3 How to approach the courses

These courses are introductory courses. Their goal is to give you a grounding in the fundamentals of music and science research, and to make you aware of the various paths that it’s possible to take in this field, including diverse topics such as psychoacoustics, neuroscience, cognitive science, wellbeing research, and educational research.

The focus of the lectures is to ground you in concepts rather than content. I don’t think that lectures are the best place to give you lots of material to memorise. Instead, the purpose of lectures is to give you a scaffold for organising your knowledge of the field. This scaffold should comprise an oversight of the key issues in the relevant topic, an understanding of the terminology used in this topic, an appreciation of the kinds of research methods used in this topic, and an overview of the most important theories or results or that topic. The idea is that, when you then read other resources in the future (book chapters, research articles, websites), the information from these resources coalesces naturally around this scaffold, making learning easy and natural.

The lectures and the lecture notes provide the best characterisation of the relevant topic areas for the exam. For the exam, the most important thing is to feel like you really understand all of the core concepts covered in the lectures, and to feel like you’ve interrogated the ideas critically so that you could expand on particular concepts in essay-type formats. The best results will come, though, if you follow up these topics with external reading, so that your knowledge does expand past what was described in the lectures. The internet is a great resource for this kind of reading, especially for more fundamental concepts such as acoustics.