Appreciation of music was a little different than I expected. There was a lot less performing music and much more listening to music. Not to say that it was disappointing, because it wasn’t. Professor Swanson was great and you could tell that this man had a real passion for what he was teaching.
We would be assigned a playlist on Spotify for each chapter in the class, where we would listen to each song and then be quizzed to identify them as they played. The class spanned music from as early as the medieval period all the way up to the early to mid 1900s. The two big projects I remember was a group project on movie soundtracks and an individual one on analyzing a certain aspect of whatever song you wanted.
My song analysis project was on The Unanswered Question by Charles Ives. I wanted to find a way to incorporate math into a musical analysis, since I am a math major. For the project, I analyzed the different frequencies of each instrument in the song and made a box and whisker plot displaying the range of frequencies within the song. The essay is linked below.