{"id":767,"date":"2015-04-22T21:36:34","date_gmt":"2015-04-23T04:36:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.evergreen.edu\/reesemusicalcity\/?p=71"},"modified":"2015-04-22T21:36:34","modified_gmt":"2015-04-23T04:36:34","slug":"week-3-response","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/musicalcities\/week-3-response\/","title":{"rendered":"Week 3 Response"},"content":{"rendered":"

So I’ve arrived at the end of the first week of my study. I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t difficult to stay on task. Sometimes there’s so much else to do (I could totally clean my room right now instead of writing this blog post…). Sometimes I find myself gripped by the ennui which Botton warned us about. It’s a struggle, but it wouldn’t really be any fun if it wasn’t. I’ll supply some thought as to how I can better focus myself to this study at the end of this blog post, but, for now, I’ll write a bit about what I’ve learned.<\/span><\/p>\n

During the first week of my study I’ve read Part I of Helmholtz’s On the Sensations of Tone – As a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music<\/em>. I was quickly enraptured by the text, and dug into the reading, but soon found the content to be a little overwhelming. In the introduction, Helmholtz won me over by explaining the reason for his research and writing. His goal was to unite two schools of thought: “physical and physiological acoustics<\/em>” and “musical science and esthetics<\/em>” (Helmholtz 1). This matched descriptions of the book which also promised a comprehensive, yet easy to grasp, understanding of sound from a scientific point of view. The early material consisted of describing how sound works. It was detailed enough that I could easily follow it, and it cast new light on subjects which were already familiar to me. However, I soon lost myself in the rapid current of new information that Helmholtz began introducing. I found myself adrift, reading about descriptions of experiments which I didn’t fully comprehend and hoping to find paragraphs or sentences which could tie together the different terms and ideas that were being developed. Though I understand, and greatly admire, the extensiveness of Helmholtz’s research, I couldn’t retain or connect to some of the stuff he was throwing at me. His analysis of the human ear, for example, was something that I was initially interested in learning about, but the content was so dense that most of it went over my head.<\/p>\n

My solution was to find supplemental sources which provided similar information in a more readily digestible form. These sources gave me a means to get my head around the depth of knowledge Helmholtz was throwing at me.<\/p>\n