Designed for a one-semester musical fundamentals course, From Sound to Symbol: Fundamentals of Music clearly covers all essential topics, but with a unique, "sound-to-symbol" approach that explores concepts through the sound of music before explaining how symbols are used to represent that sound. Reversing the pedagogical perspective of traditional music theory texts, the authors work from the premise that students should first intuitively comprehend musical sounds, and then link this knowledge to an understanding of musical symbols and theory. Recent research in music perception and cognition suggests that using this "perceptual orientation" is an effective means of teaching both musical thought and knowledge. The text's most innovative feature is an early and continuous focus on active music-making, which is supported by workbook exercises. Using discovery learning and collaborative learning techniques, it teaches students how to develop their perception of sound through kinesthetic, aural, and visual methods.
The authors incorporate numerous examples and activities for developing musicianship skills at progressive levels of difficulty; marginal icons direct students to exercises in music theory, sight reading melodies and rhythms, improvisation and composition, ensemble singing, and keyboard performance. By employing a repertoire that is simple and easy to sing or play, From Sound to Symbol gives students the opportunity to actively engage in the learning process and to easily internalize the concepts and elements inherent in the music. A fold-out, laminated keyboard is packaged with each text. SUPPLEMENTS: Audio CD Each text is packaged with an audio CD that includes all the focus melodies in the text, recorded in both vocal and instrumental versions. Technology CD Each text also comes with a CD-ROM that provides tutorials for chapter review, theory exercise drills, and dictation exercises. Instructor's Manual Available to adopters, this manual includes lesson plans, teaching tips on learning assessment, tutorials that interface with the CD-ROM, additional aural and written dictation examples for each chapter, and suggestions for scoring tests.