This page contains hyperlinks to online documents and information relevant to the class
Music H80: Experiments in Music - Spring 2017
University of California, Irvine
Blakstad, Oskar. Experimental Research. Explorable.com, 2012.
Bregman, Albert. Auditory Scene Analysis: The Perceptual Organization of Sound. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990.
Cage, John. "Experimental Music: Doctrine." Silence. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961, pp. 13-17.
Chadabe, Joel. "The Great Opening Up of Music to All Sounds." Electric Sound: The Past and Promise of Electronic Music, chapter 2. New York: Pearson, 1996.
Cope, David. Experiments in Musical Intelligence. Middleton, WI:A-R Editions, 1996.
Copland, Aaron. "How We Listen". What to Listen for in Music, pp. 9-19. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1939.
Croft, John. "Composition is not Research". Tempo, v. 16, pp. 6-11. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Dobrian, Christopher. "A Method for Computer Characterization of 'Gesture' in Musical Improvisation". Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference. Ljubljana: International Computer Music Association, 2012.
Dobrian, Christopher. "Music and Language". [Unpublished], 1992.
Dobrian, Christopher. "Musical Composition as Experiment (and vice versa)". Irvine: Conversations on the Artistic Process, 2012.
Fennelly, Brian. "A Descriptive Language for the Analysis of Electronic Music". Perspectives of New Music, Vol. 6, No. 1, 1967, pp. 79-95. [You must be on the UCI network or logged onto it via VPN in order to read the linked article.]
Helmholtz, Hermann. Sensations of Tone, as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1912 (originally published 1877).
Hiller, Lejaren Arthur. "The Aesthetic Problem". Experimental Music: composition with an electronic computer. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979 (©1959), pp. 10-35.
Holmes, Thom. Electronic and Experimental Music: Pioneers in Technology and Composition. New York; London: Routledge, 2002.
Key, Susan and Rothe, Larry. American Mavericks. San Francisco; Berkeley: San Francisco Symphony, in cooperation with the University of California Press, 2001.
Khan Academy. "Controlled Experiments": How scientists conduct experiments and make observations to test hypotheses. Intro to Biology.
Khan Academy. "The scientific method": How the scientific method is used to test a hypothesis. Intro to Biology.
Krumhansl, Carol. Cognitive Foundations of Musical Pitch. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Levitin, Daniel. "Experimental Design in Psychoacoustic Research." Music, Cognition and Computerized Sound: An Introduction to Psychoacoustics, chapter 23. Perry Cook, ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999, pp. 299-328.
Levitin, Daniel. This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession. New York: Dutton, 2006.
Margulis, Elizabeth H. On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
McLeod, Saul. "Experimental Method." Simply Psychology, 2012.
Nyman, Michael. Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Oliveros, Pauline. "On Sonic Meditation." Software for People: Collected Writings 1963-1980. Baltimore: Smith Publications, 1984, pp. 138-157.
Peretz, Isabelle. "The nature of music from a biological perspective". Cognition, 100:1, May 2006, pp. 1-32.
Russolo, Luigi. The Art of Noises (futurist manifesto). New York: Something Else Press, 1967. (Originally published in 1913.)
Sacks, Oliver. Musicophilia. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007.
Shaw, Gordon. Keeping Mozart in Mind. San Diego: Elsevier Academic Press, 2004.
Xenakis, Iannis. Formalized Music; Thought and Mathematics in Composition. Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 1992. (Original English publication, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971. Previously published as Musiques formelles, Paris, 1963.)
Zbikowski, Lawrence. "Cross-Domain Mapping." Conceptualizing Music: Cognitive Structure, Theory, and Analysis, chapter 2. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 63-95. [You must be on the UCI network or logged onto it via VPN in order to access this book online.]
Zorn, John. "The Game Pieces." Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music. Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner, eds. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004, pp. 196-200.
Pythagorean Tuning and Medieval Polyphony, a website explaining Pythagorean intonation and other tuning systems of European music throughout history, by Margo Schulter.
For announcements or questions to your classmates, and for open online discussion with classmates, you can use the class Canvas Discussions.
There is a class email address, which addresses all registered students and the professor and TA.
The textbook for this course is This is Your Brain on Music by Daniel Levitin, available online and at the UCI Bookstore. [Important Note: The UCI Bookstore guarantees to price match textbooks with Amazon.com and BN.com. You don't need to pay the bookstore's full price if you request the price match with a lower price on one of those sites.]
The original course proposal provides an unofficial projection of the week-by-week topics.
The Gassmann Electronic Music Series at UCI presents concerts and lecture/demonstrations focusing on computers and music.
This page was last modified April 12, 2017.
Christopher Dobrian, dobrian@uci.edu