Aural Skills I:

* Instructor Note: The Instructor Companion Site includes additional resources, notes, and sample solutions for activities and discussions. 

Course Description

Techniques of music listening developed through musical sight-singing, dictation, and aural analysis. Topics are coordinated with the co-requisite course Theory & Practice I. Students learn techniques for critically listening to, analyzing, and notating elements of rhythmic and metric organization, instrumentation, texture, and diatonic melodic and harmonic pitch structure in a broad range of music from Western classical music, popular music and film, and non-Western music.

Course Objectives

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

• Recognize and describe differences in pitch, tuning, and tuning systems in various styles of music. 

• Transcribe, sight-sing, and improvise melodies using diatonic major and minor scales, modes, pentatonic collections, and non-Western scales. 

• Identify melodic cadences, phrase structure, differences in texture and instrumentation, and rhythmic and metric organization in classical, popular, and non-Western musical styles. 

• Recognize, perform, and transcribe beat patterns in simple and compound time down to 16th-note values, beat patterns in popular music, and dance rhythms that include Latin American and African rhythms.

• Transcribe chord changes and outer voices in musical examples incorporating root-position I, IV, V, ii, and vi chords. 

• Aurally identify common pop schemas and 12-bar blues patterns in popular music.