dance or tap your foot to the music.

Rhythm is structured through a hierarchy, where it starts with a steady pulse, which is then organized into "meter". Meter is the grouping of beats into regular patterns, where to be more easy to understand, we can think of it as the "time signature" of the music. The time signature is usually written as a fraction, where the top number indicates how many beats are in a measure, and the bottom number indicates the type of note that gets one beat. For example, in a 4/4 time signature, there are four beats in a measure, and the quarter note gets one beat.

It is also worth to mention that there is a concept called "Syncopation", which is the accentuation of weak beats or off-beats in music. Syncopation can create a sense of tension and release in music, and it is often used in jazz and other forms of popular music to create a more complex and interesting rhythm.

Melody

Melody is the succession of musical tones that unfold over time. It is the part of the music that you can hum or sing along to, and it is often the most memorable part of a piece of music.

For instance, every one's favorite: Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. The melody of this song is the sequence of notes that you can sing, and it is what makes the song recognizable and memorable.

Pitch

Pitch is the perception of the frequency of a sound. Higher the frequency, higher the pitch, and lower the frequency, lower the pitch.

Harmony

When there are multiple pitches sounding at the same time, we have harmony. To be exact, harmony is the combination of different pitches sounding together.

Think of a melody constructed with pitch to be unfold on the axis of rhythm, then harmony is the vertical axis of the music, it gives music its depth and weight.

When you play a chord on an instrument, you are creating harmony. The way the different pitches interact with each other can create different emotions and moods in the music.

In Western Art Music, we have developed a system of functional harmony where certain chords feel like "Home" and "Away", with other middle chords creating tension and releases. For instance, tonic "I" chord sound stable and restful, while the dominant "V" chord creates tension that wants to resolve back to the tonic "I" chord.

We will eventually reach the concept of "Functional Harmony" later in this note, so don't freak out.

Timbre

When you sketch a drawing's outline, at the end you have to color it to finish your painting. Different ways of coloring can give the same drawing different flavors.

In music, we can play with the Timbre of the sound constructing melody and harmonies, to give them special flavors, just like painters did.

Timbre is the quality of a sound that distinguishes it from other sounds, or the tone color. It is what makes a sound of synthesizer sound different from a guitar, like we've seen in the two versions of "Heartbeats". Using synthesizers, the track sounds energetic and pulsy, while the acoustic guitar gives the track a more intimate and warm feeling.

Compared to rhythm, melody, pitch and harmony, the way we describe timbre is more subjective and somehow vague. For instance, typically guitar sounds "warm", while synthesizer sounds "cold". But these descriptions are not universal, and they can vary depending on the context and the listener's personal preferences.

Tempo

Quickly mention a simple term: Tempo, which is the speed of the music. To be more in depth, it is the rate at which the rhythm of the music unfolds, and it is usually measured in beats per minute (BPM) nowadays.

In older times, typically in Western Art Music, we use Italian terms to indicate the tempo of the music, such as "Allegro" for fast, "Andante" for moderate, and "Adagio" for slow.

Texture

Texture refers to the way different musical elements are combined and layered together in a piece of music. It is the way the different voices or parts of a piece of music interact with each other, and it is what gives a piece of music its overall sound and feel.

Different to harmony, that texture does not care about the vertical combination of pitches, but rather the horizontal combination of different musical elements, such as rhythm, melody, and timbre.

This determines the "thickness" of the music, whether it is a single melody line (monophonic), a melody with accompaniment (homophonic), or multiple independent melodies (polyphonic).

And still, we will unfold more in a later section about texture.

Form

Form can be visualized as the architecture of the large-scale organization of time in a composition. It is the way the different sections of a piece of music are organized and structured, and it is what gives a piece of music its overall shape and coherence.

For those who does not have a music background on Western Art Music, this is a bit tricky to understand, as most of the forms we will discuss are based on the conventions of Western Art Music, which may not be familiar to everyone. However, you may understand the concept of Form as the "song structure" of a piece of music, which is a more general term that can be applied to any type of music.

For instance, modern pop songs follow a form called "Verse-Chorus Form". More stuff about forms will be discussed in a later section, but for now, just understand that form is the way the different sections of a piece of music are organized and structured, and it is what gives a piece of music its overall shape and coherence.

Listening, Taste and Pleasure

We are living in an era where distracted listening is the norm, where music is often consumed as background noise, or as a way to fill in the silence. If we put our divices away, and let the music flow into our ears, try to do cognitive engagement with the music, we might be able to discover new things about the music that we have never noticed before.

For instance, you might have found out that you are addicted to certain type of music, and you might have a strong preference for certain genres or artists. This is because our enjoyment of music is not just a passive feeling, but a complex interaction betweent he sounds we hear and the schemas, acts as the mental frameworks or rules our brains have built up over a lifetime of listening.

"This is Your Brain on Music" by Daniel Levitin

Schema

This is the first reading of the course, and it covers a lot of topics that sets the foundation for this segment.

Remember the schema we mentioned earlier? This concept proposed by Daniel Levitin is a key concept in understanding the perspective of how we listen to music that we like. You can undertsand schema as your brain's way of organizing and categorizing the music you have heard before, and it is what allows you to recognize and appreciate new music that is similar to the music you have heard before.

If a new piece of music fits into your existing schema, you are more likely to enjoy it, because it is familiar and it resonates with your existing musical preferences, you will find it more predictable and enjoyable. On the other hand, if a new piece of music sounds quite different from your existing schema, generally you'll find it less enjoyable.

However, there is a inverted U-shaped relation between the complexity of the music and our enjoyment of it. If a piece of music is too simple and predictable, we find it trivial and boring, but if a piece of music is too complex and unpredictable, we find it confusing and irritating. Most of the music we enjoy falls somewhere in the middle of this spectrum, where it is complex enough to be interesting, but not so complex that it is overwhelming.

Ornette Coleman - Free Jazz

This track is a good example to demonstrate the concept of schema.

This Free Jazz track sounds like chaos to me, and perhaps to most of the people on the planet. I feel a sense of confusion and even irritation, and even a Youtube comment pointed out that timestamps are all lebelled as chaos. This reaction happens because this track does not fit into our existing schema of music, because it is too complex or unpredictable. Our brains struggle to find a familiar pattern or structure in the music, and we often reject it because it feels nonsensical.

Relativity of Taste

Taste is a complex and subjective phenomenon that is influenced by a variety of factors, including cultural background, personal experiences, and individual preferences. It is dificult to define taste in a precise way, because it is not a fixed or objective quality, but rather a dynamic and evolving aspect of our relationship with music.

In fact, every person has their own unique taste in music. What one person finds enjoyable, another person may find unappealing, and this is because our taste in music is shaped by our individual experiences and preferences. This phenomenon is what we call the "relativity of taste".

The reason is clear, where we stated in the last paragraph, that everyone has different background and experiences. These differences are the reason why we have different tastes in music, and why we can enjoy different types of music.

Levitin suggests that some biological universals, such as preference for "consonances" over "dissonances" that begins even in the womb, we must eventually confront the fact that much of what we call "good taste" is actually a social construct. Our taste in music is not just a matter of personal preference, but also a reflection of the cultural and social context in which we live. For instance, certain genres of music may be more popular in certain cultures or social groups, and this can influence our taste in music.

The Shaggs - Philosophy of the World

While Coleman's music is complex and virtuosic, this track by The Shaggs were three sisters with very little musical training, whose amateurish style subverts almost every rule of Western turning and rhythm.

We are left to wonder if one person finds this incompetent music to be enjoyable, while other finds it unlistenable, is there actually any universal standard for what makes music good? Or is it all just a matter of personal preference and cultural context?

But most importantly, this track triggers a conversation between scholars, where they debate whether our musical prferences are shaped by our biology, the Nature, or by our culture, the Nurture.

From a biological perspective, the result is that the listening to The Shaggs is often cognitive distress, because their music lacks the predictable patterns our brains have evolved to crave, and it often falls in the chaos category of the Inverted U-function. However, the Nurture side suggest that: if tasts were purely biological, everyone would hate The Shaggs, yet they have a dedicated fanbase that finds their music charming and endearing. This implies that if you have been nurtured to value authenticiy, or rawness of music over technical polish, your schema will change, and this is where the noise becomes art.

So in fact, this track prove that while our biology privides the hardware for listening, our culture provides the software to tell us what is good.

"Let's Talk About Love - A Journey to the End of Taste" by Carl Wilson

Cultural Capital

Since we know that musical taste is not just a matter of personal preference, but also a reflection of the cultural and social context in which we live, we can turn to the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu for a more in-depth understanding of how taste works in society.

What do you think if listening to Bach is superior to listening to Justin Bieber? Or if listening to classical music is more sophisticated than listening to pop music?

A french sociologist named Pierre Bourdieu argues that our taste in music is not just a matter of personal preference, but also a reflection of our social class and cultural capital. He suggested that taste is never disinterested or purely about music, instead, it is a social phenomenon used for distinction.

Think of how a high school student might start listening to an obscure indie band to show off their unique taste and differentiate themselves from their peers, or how a wealthy person might attend a classical music concert to demonstrate their cultural sophistication and social status. In this sense, taste is a weapon used to mark social boundaries an claim status.

And this leads to the concept of Cultural Capital, which refers to the knowledge and skills, or "special currency" that allow an individual to navigate high-status cultural spaces and social circles.

This means that when someone claims Bach is superior to Justin Bieber, they are often not just making a musical judgment, but usually a social judgment, where they are trying to increase their own cultural capital by aligning themselves with elite values, drawing distinction between themselves and those who listen to "lowbrow" music, and asserting their own superiority.

Therefore, most of the times when people say they listen to difficult music like Free Jazz we mentioned earlier, they are spending cultural capital to prove that you have a more sophisticated schema than the average listener, thereby distinguishing themselves from the common crowd.

Social Norms of Listening

Understand it as music is a room with invisible rules, similar to the intuition where you will not wear a t-shirt to a classical music concert, or you will not scream in a library.

The image of a classical music audience are stiff, silent, and passive, and in Bourdieu's view, these silence is not just about hearning the notes, where it is a cultural signal that the music is somewhat "sacred", intellectural object that requires a specific kind of disciplined distinction to appreciate.

For instance, knowing what Beethoven's motifs mean is one kind of capital, but knowing how to sit, dress and respond in a concert hall is another kind of capital. These norms transform abstrack knowledge into visibal social distinction.

This theory acts as a bridge to connect to the concept of cultural capital discussed earlier into behavior. These social norms of listening show how that hierarchy is enacted in practice.

Steve Reich - Pendulum Music

This one is not on the listening list, so I will not provide an embedded Youtube video. Basically, in this piece, microphones swing over speakers to create feedback loops that change over time. For a listener with a traditional classical schema, this might be perceived as noise, but for someone with a more experimental schema, this might be perceived as music, as it is a masterpiece of minimalism. This gap in understanding is exactly the distinction coming from the different social norms of listening, where one group of listeners might find this piece to be a profound exploration of sound and rhythm, while another group might find it to be a meaningless noise.

Thinking about Time in Music: Time, Form and Rhythm

Temporal Medium

We now can end our discussion about the social and cultural aspects of music, and we can start to talk about the musical elements themselves.

When we say music is a temporal medium, we mean that music unfolds over time, and it is not just a static object that exists all at once. This means that the way we experience music is fundamentally different from the way we experience other art forms, such as painting or sculpture, which exist in space and can be experienced all at once.

Temporal expectations are the way we anticipate and predict the unfolding of music over time, connecting the schema concepts we have discussed earlier. But there is a challenge on the way we understand temporal expectations, a piece by Igor Stravinsky called "The Rite of Spring".

Igor Stravinsky - The Rite of Spring

On first glance it sounds like Tom and Jerry's soundtrack, but it is actually a masterpiece of modernism. When this work premiered, it was so radically different from the music of its time that it famously triggered a riot in the theater.

The reason for this is that Stravinsky deliberately subverts our temporal expectations by using irregular rhythms, unexpected accents, and dissonant harmonies. Which it is hard for audience to find a steady, predictable pattern in the music, and when you think about the schema, the audience's existing schema classical music were shattered, and they were not able to process the music in a way that made sense to them, which led to a sense of confusion and even anger.

Think about the same era this piece came out, around 1913, where there is another famous artist named Pablo Picasso, who also created works that subverted the existing artistic norms and expectations. We call it as Modernism. Just as Picasso was moving away from realistic painting style to "Cubism", deconstructing objects into geometric shapes and presenting them from multiple perspectives, Stravinsky was moving away from the traditional tonal and rhythmic structures of classical music to create a new, more abstract and experimental style.

Both artists were challenging the existing norms and expectations of their respective art forms, and they were both met with resistance and controversy from audiences and critics alike. However, over time, their works have come to be recognized as masterpieces of modernism, and they have had a profound influence on the development of art and music in the 20th century and beyond.

This shows that the way we "mark" time, or create time in music is always a reflection of the cultural and social context in which the music is created, and it is not just a matter of personal preference or biological universals.

Marking Time with Music

We already stated that music unfolds over time, and it exists in time, but it also has the power to shape our perception of time.

It effectively makes time by organizing our perception into cycles and patterns. Just like we use church bells or clocks to mark the passage of time.

Steve Reich - Piano Phase

Music can be used to dictate time, and nothing demonstrates this better than Steve Reich's "Piano Phase".

In this piece, two identical piano patterns begin in unison, but slowly drift apart as one piano gradually increases its tempo. This technique is called Phasing, and it creating an insteresting effect when one piano is playing at a certain tempo and offset from the other piano, it creates a new pattern that we perceive as new rhythm relationships.

This music represents a radical shift in the schema, since it is extremely repetitive and minimalist, that forcing us to abandon our expectations for a traditional melody and instead focus on the subtle changes in rhythm and texture.

This syncing is not merely an artistic experiment, but it is widely used as a tool for survival and labor coordination, where here are some worksongs that uses music to coordinate the labor of a group of people:

Postal Workers in Gnana - Field Recordings

This is a field recording of postal workers in Ghana whistling while they work, and you can clearly hear that the sound of stamping and whistling are perfectly synchronized, where the stamping sound work as drums, and the whistling work as melody.

One of the main reason where they decided to stamping in rhythm with their whistling is that it helps them to coordinate their work, and it also helps them to maintain a steady pace and rhythm, which can increase their productivity and efficiency.

Mississipppi Chain Gang - Rosie

Prison chain gangs in the American South were groups of incarcerated men forced into hard labor, often in outdoors. This recoding is a field recording of a chain gang singing while they work, and you can clearly hear that the sound of their tools hitting are perfectly synchronized. In each bar-ish segment, you will hear the hit on the first beat, and the leader will start sing a line in that segment. In the next segment, it also starts with a hit on the first beat, and the workers will repeat the line that the leader sang in the previous segment.

Soran Bushi

This is a fisherman's song from Hokkaido, and it is also a good example of how music can be used to coordinate labor. In this song, the rhythm of the music is perfectly synchronized with the movements of the fishermen as they pull in their nets.

What we are trying to say through these three examples is that, the rhythm of these work songs serves a functional, communal purpose. Music under these environments are used to coordinate the physical movements of a group, ensuring that everyone strikes a hammer or cancels a stamp at the exact same moment.

This is often achived through a style called Call-and-Response, where it can be clearly heard in the Rosie that leader privides a signnal and the group resoonds in sync, proving that a steady, regular beat is the most effective way to unify a collective body through time.

Musical Form

If rhythm is the micro organization of time in music, each of these micro units of time are then ensemble and organized into larger units, we call it as Form.

Form is that kind of blueprint that tells us where the journey of music is going, and how long it will take to get there. It is just like the architecture of sound, just as building is organized into rooms and hallways that serve different purposes, a musical composition is organized into sections that provide a sense of narrative logic and arrival.

For instance, we might encounter a simple Verse-Chorus structure in a pop song, or Sonata Form in classical symphonies, or even more complex forms like Fugue in Baroque music. Each of them features different journey and arrival, but all of them serves as a mental map for the listeners.

Verse-Chorus Form

Let's start with the most common form in popular music. Verse-Chorus Form consists of two main sections: the verse, and the chorus. The verse is the section of the song that tells the story, where the lyrics usually change with each repetition, while the chorus is the section of the song that contains the main message or hook, where the lyrics usually remain the same with each repetition.

Our professor uses an example of Yellow Submarine by The Beatles to demonstrate this form, where you can hear at any streaming platform. Pay attention at the lyrics, and listen to perceive the difference between these two parts:

Verse

In the town where I was born
Lived a man who sailed to sea
And he told us of his life
In the land of submarines
So we sailed up to the sun
Till we found the sea of green
And we lived beneath the waves
In our yellow submarine

Chorus

We all live in a yellow submarine
Yellow submarine, yellow submarine
We all live in a yellow submarine
Yellow submarine, yellow submarine

Verse

And our friends are all aboard
Many more of them live next door
And the band begins to play

Chorus

We all live in a yellow submarine
Yellow submarine, yellow submarine
We all live in a yellow submarine
Yellow submarine, yellow submarine

You can hear that the verse is more narrative, pushing the story forward, and building up the tension, while the chorus is more repetitive and catchy, providing a release of tension and a sense of arrival.

Strophic Form

Strophic Form is quite different, as it consists of a single section that is repeated throughout the song, with different lyrics each time. Think about American folk songs, where you can hear there are different parts of the song seperated by a repeated melody, but the lyrics change with each repetition.

For instance, the example song "Amazing Grace":

Amazing Grace how sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me
I once was lost but now am found
Was blind but now I see

'Twas Grace that taught my heart to fear
And Grace my fears relieved
How precious did that Grace appear
The hour I first believed

Through many dangers, toils and snares
I have already come
'Tis Grace that brought me safe thus far
And Grace will lead me home

Since all these three parts has the same melody that is repeated over and over with different lyrics, we flag then as A, A and A. It just feels like someone is simply wanna tell a story for you, but in a singing way, and the repetition of the melody helps to reinforce the message of the song, and it also creates a sense of unity and coherence throughout the song.

If we discuss about the scope of Western Art Music, things are a bit more complicated.

Sonata Form

Sonata Form is commonly used in Western Art Music from 18th century, and usually opening movement of a multi-movement work, such as a symphony or a string quartet.

It basically follows a following three-part structure:

The first part is called the Exposition. This part introduces the main themes of the piece, the main characters.

The first theme is usually in the home key, which is the key that the piece is based on, and it establishes the tonal center of the piece. The second theme is usually in a different key, often the dominant key, which creates a sense of contrast and tension. There will be a closing theme in the end of the exposition.

Second part is Development. This is the most exiting part of the journey, where the composer takes the themes introduced in the exposition and develops them in new and interesting ways. The composer might take a theme and fragment it, or transpose it to a different key, or combine it with other themes to create new melodies and harmonies.

Finally we will reach Recapitulation. This is the part of grand return to our starting point, where all the themes from the exposition are restated and resolved in the home key. It sounds like a "closure".

One of the famous examples of Sonata Form is Mozart's Piano Sonata No. 16 in C Major :

You can try to track this form down.