* 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 II: Popular Music. This course builds on skills developed in Aural Skills I. Students learn techniques for critically listening to, analyzing, and notating musical elements of instrumentation, sound production and timbre, advanced rhythm and meter, loops and harmonic chord schemas, advanced diatonic harmony, and basic chromatic harmony including secondary functions and modulation. 

Course Objectives

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

• Sight-sing diatonic progressions in simple and compound meters that incorporate modal and pentatonic collections, chromatic embellishing tones, secondary dominant harmony, and modulation.

• Perform rhythms and conduct accurately in simple and compound meters that include subdivisions, ties, syncopation, and hemiola, as well as rhythms in asymmetrical meters and simple and compound meters using less common beat notes (e.g. 2/2, 6/16, 4/8, etc).

• Transcribe melodies and chord progressions for examples from the repertoire that use chord shuttles, common pop schemata, chord inversions, secondary dominants, sus chords, augmented triads, added6 chords, tritone substitution, diatonic sequences, and modulation. 

• Improvise melodies and countermelodies over a given harmonic progression incorporating embellishing tones and rhythmic motives. 

• Aurally identify and diagram formal elements of a song including phrase structure and song sections.