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I understand how someone with no music background could be quite lost. It also sounds like the quizzes require considerable accuracy and understanding of the material.

I'm not interested quizzes or assignments though. I'm just along for the ride.

I've been very impressed with how well those buttons work. I am guessing that they only shorten or lengthen the spaces between the words, because the words themselves still sound very normal and natural.

It was so fascinating I had to re-watch a lecture because I missed so much content through experimenting with the buttons

Don

Despite that I think the course can be difficult, I think it's worth checking out by anyone with an interest in the topic. As malkin says, you can just watch the videos if you prefer, without trying the quizzes. Or you can download the materials for more leisurely study over a longer period of time. It may not be the ideal way to learn music theory, but few of us have an ideal avenue for such learning open to us.

The main questions I see in the discussion forums initially include:

What is an interval?

Why are the number names of the intervals what they are (third, fifth, etc.)?

Why are some intervals major/minor and others perfect?

What is this lunatic mapping of halfstep counts to interval names? (Arises from not having the answers to the two previous questions)

Why is there a halfstep between E and F, and between B and C, but a whole step between all the other pairs of adjacent natural notes?

Why start by making triads out of 1-3-5? Why not start, say, with 1-2-5 or 1-4-5 or...?

Since a mode has the same notes as a major scale (e.g. D Dorian has the same notes as C major) why bother with modes? Why not just say you're in C major, since the same set of notes is used? (I think this arises because the instructors introduced modes in week 1, but only addressed what it means to be "in" a key or mode in week 2.)


I think these are all excellent questions.

A mode is a pattern of Tones and Semitones. C major starting at C with the pattern of T-T-S-T-T-T-S is the Ionian mode. D major, starting at D also has the same pattern for Ionian mode, T-T-S-T-T-T-S. Notice when played in this way D major has two black keys F# and C# (D,E,F#,G,A,B,C#,D).

However, Dorian has the pattern T-S-T-T-T-S-T very different from D major Ionian, starting at D. With Dorian you omit the F# and C#, so resulting in D,E,F(natural),G,A,B,C(natural),D. What is Dorian mode starting at C? It would be Dorian pattern T-S-T-T-T-S-T or C,D,Eb,F,G,A,Bb,C. Notice that Dorian Mode starting at C is very different from C major. Try playing it on the piano and you'll notice scale of Dorian starting at D (D,E,F,G,A,B,C,D) sounds just like scale of Dorian starting at C (C,D,Eb,F,G,A,Bb,C) except lower one step in pitch.

What is Dorian mode starting at A? It is not A,B,C,D,E,F,G,A, all the white keys because that's Aeolian mode not Dorian mode. Scale starting with A with all white keys is also not C Major but A Natural Minor.

I am very happy with the course so far, I like the way the video topics are in small chunks of information. This allows you to watch all of them at once or one or two at your leisure. Obviously a few think there should be more detail but then it might lose the succinctness I desire. Courses of this nature are really aimed at adults, who should be more than capable of doing further research and reading of anything that doesn't make sense or requires further detail.

I keep having dreams that I'm in the Scottish Highlands. I am trying to scale huge mountains, but I can only take half steps. I see an Army major up ahead, approaching a cliff, he walks up to a ledge, he falls off a ledger line, and gets turned upside down, then morphs into a coal miner. I'm confused, it's all getting me down, putting me in a bad mode. I want to go home, but I'm afraid I won't be able to get in because I can't find my key.

Riddler, it sounds like you should watch the lesson on intervals. You'll be hopping up the mountains by sixths and sevenths in no time!

8 Octaves, thank you for the explanation on modes. I wasn't asking for myself, I was just reporting the kinds of questions that many students are having in the course. They all are about "why" - people can memorize definitions, but if they don't have the "why" which many students crave, it will be hard to make sense of, remember, or use what they're learning.

What amazes me, in a good way, about the music courses at Coursera is how very hugely many people are seeking this understanding.

I found their definitions of the modes - patterns of tones and semitones - to be the most succinct explanation of modes I've ever heard. The extra video they put up this week, where they played the same piano/sax tune, starting in C, in each of the modes was also a very helpful aural lesson for me.

I found their definitions of the modes - patterns of tones and semitones - to be the most succinct explanation of modes I've ever heard. The extra video they put up this week, where they played the same piano/sax tune, starting in C, in each of the modes was also a very helpful aural lesson for me.

Rudimentary (fundamental) music theory is very important to me. These are the basic things on which music rests - real, living music. You want to really grasp what each thing is, so you can truly use it. And you should be taking time to do that with each element. The idea of so many things being presented in such a short time has disturbed me from the beginning. I could only see it as a review, or a "taste for the future" - and even then I'm not sure.

Take a couple of things:
Time

You have time signatures, beats per measure, strong-weak beats, pulse, and then you also have the relative length of notes such as half, quarter, dotted (anything), and which note "gets the beat". There are different concepts at work. They can get mixed together, and they do get mixed up.

Intervals
There is the fact that C and Eb are three semitones apart, which you can count along piano keys, and musically that when they are played together they make a sad sound. Then there is the fact that this distance, and that sound quality is called "minor third". But there is also the fact that the same sound on a pretuned instrument can also be called "major second" if spelled as C D#.

There is the fact that if you were to play the various intervals to explore whether you find any more or less pleasant than others, you would probably find them to be so, with C Db being on the grating, unpleasant side, and C G being smooth and pleasant, but if you played a bunch of the latter, you'd wonder why you suddenly feel like you're in an old monastery.

These things are deep. They are fascinating. At least as important is that if they become real and truly grasped, then they open doors to many things. Music is a thing that we hear, and we feel. Theory should be connected to that. If so many things are gone over this quickly, can that happen?

I read the list of questions being asked. My first reaction was, if those questions are being asked, what was taught - shouldn't the teaching have already answered them? Unless the course's aim is to give a taste, and to let people start learning about these things - which I think would take quite a period of time.


If the course is teaching fundamentals, how can the question be asked "What is an interval?"

Some of the other questions, I can see could lead to further, thoughtful exploration, and that is good.

MODES
We just had a lengthy exploration of modes in a group I was in.

As 8 Octaves described very well, modes go along the diatonic system with a very particular sequence of tones and semitones, which we have in our major scale, but not necessarily starting at the same place.

We can see this pattern on the white keys of the piano when we play C major. From C to D there is a whole tone (2 semitones - one of them a black key) and that continues until we get to EF, with two keys touching, and therefore only a Semitone apart. We will find that sequence in any major scale.

(A quick note about Tone and Semitone - many people have learned to call these Whole step and Half step, and they know this same pattern as W-W-H-W-W-W-H. It's the same thing. Initially I learned these as T's and S's too.)

Historically (a simplification) music was in modes. If you translated this into white piano keys, "Ionian" would be the sequence to T's and S's you get when playing from C to C, "Dorian" would be the sequence of T's and S's if you played from D to D, and so on. You still have the same chain of T's and W's, but you've moved up one on the chain.

This "white key", and D to D, E to E etc. idea is a good way of getting a first grasp on modes. You get to see the sequence of S's and T's.

There were no chords or harmony as we know them today when modes were used originally. I also don't know how much music is written strictly in a mode, in the way that common music slips between being in major and minor keys. I think (?) that modes are often put into music that may be in a major or minor key, to give interesting colour. Jazz uses modes, and more modern music uses them.

When we learn about modes in the RCM book, we learn to write them two different ways. 1. For D Dorian, you consider that it is like starting on the 2nd note in C major, keep that key signature, and just start on D as your tonic. 2. For D Dorian, consider that it has a minor sound because of DFA, pretend it's an altered D minor, use the key sig of D minor (one flat - Bb) but then raise that flatted note = raise the 6th note so that you still get D, E, F, G, A, B(nat), C, D. Either way you get the same sequence of T's and S's.

This led us to question why two ways were being presented, and the merits of the second way versus the first. Well, one factor is that we use chords and harmony. And then musicians might want to use different flavours of minor scales - for example, a pallet of D natural minor, D melodic minor, Dorian, Phrygian - as they go along in their music.

And that was barely touching modes.

The link below gives an excellent, thorough look at modes, which includes the practical side - i.e. linking it to music. It is much better than what I studied initially in theory rudiments (which really didn't give that much, in retrospect).

A last thing about modes. We spent some time looking at Scarborough Fair, which is said to come from the Renaissance period, but its history is obscure. We found that in the many renditions out there, some were in mostly Dorian mode, some were in "natural minor" (Aeolian) - both of them creating that "medieaval" or folk flavour. But almost every single rendition, if in D minor / D dorian - all tended to have a C# in there once in a while. Try playing Scarborough Fair different ways - in D Dorian, D natural minor - eliminating any C#, sticking in a couple of C#'s where they seem normal - and see what effect it has. I found only a single version that was totally in D Dorian, because somebody made an effort to do it that way, and it didn't sound as good.

Sorry for the modes tangent - it happens to fascinate me at this time.

keystring, what would you suggest for someone wanting help with learning music theory, in the deep way you see as ideal?

(I've separated this into its own post, to let my core question stand alone. Here's more of the extended story behind why I think about this course the way I do.)

I emphasise "help", not just "learn music theory on their own", because I think of how I learned harmonic analysis. I had a book on music theory, which I had learned some things from. Then I took a course, where it felt like everything in the course was brand new to me. Later I went back to the book, and discovered that everything I learned in the course, was in the book! I just hadn't been able to understand on my own what I was reading, not even to understand that I didn't understand it. And I do a lot of study on my own, but this is something I needed help with.

An aspect of my harmonic analysis course was that I came out of it with a lot of head knowledge, but no aural ability with any of the concepts I had learned. There was an aural component to the course, but I completely sucked at it, and every aural exam was just a matter of pure guesswork for me. (I did gain a playing ability, for example for structuring flute improvisations, which I enjoyed greatly finding.) My aural inabilities have troubled me greatly, and I have spent a long time (decades) trying to improve. I finally seem to have turned a corner in being able to be kind to myself even with my aural inabilities, and in being able to start to hear some things sometimes and celebrate my little bits of progress.

But despite the pain I have had at comparing my large head knowledge to my small aural knowledge, I'm glad I took the course. I seem to develop so very very slowly in aural ability that a teacher would die of boredom trying to teach an organized scheduled course that went only at the speed I could master things aurally. So I got a bunch of head knowledge, and that's a treasure trove I return to over time to see what I can play around with looking for better aural skills with it. Without the head knowledge, since I'm on my own for studying and developing now, I wouldn't even have an idea of some of the kinds of things to try to improve at aurally.

I see the Coursera course as a resource for augmenting self-teaching. I see it as an accelerated course in the basics of music theory head knowledge, to introduce people to the topics. If the professors slide over something, not realizing that what's obvious to them won't be obvious to students, someone's sure to ask the question in the discussion forums and answers will be provided. Indeed, probably the biggest benefit of taking this as a course rather than simply reading books is the discussion forums, where people are able to ask all the basic basic questions that have puzzled them for years, and stopped them from getting further.

The course doesn't take the philosophy, as far as I can tell, of starting purely from played music, and having students listen to and play their music theory as much as they look at it on paper. I've learned about that approach from you and Gary, and I think it's a wonderful approach. But I think it's a rare approach, and in the meantime I tend to think it's better for people to get exposure to ideas and topics than not. Hopefully along the way sometime students will meet the idea of making their music theory into real music -- and in a way, I've found my role on the discussion boards for the course as pushing that "connect music theory to sound" point of view for people to practice and expand their learning.

I went to a vocal intonation workshop recently. We did exercises that left me almost in tears at how scary they were, and at how much I didn't hear what others seemed to hear. (Scary because apparently for me the worst musical sin is to sing out of tune, and during the exercises we were seeking very fine tuning which I couldn't hear, and so I felt, I don't know, as if I might be naked and not even realize I were naked.) So there were ways that workshop could have been run differently that would have been less scary for me. But I'm glad I took it anyway, because it's introduced me to a set of ideas, and I've thought of exercises to help me in my own intonation related to the exercises in the workshop, but working on the specific things I need. So maybe it wasn't the ideal workshop, but it was a resource from which I took the good, let go of the bad, and will be able to use it in the future. I think lots of students are being able to use the Coursera course in the same way.

Just when I thought this week's lecture is too easy, the double and triple dotted note was introduced. Very interesting. I've never heard of a double dotted note. For a double dotted quarter note, the time would be a quarter + an eighth + a sixteenth notes together. I'm learning something even if it's mostly review.

So much was covered in this weeks lecture it would spin the head of anyone not doing it purely as revision.

I haven't done any kind of serious study of any subject for many decades so this course, and the Berklee one too, are a bit of a system shock. The only "study" of music theory I've done is reading up on the theory pages in the Alfred's AIO Books, so a lot of the stuff in these lectures is going over my head, but some of it is sticking too...a lot is sticking, I'm holding my own in the quizzes and assessment/assignments. I'm sure anyone with no prior musical knowledge would have to be a fast learner to keep up, but folks like that do exist. So far it seems to be better for me to follow the video course than try to read up in a book*, so I'll not be throwing the towel in yet, I hope to survive and come out at the other end knowing more than when I went in.

*No, I'm not one of those chaps who doesn't like books with no pictures in them.

Well I just submitted the final exam for this course and it has been quite a challenge. I found the quizzes fairly easy but spent too many hours to count on the final over many days. I have enjoyed the course and the other students and teachers were so supportive and helpful. This is the first course I have taken on Cousera and from what others say I may be spoiled now by how much help and support that one of the teachers especially has provided in this course.
Judy

Way to go, zilly!

I am now working on a coursera for Fundamentos de la escritura español. I expect to be overwhelmed any moment, because my Spanish is not really all that good.