Courses
HUM 327 / MUS 327 / CGS 327 / PSY 328
Animal Music
This undergraduate course brings together scholarship from musicologists, cognitive scientists, and biologists to explore the concept of "animal music" from a cross-disciplinary perspective. Animal music is an important topic because it harbors profound information about the history of life--by examining it in relation to human music making, we stand to gain a better understanding of everything from social synchronization and linguistic turn-taking to (bio)semiotics and cultural evolution. Using a combination of short lectures, student presentations, and creative projects, this course provides students with a comprehensive understanding of the field.
MUS 527
Seminar in Musicology: Animal Music
“Animal Music” is a graduate seminar offered periodically at Princeton University. The seminar considers various responses to the question: Do animals make music? We will approach the question in an interdisciplinary manner, and from three broad perspectives: from the perspective of composers, from the perspective of the history of science, and from the vantage of contemporary animal behavior science. The seminar aims to give participants a solid, if not exactly comprehensive, view of the field.
