Technologies of Music (MUA 340)

Case studies in technologies that changed Western music, in three units, each built around one book:

• Sound recording, with Mark Katz's Capturing Sound: violin vibrato and the phonograph, turntable battles, digital sampling
• Music notation, with Thomas Forrest Kelly's Capturing Music: from Guido's hand to Philippe de Vitry
• Technology and the human, with Deirdre Loughridge's Sounding Human: from the automaton flute player to chopped and pitched vocals

Students lead discussions of chapters and of topics they choose themselves, make performing editions of medieval pieces, and open and close the semester by writing about the technologies in their own musical lives.