MUS-10126 - Module Specification
School of Humanities and Social Sciences
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences

Programme/Approved Electives for 2025/26

Available as a Free Standing Elective

Co-requisites

None

Prerequisites

No

Barred Combinations

No

Description for 2025/26

This module introduces key theoretical and practical aspects of popular music, exploring its socio-cultural contexts, functions, performers, markets, and scenes. It challenges cultural assumptions about sound and listening, examining popular culture, fandom, and sound recording. You will learn about music dissemination, consumption, and sharing on digital platforms, covering ethics, strategies, methodologies, and realities in today’s music world.

To provide students with a wide-ranging introduction of the main historical, theoretical and practical thinking around the subject of popular music, sound and digital platforms; exploring the role of popular music in its socio-cultural context, its functions, sonorities, performers and viewpoints. This module will be grounded in real- world sonic practice by applying the theory and methods of ethnomusicology and popular music to specific case studies around the world. Furthermore, this module will help students to question cultural assumptions about the nature and possibilities of sound and listening, interrogating listening and sound recording as ways of engaging with and representing social life.

Intended Learning Outcomes

Explain how sound, popular music and digital platforms articulate and demarcate social spaces and how sound-based practices negotiate social structures: 1,2
Recognise and describe a diverse range of sonic worlds, demonstrating insights into socio-cultural context.: 1,2
Demonstrate skill in critically assessing and developing theoretical ideas through reflection on experiences and observations of social life: 2
Describe the role of recording technology and communicative media in shaping how sound and popular music is made, used, disseminated, and heard: 1,2

Study hours

24 hours of contact time, to include: lectures, seminars, and tutorials:
12 hours lectures
9 hours seminars and workshops 3 hours small group tutorials
Individual study:
30 hours of listening report assessment preparation. Listening and reflecting on sound cultures presented during lectures. 42 hours of directed study/listening/weekly preparation, consolidation of lecture, workshop seminar and tutorials.
54 hours of summative individual assessments preparation

School Rules

None

Description of Module Assessment