CREA2103 Music and Emotion: Understanding the Cognitive and Behavioral Effects of Music

This topic explores how music engages our emotions, and how it effects our mental and our physical states. Drawing on multidisciplinary knowledge from humanities and social sciences, psychology, and cognition, this course explains how people think, feel and behave in response to music. You will discover why we choose some of our responses to everyday encounters with music, for instance, why we like some music and dislike other. Additionally, you will learn how music operates across different cultures and explore music as a social activity. It will encourage you to think conceptually about your own music choices.

The topic aims to introduce students to:

• The foundations of music cognition and how our mind perceives music
• Critical and theoretical understandings of music and emotion
• The effects of music on our emotional well-being

1. Synthesise the important concepts and debates in the field of music and emotion
2. Compare and distinguish the concepts in scholarly writing
3. Develop written and oral presentations which reflect these understandings
4. Hypothesize possible emotion responses to distinct music and infer possible theories informing these responses
5. Create music which will likely elicit or be perceived with specific emotion