Chapter 3: 3.1.6.3 -

I finished up Chapter 3 today, so here is the rest of my review of the chapter.

3.1.6.3 - Chords

I've always wanted to know more about chords, so I found this section to be fun and interesting.

The info in this section is kinda confusing just reading it from the text, but with the mini lecture the girls gave on Wednesday and with the help of the supplements I think I have a decent understanding of the different chords and could identify them with decent accuracy. To get any better, I would just need to practice it more.

Flash Supplement - Chords

This is a good supplement. I t is fun and I didn't notice any problems with it. It is challenging for a beginner, and does a good job of teaching the concept. I think that the way this one is designed is more effective than the game style supplements earlier in the chapter ("Beats in a Measure" and "Key Signatures"). I get to spend the amount of time I want to spend selecting what I think is the best option. The other supplements were fun, but I don't think they taught the material as well.

3.1.6.4 - Chord Progression

There isn't really much to say about this section. Tonality and cadence was interesting to read about. After reading this you can understand better why a lot of music sounds the same, just placed at a different tempo and rhythm.

The two supplemental videos here are not on the supplement page on the website.

3.2 Applications

I thought it would be better to just keep all of 3.2 together since it is all so similar. I found it interesting to know exactly what the different abstractions of the staff actually meant. I see tabs and chord progressions everywhere, so it was fun to actually learn exactly what was going on in those music sheets.

Max Demo - Music improvisation demo

This was kinda fun and does what it is expected to do well. No suggestions or criticisms of it.



Chapter 3 Conclusions

This chapter required a decent amount of collaboration between the music majors and non-music majors. It was fun to get to learn more from them and helped us become more comfortable talking to each other. I think that a lot of the concepts in this chapter require an accompanying lecture to make sense for beginners. The supplements were decent, but I think the 2 game supplements (Beats in a Measure and Key Signatures) would be better if they were designed more like the 2 supplements in the chords section.

I agree with the music majors that the order of this chapter is a bit off. It seemed like the revised order that they gave would work, and I'm sure they know what order would make the most sense.

I had fun learning more about MAX from Eric. There is a lot to that program and it was much easier to find things when someone who knew what they were doing was there to help out.


This is a bit unrelated, but I thought it was worth mentioning somewhere. For the class, I think that it would be a good idea to make sure that there is a good mix of music and cs majors all throughout the room. It would be detrimental to the learning experience, I think, if the different majors group together and don't associate with each other at the beginning. I think that having majors mixed everywhere so that they can explain things to the cs majors if they get confused about music things, and cs majors to help music majors if they get confused about cs things, is an important part of the interdisciplinary aspect of this class.