hi my name is Matthew Nichols I am your professor for this class this is mul 2010 the history and appreciation of music unfortunately our semester has to start just like this due to the unforeseen circumstances I have to be here remotely with you for our lecture today but I'm hoping that this will still give you the chance to understand the material that we normally would learn on the first day as well as give you the opportunity to maybe take some time to stop and reflect and prepare questions that I can help you with in the future so what I'm going to do is I'm going to be utilizing this technology as well as my normal PowerPoint slides that I use within class to help us work through the lecture that we would be having today and then in the description we will have some listening examples for you to listen to at the end of class as well as we're going to post a discussion board for any questions that you may have that I can answer so let me go ahead and put us over here to aha already the first problem making sure the technology stays the same mul 2010 this is just how I'm gonna keep track of my thoughts for the class um but if you ever want to see any of these slides or maybe I hurry up through a slide in class you can say hold on I'm not done writing down the material or for today you can pause it and write down the stuff that you need for the syllabus you can take a look at this yourself if you have any questions let me know um honestly the things you need to be worried about are coming prepared and being ready to discuss and being ready to ask questions I definitely structure this class differently than most other classes in which I don't want you to regurgitate information that you can Google on Wikipedia I want you to have some internal conversations with yourself that allow for you to be able to listen to music a little bit deeper as well as maybe appreciate music that you didn't appreciate before okay make sure you're taking notes I do allow electronic note taking but you put yourself in the temptation of getting distracted if you utilize something like your phone or an iPad or a computer if you can utilize hard copy just writing on a notepad that's definitely the easiest way to stay focused but I understand that digital is also good hence why I'm doing this today is because I have the ability to utilize the digital technology now communication is key in life in general I find that most times especially in college a lot of students coming out of high school don't realize that they just need to communicate and where you may have had parents that stepped in for communication or you just don't feel comfortable having an honest conversation with a professor or a teacher what you'll find is that most of us are willing to work with you so if you communicate ahead of time hey just want to let you know I'm struggling with this concept can you help me with any pointers or hey I'm going to be out of town or I'm falling behind is there anything you can do to help with the grade we'll talk about this more in our next in-person class but I just want to go ahead and start by saying please communicate in years past I've had students who failed my class simply because they chose not to communicate and communication has to be more than just the last day of school wait I realize I'm failing is there anything I can do to bring my grade up at that point it's a little too late so please communicate if you have any questions if something doesn't make sense or if there's anything I can do to help you make sure that you are successful lastly you don't need a book for this class you're welcome a lot of what we do in this class is is again the experience of listening to music and most of that music's for free on YouTube or if you have a Spotify or an apple music account you could be listening to this music for free the information given in a textbook it's also stuff you can just Google go to Wikipedia and look up the composers and look up their names their birth dates how long they've been alive what was their most you know famous pieces all that stuff I don't need you to waste money on a book for and as you'll find this class is structured to be worried to worry less about the historical regurgitation and more about you being able to understand music on a deeper level so no you do not need a book now what to expect about this class this class again like I said is structured differently I'm taking a bit of a risk by utilizing a large lecture class in a way that's a little bit more personal for me I'm actually the professor of percussion here at FAU and a lot of what I do is one-on-one instruction with a lot of the music Majors as well as a little bit more diverse Ensemble instruction but we're not talking a hundred people in the room that I have to reach out to we're talking maybe 10 15 20. so this class I as much as I'd love to do that I understand that I'm just going to have to speak at the class during the class but what hopefully we will find is that when I give you this information you want to do what you can to internalize it and then be prepared to provide some sort of response during class that I can help either confirm that you know what you're talking about or give you some guidance to help you understand the material better that is the key to this class is participation not only participation when we're in lectures but then for the graded assignments your participation is what gets you the grade so participate participate participate if it's dead silent during class and I start getting bored we'll in class early but that's not a good thing because if I feel like we're not really engaging the material then it's not worth my time to just waste my breath so I want you to engage I want you to participate again the more you ask questions in class you may feel uncomfortable as a just a person to say I don't want to raise my hand and talk in front of all these people but if you can stomach it and be willing to hear me and allow me to either criticize in a way that gives you the information you need to be pointed in the right direction if you can do that then I highly encourage participation if you need to come to me after class and just ask questions in a more one-to-one kind of situation I'm okay with that I will stick around at the end of class to make sure that all questions are answered but participation is key you definitely are going to need to demonstrate your knowledge and as it turns out there's really only three grades it's your attendance which will be taken during class as well as your midterm which is a group assignment and your final which is a group assignment and those assignments are purely your demonstration of the knowledge that we've learned in class and we'll get into how those are graded a little later as far as the midterm and the final but I do want to say that um you as long as you're doing the participation as long as you're asking questions and with the feedback that I give you at your midterm and you have a very easy chance of getting an A in this class okay but ultimately your success is your responsibility and I say that because I can only do so much with so many of you in the class personally that if we are you know if I'm supposed to just kind of reach out hey you've been quiet but most of you might be quiet and you might be quiet because you're uncomfortable and we talk about it not be quiet because you're not paying attention because you're busy doing something else I get that too all right so your success is your responsibility all right moving on so for our attendance each class you're gonna need access to Canvas I know you can access canvas on your phone but you can do it on a tablet or a computer I recommend bringing something testing this out beforehand because the quiz is only available during class time and it's only available online so your attendance has to be done it's a one question quiz that you answer the question based on the code word that I'm going to give you at the front of the class and as long as you're in class for you to see the code and to type it in on time then we're good okay so uh for today let's give that a test make sure we still have this yes so go on to Canvas if you need to pause the video and go figure this out that's fine go on to Canvas now quiz one should be available to for you to view as long as you're watching this during class time go in take the quiz make sure the code word is y'all y-a-l-l I'm from the south y'all is it's the most comfortable word I know so you're going to notice these words popping up every class make sure you spell it correctly since you're paying attention please don't give this to anybody outside of the class the attendance grade isn't worth it for you to share it to your friend who didn't want to come to class today or overslept or had something to do um it's not worth it to give them that because really what ends up happening is you know you you start helping a friend because they couldn't get out of bed and all of a sudden now um they haven't shown up in two weeks but we've talked about two weeks worth of the class material then they go to do their midterm and what happens they don't know what they're talking about I call them out on it they get a failing grade and then when they come to me and go I don't know why I got a feeling great now they're going to go yeah that's strange you apparently have been coming to class every day even though I don't recognize your face um please don't share this but it's like the easiest way to cheat but I'm asking you not to cheat okay so at this point now if you have any questions about the class feel free to put them in the discussion board any answers that I can give I prefer the discussion board publicly so that if you ask a question like what time is our final exam I can answer that for the whole class and everybody can see it okay and if questions are being repeated then I won't answer them you just have to scroll up to find it but now we're going to get into just the first little introduction of our class and then we will go through the musical examples on our own and then we will be pushing ourselves for the next class so go ahead and get your note-taking devices out you could obviously screenshot these and save them for later but again I the idea of taking notes by hand is is usually found to be a little bit more retained as far as just looking at it and taking a picture of it if you hand write each word it does help with you retaining the information okay so is music like poetry or spoken word a lot of people categorize the Arts in the same way each element of the Arts comes together as one big art most commonly poetry and music kind of go together probably because of the accompaniment side of things but we have to ask the question is it like poetry or spoken word so the use of syntax in poetry utilizes every little piece is it the grammar the punctuation the the word choice all of those little nitty-gritties can really help convey the idea that we need in poetry all right we have similar in music you know all these little there's little details and music that can really change how much the music is interpreted based on the Dynamics or the punctuation the articulation or the Timbre um and you know they're both used for expression and emotion we can get a deep emotion out of poetry we can get deep emotion out of music but as you'll find in this class music is going to be far more complex because we've got things that aren't as tangible to deal with okay so the first three elements that we need to talk about are building blocks that we build our music off of are listed here it is pitch Rhythm and Timbre okay we're gonna break each one of these down real quick so go ahead and write down pitch and give yourself a little bit of space to to write some stuff down we got Pitch Rhythm and Timbre so what is pitch pitch is our designation of low or high so when you listen to something air pressure fluctuates that's just we're going to get a little scientific here but when I clap my hands that is a reaction of when I bring my hands together the air pressure fluctuates between a positive and a negative space in every direction and my ears take that change and because of the little hair follicles on the eardrum it follows that and it converts it into a sound so really sound is just air pressure changing right if we're talking scientifically and what we've learned is that the faster air pressure changes the higher it sounds to our ears I'm actually in a room with a piano so you're going to hear the piano played but I can't really change my camera angle to show you so something High is created by faster moving air molecules something low [Music] is going to be slower moving molecules so when we talk about how frequently the air fluctuates that word frequency is used a lot in determining pitches oh this is a high frequency versus a low frequency and that just has to do with how fast or slow the air is moving the air pressure is changing now there's limits to what we can hear and they the averages to say that we can hear things moving as slow as we can hear a sound that's created by air fluctuating 20 times per second and that measurement is called Hertz based off the scientist of the name Hertz 20 times per second if it vibrates that fast we can hear that as a low frequency versus 20 000 times a second so 20 Hertz to 20 000 Hertz is the general hearing of a human being now obviously that's like newborn hearing and the older you get the more that shrinks you start to hear a little bit less of the low end a little bit less of the high end but we get to utilize pitch in our hearing based on the frequency in which the air fluctuates um musical notation for what a pitch is is is actually in you know you can divide a Hertz infinitely right we can go into the decimal places infinitely but what we've done over years is we've kind of Consolidated how we categorize the space between each note musically and right now the way the piano is set up which is our our kind of our measurement for Western classical music is it's divided into 12 equal spaced notes before we hit a reoccurring note that is twice as fast so for those of you who aren't who don't understand music this is going to be a little I'm going to get a little little geeky here um but try to try to follow along if you can if I take a note like this and I were to take however fast that notice let's call it 400 Hertz and I play something that sounds 800 Hertz or twice as you know double the frequency it would sound like this and all of a sudden we now have um some sort of reoccurring sound so what we've done is we've taken that which is called an octave or the the same note repeated twice as high and we've split up every possible sound in between into only 12 sounds we could do so many more and some non-western schools of thought actually divide them into smaller units but for us we just have 12 on the piano music is notated actually vertically so the higher notes are written higher on what's called a musical staff the lower sounding notes are lower um the other way that we can differentiate and classify pitch is based on what clef is used so it's the general range of the notes being targeted for the music so the lower notes are considered the bass the bass notes which we kind of can relate bass to like base frequencies or Bass woofer a speaker then we have a tenor which is in the middle and then treble which is for the high frequencies do you need to know this uh not at the level that some other music appreciation teachers would ask of you again this is this is just a way for musicians to speak to each other I just want you to know so that you know that we've we've kind of created from the whole idea of the building block of pitch musicians and composers are utilizing a system to classify those pitches and for you the listener you need to differentiate what sounds High what sounds middle and what sounds low and again like what we can do we could we can consider the male voice to be sort of the lower voices that carry some of the the lower frequencies and then adolescent male or female could have a more of a middle range maybe something a little bit higher and then we would notice either some of the Adolescent female or even just General female voices that can be a little bit higher we classify you know keep that in mind you can even go even higher than that think like birds chirping are going to be high frequencies the the rumble of your engine is going to be a low frequency right and maybe your food processor is kind of a middle frequency or or a bunch of frequencies depending on how loud your food processor is okay so that's pitch the next one we said we were going to talk about is rhythm this one's a little tricky Rhythm has to do with the reoccurrence of time so if we think about time as a line and we mark this point in time and then as time goes on WE mark this point in time the distance between those can be classified and we can create our own recognition of what that distance was and we call that rhythm so the periodicity or how often a sound or a a pitch will occur over time is considered the Rhythm and The rhythms can be slow like your heartbeat they could be a medium like walking down the hallway or they could be fast like when your heart beat is raised from getting scared or running a mile how fast your feet move in those moments you know that could be a way to determine how fast or slow a rhythm is okay now there's a difference between meter and rhythm so make sure you make a quick note of this Rhythm has a has an underlying pulse so when we think about you know our favorite song on the on the radio and we're bobbing our head to that song the way we're bobbing our head is to the pulse of the music but then what the singer sings you know it may be different than the way we Bob our head and that's because that's the Rhythm that they're singing they're singing a rhythm that's different than the pulse of the song okay we're going to get into this a little bit more as uh as we we meet in person kind of just jump back through these and know that you know the pulse of the music is going to help us determine how we classify The rhythms and then the other part is the meter which is really how we classify and organize our thoughts about Rhythm and pulse so we're looking at um rhythm which is different than the pulse pulse of the music is kind of the agreed upon uh timing that we all feel the rhythm can be something within that could be it could be the same as the pulse and then when we look back at it and we think okay this was grouped into reoccurring pulses of four then that's when we're talking about meter and so there's something called time signatures and the time signatures help us divide and say we're always kind of returning every four beats we're always going to return back to what feels like normal home so we're going to say this is a group of four based on that and so the rhythms that we see are then given based on the pulse of the music and then we can distinguish you know it's every four beats that we feel the pulse returning it could be three it could be five and we'll do a little demonstration when we're together where we can really play with the meters so you know the the idea of knowing what the meter is has to do with knowing what beats are strong and what are weaks if if we're thinking the pulse of the music is here to and we say we want to categorize it into four groups of four pulses two three four one two three four then within this we have some pulses that are going to be strong and some that will be weak so we'll think pulse is usually one and three are going to feel strong and then the two and four are going to feel weak so we think one two three four one two three four so that's a way for us to categorize meter for the purposes of this class I don't really think we need to get too strongly into well the meter of this piece is highly influential but we can talk about how the Rhythm influences things okay so knowing if a rhythm feels fast as in is it something more agitated than me walking or does it feel moderate where you know it's a medium Tempo Rhythm or a medium Rhythm where it's like feels like I'm walking kind of a walking pace or does it feel slow like I'm creeping around the corner or my heart rate is resting okay start with that and lastly the tough one here is Timbre just say it right now wherever you are just say Timbre you notice I didn't say timber which is the way it looks like I should have said Timbre because that's phonetically what I should be doing but it's Timbre Timbre so don't let that fool you and I you know what's funny when we get to our midterms when we get to our finals I know that people weren't paying attention when they're utilizing the Timbre of a piece and they go yeah so I felt like the timbra of the piece and I go wow you didn't even say it right that means you didn't you weren't even paying attention so the Timbre this one's a weird one has to do with the quality of sound the big word that I want you to remember is Sonic signature and the way that we're going to talk about this in a easy example would be to talk about the difference between my voice and my little one and a half year old daughter's voice so my voice has a little bit of a deeper raspier sound and that comes from my vocal cords it comes from the strains and stresses comes from maybe just having the general male vocal range but then you have my daughter who is so young and she's just finding her voice and it is very sweet and it's soft and it's gentle and she's still just kind of learning how to piece together the all the different sounds that she needs to make in order to speak a language and you can tell very clearly if it's me talking or if it's my daughter talking and that's because we both have different Sonic signatures and the way that we you know can classify that musically is through what we call Timbre so the Timbre of something that we're listening to is going to change how we feel affected by the music if it's something that's really edgy and crunchy and distorted it might kind of take us aback versus if it's a very you know what if it's a choir and everyone is singing very softly and gently that might change the way we hear the music so we want to pay attention to the Timbre we want to pay attention to how different instruments sound so that we can say hey I noticed that it sounds like a different instrument because it sounded like this first and now it sounds like this and that's going to be us talking about the Timbre right so what did we talk about today we talked about pitch which is how high or low something sounds and we can recognize different ranges of pitch based on like the rumble of a car or the birds chirping or people talking being low medium and high then we talked about Rhythm being how we classify the periodicity or how often notes are performed and then we talked about Timbre which is the Sonic signature of the different instruments that we're listening to and how they work together or how they don't so all that's left for today and normally you know this we're only 30 minutes into a two hour class normally we would be experimenting with this and I'd be playing the piano we'd be listening to music so I would definitely want you to take this opportunity to go even though we're done with class pretty early go and listen to the examples and start to question what you know and what you don't know and I want you to go to the discussion board really pay attention to those around you who have asked questions and if I can answer it I will before our next class otherwise we'll talk about it when we get together again all right um I think that's it usually is when I just say if you have any more questions so if you haven't already please go and do the um go ahead and do the the canvas quiz if you haven't done it already make sure you're listening to this video watching this video all the way through go take a look at the examples that you see for today and then from there what I'd like you to do ask questions or confirm hey I already knew this about music or I thought that this meant this or according to Google it says this is what this means whatever get involved start getting involved in this class so that we can have more fun all right I'm available for questions if you have them my contact is within the syllabus Nichols m fau.edu I'm sorry again that we had to do this there were issues that I was having um that are out of my control that keeps me from being here in class uh this morning but I look forward to meeting you all very soon so have a great rest of your day and be in touch if you have any questions