Competences developed in the course

Transversal Competences

CT8: Develop ideas and arguments in a reasoned and critical manner.

CT13: Seek excellence and quality in professional activity.

General Competences

CG4: Recognise musical materials through the development of auditory capacity and apply this ability in professional practice.

CG17: Be familiar with different musical styles and practices that allow understanding and enriching one’s field of activity within a broader cultural context.

CG23: Value musical creation as the act of giving sonic form to a rich and complex structural thought.

CG24: Develop capacities for self‑directed learning throughout one’s professional life.

Specific Competences

SO1: Understand the musical structure of works from different repertoires of the Western tradition and other musics, with the ability to assess their expressive, morphological, syntactic and sonic aspects, and describe their characteristics.

SO2: Develop auditory skills that allow recognising, memorising and reproducing a wide variety of musical materials, as well as critically analysing the phenomena involved in listening and in the production of organised sound.

SO10: Integrate art, technology and science with sufficient flexibility to adapt to multiple and changing environments.

Learning outcomes (general objectives)

1. Describe the origin, instrumental or vocal composition, style, period, author or school of any highly complex musical fragment through auditory observation.
2. Develop critical listening skills, recognising the different musical and sonic aspects that shape any musical fragment, recorded or live.
3. Develop capacities to detect and describe sonic artefacts produced by processes and technologies of sound generation, capture, transmission, reinforcement and reproduction.
4. Develop capacities to detect and describe different treatments and processes introduced for aesthetic purposes in the generation, capture, transmission, reinforcement and reproduction of sound and music.

Contents

In‑depth study of musical discourse parameters. Implications of musical parameters for style. Styles, periods, authors and schools. Timbres and their combinations. Listening to musical fragments, vocal or instrumental, recorded or live. Detection and description of sonic artefacts and deficiencies. Detection and description of processes and transformations applied to sound (reverberation, equalisation, compression, filtering, encoding). Detection and description of electric and electronic instruments. Detection and description of recording techniques. Detection and description of styles of sound and musical production.

Teaching methodology

Teaching–learning methodology includes sessions with topic presentations and specific examples by both faculty and students, debate and discussion sessions, commented listening sessions, group work sessions and student presentations.

Assessment systems

Continuous assessment based on diagnostic evaluation and formalised through summative assessment leading to the final grade. Continuous assessment is carried out through different evaluation records derived from specific activities such as class participation and work, presentation of assignments, completion of technical ear‑training tasks and/or readings outside class, submission of written work or collections of sonic and musical examples, or written and oral examinations.