Kursteilnehmer-Bewertung und -Feedback für Fundamentals of Music Theory von The University of Edinburgh

It's a good course considering the amount of content and the time allotted to complete it (6 weeks). For the pedagogical staff: certain concepts could be explained in depth (especially week 3). Some reorganization of the content is desirable. Apart from this, great job done by the instructors.

For prospective students: Please apply the concepts learnt in each week by practicing it on your instrument even if it is not a piano (guitar for me) before attempting the quiz and final exam.

Don't hesitate to go beyond the content given here for further explanation.

Do not ignore assignment review requests from your peers.

Enjoy!

Really enjoyed taking on the challenge of this music theory course. Starting out as a drummer, notes on the treble and bass clef were absolute alien entities to me, but this course has changed that. Would recommend 100%. My only complaint is that the last few weeks' exams ramp up the difficulty significantly leaving you feeling like you missed something in the lectures. I think some of the harder topics could have been broken down better for people who have never been introduced to them before. Further reading and research is necessary for completion.

It was a great adventure to learn basic music theory. Thank you!

Explanation in the videos were simple and well understandable (I have non-native English).

However chord and cadence related questions in quiz and final test were more complex compared to the simplified explanation. Therefore

identifying chords and cadences correctly was a challenge for me as a complete beginner. Apart of that I owe a big thank, as this course has unsealed a complete new World for me. This new World is MUSIC. Thank you.

This course was perfect, except for Week Three, which was problematic for quite a few of us, if the Discussion Forums are anything to go by.

Either way, I learned a lot, and I am proud to say I can now read music, which was the main reason I went into the course. Most of the instructors used the piano to teach, and the addition of the auditory experience really enhanced my learning on this course. I would definitely recommend this course, and be happy to take another course with these instructors.

At the beginning, I thought the course was very good for beginners or people that know how to play an instrument well but would like to know more about the theoretical background.

However, the last two sessions were very hard and there could have been more detailed course material throughout the course and more exercises to make sure the concepts are well-understood by all students.

Nevertheless, the course proved to be very useful and enabled me to analyse a musical piece, which made it worthwhile.

Good. But sometimes the course jumps way too fast. Since I have already studied music theory, I joined this course to observe how music concepts are presented by the faculty; methodologies used; practical demos. While I liked the approach and the shared presentations very much, I felt, it could have been graded more gradually.

Also, as an introductory course, perhaps its better to put in less concepts with more application to real day to day music, rather than covering wide ground.

I'm a musician and a teacher and took this course just to refresh some concepts. I learnt a lot but I found this course too theoretical. I missed the music here! There is one professor who is amazing and played a lot (forgot his name, he plays cembalo). The other ones were too serious and too theoretical. Have in mind that this is a difficult course. You have to know music in order to be able to pass the quizzes and the final exam (which are both difficult). Thanks a lot! / Antonia

There is a lot of good things to be said about this course, as it goes pretty in depth about music theory and other relevant aspects. However, there is also a lot of room for improvement as well, as the difficulty level at times seemed pretty intimidating for a beginner course, such as in one particular week (4 or 5, can't exactly remember), where there was very little explanation but a lot of advanced stuff being tested. Overall, it was a great learning experience.

I've found this course very helpful to improve my knowledge of music theory. Some teachers are very clear and passionate about what they teach. However I don't think I would recommend this course to those who know nothing about music, I think it is necessary to know at least how to read music. I found the quizzes and the final exam very challenging and difficult but they helped me maybe more than the lessons themselves to get a better view on this subject.

I think that this is an excellent course and I got a lot out of it. However, at times, I found that the quiz and exam questions were far extended beyond the material covered in the lecture. For example, in lectures, the keys were often limited to C Maj, and A Min, but the quiz questions would be much more difficult extending to keys with many more sharps and flats. It might be that further examples, or lectures could be added to address this.

I think it is a really good course, unfortunately too advanced for someone that is just starting to play the recorder and recognises the notes and so on. Also the fact that the notes are ABCDEFG instead of DO.RE.MI.FA... made thinks a little bit confusing for me. I learnt some stuff until 3rd week where started to be quite complicated, 4th week was frustrating. Maybe in the future I'll come back to it.

Great content for an introductory course regarding the topics they covered - helped me fill in missing gaps of knowledge. Lots of clear examples too. My criticisms of the course are:

- Usage of English terminology for rhythms (i.e. quavers, etc.)

- The last video explaining cadences in depth has a lot of audio issues - the instructor is quiet and there are suddenly large spikes in volume from noises

I could give five stars, but I've ended up with four and I'll explain why. The course is awesome, instructors are great. The problem is the pace. At some point you have to absorb a considerable amount of information in a short period of time. Of course, it's not a reason to avoid the course, but this feedback could be useful for further adjustments reflecting in a better product for all community.

This course was really good and I learned a lot, but the teachers jumped around a lot and assumed that the students knew a lot of information already. I was able to survive simply because I had studied about a third of the information presented already. It is a very good course, but not complete. More explanations and examples of HOW to do/calculate the concepts presented would be nice.

This course it is a great tool to study about music theory and it helped me to increase my knowledge about this topic. However, I don't think that it's an introductory course, because the quizzes of the latests weeks(3,4,5 and 6) had a gigantic raise of difficulty, Therefore, if you're a beginner in music theory or if you don't know anything about it, I wouldn't recommend this course.

Generally this course has good subjects and syllabus. In some parts of course they teach reasons of the subjects and it becomes more logical for me. The only reason that I gave four stars is lecture videos are not enough for the final exam. Especially for part 2 of final exam, some questions are more detailed for given lectures. However, it was a good introduction for music theory.

First of all: Thank you very much for providing this, I've learned a lot!

Why not 5 stars?

In some cases you just used a link to Wikipedia as additional material for a video. In the first and second week you had more details, I know you already kindly invested a lot of time, but I would appreciate if you could add some details to those sections where you just used links.

A variety of topics in music theory was well-organized. Series of practice questions are usefully available. One suggestion is the auditory materials should often accompany written explanations to help learners be acquainted with what you would hear and underlying theory when lecturing about certain topics such as the difference between some time meters or something.

With the exception of week 3, which is indeed very badly taught, and week 6 which is complex and felt the videos could go a bit into more details, the course met my expectations.

I've always played guitar but never had any music theory training and I leave this course with a lot of answered question of things that I hear in music. It was well worth it.

It's quite good, and everything that was asked in the exams was explained. But I feel it could have been a lot better if they exaplained everything in a more explicit way. Personally, i learn more when things are shown with examples and several concepts than just with listening about the topic, and I know I'm not the only one who learns that way

Very challenging course. I must say, this is definitly NOT a fundamental or starter course. The level of frustration was quiet high and exploded in week three. Week three is terrible, without any learning benefit. Everything els was challenging, no beginner level in my eyes, but in the end I learned a lot. Thank you!

It would have been a great course for those new to music theory, but I think the way Week 3 was taught needs a huge improvement. I almost dropped the course because of that alone. But otherwise, the other professors did a great job of teaching music and conveying the feelings it brought with it.

Really helpful for getting a basic grasp of concepts that I've struggled with without really learning in other places. The final exam is somewhat of a departure from the course material though and requires a fair amount of self-learning to complete. But I'm thankful for the free course!

On the whole a good level of detail and introduces concepts nicely, however i think particularly in week 3 a lot is thrown at you with not much explanation. An addition I think would be useful is explaining how knowing certain things in music theory can help us make music.

The final exam seemed to be about things not covered in the course, but peer review of other students contributed to dispelling the ambiguity. What was covered provided a great over-all look at music theory and sets up a sound model for development of concepts.