Be warned. There is no way that this is a beginner course. It is really a mishmash with most of the lectures almost too elementary, simplistic and disorganized and then suddenly in week 3 you will be faced with quizzes that (in the admission of the course lecturers themselves) are at third year university level. The final quiz is just too over the top for any beginner to even contemplate, while the final lecture in Week 5 is such a mishmash of poorly filmed and poorly recorded material that Coursera should be ashamed of itself for allowing it to be shown. I assume that the glowing ratings by some are either people who have only audited and not attempted the quizzes or have already a solid background in music theory. Several of the other comments show a similar degree of disillusionment to what I have faced and it really is a pity since the idea of providing an education is to encourage rather than discourage. The University of Edinburgh should be warned that that publishing this weird mix of childish elementary and unprofessional lectures along with quizzes that bear little relation to the material taught will only tarnish their reputation. I really sympathize with the people in the discussion forum in Week 6 who seem so lost and frustrated. Best advice I can give --- find another course. The University of Michigan seems to have on

Avoid this course. After lesson 1 it begins to fall apart. The explanations become harder to understand and then in Lesson 3 it's as if the instructor completely forgets to teach and just refers you out to online or other sources. Then, the test in Lesson 3 is barely related to the lesson itself. The best lesson was Lesson 1, and if they had stuck with that combination of instructors for the full course I think it would have been a much better course. But they didn't, and it wasn't.

Way too difficult and they don't teach in a way that will help you remember the content that you learn. It's taught way too fast and the final exam is a killer!!! It starts out really simple and boring and then it changes into crazy hard college level work!!

First of all, I want to thank all my colleagues for grading my final project!:)

We made it!!

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This course consists of 6 weeks, but the difficulty level varies in each week.

First and second week: Easy!

Third and fourth week: Difficult as hell

Fifth week: Intermediate

Sixth week: Final exam & Peer grading

It took three sessions for me to complete this course and it wasn't easy at all.

From the third week, I had to search the internet(ex. YouTube) to fully understand the lesson and pass the quizzes.

I'm a slow learner, so it felt really challenging.

But all this being said, I can tell you that all of this was an essential part of learning valuable concepts and theories.

It was tough, but rewarding.

This is a great course for everyone who has a passion for music, and the key to successful completion is to learn consistently.

Visit Coursera every single day and learn every single day.

No matter how slow you are, as long as you keep going, you will get there.

Cheers!

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p.s.

In week six, try submitting the final exam part 2 as fast as you can,

because it gets much harder to get a peer-grade as the time goes by.

If your final exam isn't graded yet and the course is about to finish,

go to discussion forum in week 6 and ask your colleagues for help.

Here's a small tip: If you find other colleagues' SOS on the forum, help them out and leave a comment that you just graded their assignments and ask to grade your work!

The only parts that are well explained are those by Dr Zack & Dr Nikki. There are HUGE gaps between the content and the quizes, and significant parts of the music theory are left aside. For the most complex parts, the supplemental material is just an enumeration of overwhelming links to wikipedia or musictheory.net (those are easier to understand, at least). Explanation to quiz answers are only provided in the first quiz (introduction).

Although there is a lot of useful material covered, there was also a lot of hand waving and redirecting to musictheory.net and wikipedia instead of explaining the material thoroughly in their own words. The difficulty ramps up beyond what I would have considered a beginners course. The quizzes are disproportionately complex, especially week 4 onward. Instead of reviewing the simple ideas as they were commonly presented, in the key of C, it feels as though the quizzes were designed to stump experts. There were many trick questions, and multiple choices that are not explicitly labeled to inform you that more than one answer is required. If you already know music theory and just need a review, this course may serve that purpose for you. I would suggest nearly any other source as an alternative for someone who is just trying to learn music theory.

Lectures are often too short and they don't explain the concepts well, which should not be an actual problem if the quizzes were not so difficult. I understand students must make some research and spend time understanding the concepts, but the difficulty of the quizzes is tremendous compared to the little amount of detail and information that is provided in the course. The contents are not well organized and very often you are referred to wikipedia and musictheory.net links, which are way more useful so if you are a begginer don't waste your time on this course and learn the basic concepts directly from wikipedia.

After going through each lesson, week by week and thinking I was really learning something, but I can't pass the first exam (even with my notes and Google) and almost had a panic attack when I looked at the second exam.

I feel like I wasted fifty dollars and hours of my life in order to get what little belief I had that I might have actually learned something come crashing down.

Its not as easy as it seems, it will give you a good challenge. After you finish this, you will be more confident about your music theory. Thank you University of Edinburgh! Thank you Coursera!

This is the most frustrating Coursea class I have taken so far and the only one I started but did not complete. It might be a good refresher course for a music major, but it is mislabeled as "Fundamentals of Music Theory". The instructors introduced much terminology but provided little context on how it could be used. They performed the music very well; it was entertaining but not instructive. Why not demonstrate most thing in the key of C, in common time, and using the G clef. One needed to master every concept already introduced before even beginning to understand the next. The practice tests included multiple concepts in each question. I passed many quizzes through a process of elimination, never understanding the material.

One way (approach) to 'teaching' data shows only that you know data but haven't designed multiple ways of teaching it. No, feedback from instructors, directly, makes it hard to obtain conceptual understandings. ie, as soon as you become lost with the one-way taught week, no way to grasp the following weeks. There could be a higher rate of success AND enjoyment of learning, if more thought were put into 'How to teach' the material. Been playing music for over 30 years and am failing from week 4 on. This shouldn't be as confusing as Coursera has made it. Disappointed and DISCOURAGED!

If you don't know much about music theory, it's going to be pretty challenging, and still is reachable. You learn as much as you want with this courses. I'm glad I could finish it.

This is a very unevenly paced and constructed course - not at all delivered to the standard of the previous Coursera courses I have followed. Some lectures are clear and guide the learner step by step - and then others suddenly assume a level of knowledge and sophistication that is at a significantly higher level and includes concepts that have either not been introduced or have been dealt with in minimal detail. It also ends up focusing more on music analysis than music theory - while there is a relationship between these 2 approaches I did not embark on this course to become an analyst - as a practising musician I wanted to understand more of the concepts behind what I do and hear. Very disappointed - I will now look elsewhere to satisfy my learning.

Lessons are all over the place and missing information. Top down view and annotations are not always available. Student is not given enough material to pass quizzes easily without looking for additional materials. Fun course if you already play an instrument, otherwise confusing.

As a Buzzok player and a software engineer, this course encourages me to play on my instrument differently and to think in a new web application for music discipline !!

Thank you very much

A very challenging course, particularly in the last couple of weeks, but very rewarding. The instructors have produced an excellent set of video lessons, plus supporting materials.

The course material itself is good and you do learn a lot but for a course that starts at complete beginner level the final exam is too much of a reach for many. It feels like the course should be at least 50% longer as in that exam you are literally trying to stitch ideas together into educated guesses (i got 80% plus on all of the course work). It needs work to narrow the gap as this is not good learning, it frustrates many and is not helpful.

Very good course for people who want a general overview of music theory basics, particularly as a foundation from which to start from. The first week is slow, but the second immediately picks up pace (and it is a *fundamentals* course, so starts such that everybody can understand it). Lectures are very well organised.

It was a very nice course. We were able to understand the basics of music theory and how the notations and chords work. Thank you so much to the entire staff of Edinburgh University and Coursera..:-)

For beginning level music theory it does go in depth with the material. However, sometimes the tests or assignments will have certain things that were not mentioned in the course that the student must use common sense with. Overall a challenging and knowledgeable course.

First of all, I must say I agree with some of the lower rated reviews because I felt the same way. I took the course to revise the subject. I can say that it did actually teach me a lot of thinks that I overlooked the first time around. Shortcuts, mnemonics and other stuff

The pacing I'm not sure though. It started off with "here are two notes on the staff" in week 1 to "here is the third inversion of secondary dominant in relative minor" in week five.

Here are my thoughts on the course:

I originally wanted to give only three stars- for Richard, Zack and Nikki. I felt like they were really good teachers compared to the others who taught using examples. Even the reading material was good.

As time went by, the reading material were just links to wikipedia and musictheory which I didn't expect from the University of Edinburgh. Still I must say this was kinda like a boon because those links were very helpful, even more so than some of the lecture videos.

I felt like some concepts in the quiz weren't taught in the sessions (such as counting unequal note values within tuplets etc) Also week 3 could have been handled much much better, with lots of practical examples to make learning the theory even more efficient

I don't mind the challenging quizzes, I would like to say if you're clear with the concepts and try to understand what the question is about, it is easy to score 100 in all the quizzes...even week 5. I understand the beginner's frustrations with this though. Please add feedback to all the other quizzes from week 1. Only week 1 had actual feedback, where we were told where we went wrong in the quiz.

Speaking of week 5, that took a lot of time for me because of the clearly not so beginner content and the pace. I might suggest better positioning of the camera, maybe a top view instead of a side view so we can clearly see what is being played,

I understand that its typical of universities to not spoon-feed everything, and to encourage us to go and explore the subject some more. At many points, I felt discouraged though. However I'm happy to say I eventually used multiple sources, and was able to finish the final exam which I did very well.

So in the end, this course did encourage me to do further research so I could better understand the topics, and I ended up gaining a lot, I'll go with 4 stars for my review

Very disorganized presentation of materials, bad explanations, and the quizzes have wrong/ambiguous answers. I don't recommend this if you want to start learning music theory. Youtube has better offers.

I came into this course as a lifelong musician (more than forty years experience) with limited knowledge of theory. I came into this course with a thirst to learn, understanding that I would be challenged because the course description explained that it would offer something for everyone, beginner or advanced. The course did not disappoint in this regard.

While I did find week three extremely frustrating, I did take the instructor's references and search the online world for sites that would help me learn, more thoroughly, the concepts. Now I have a bookmark library filled with sites that will help me continue on my journey to learning theory and the Fundamentals of Music Theory was a great starting point.

My advice for those who consider taking this course is for you to enter with an understanding that this is an inexpensive (or free to some maybe), non-credit course that looks at music theory in six short weeks. Don't expect to have every little detail expanded upon with hours of exercises. That you are enrolling in an online course means you already understand that the onus will be on you to seek out the knowledge you need to pass this course. I also suggest that you frequent the forums each week and take part in active discussions around the concepts you are learning.

Thanks to this course, I have learned more about theory in the short time I spent in this course than I have in the forty plus years I've been gigging. I will definitely take more courses around music theory. Thank you to Coursera, for offering the course, and to the instructors from the University of Edinburgh for giving their time to create this course.

Thanks a lot team. I have personally been trying to learn music theory for a while but things always seemed a bit abstract till I did this course. The content was also really neat and precise.

For someone like me whose formal music background consisted of clarinet lessons--for which I rarely practiced--and guitar lessons--for which I practiced even less--some 6 decades ago, this course required diligence and concentration. But the reward for that was tremendous. I've learned so much about how musical compositions are structured and how those structures relate to acoustic phenomena and their appreciation. This knowledge has given me immense appreciation for composers of music and for the musicians who transform an intellectual art into performances that others can enjoy. The lecturers packed a great deal into their videos, and all of them were not just wonderful, but they complemented each other. I especially loved how Zack Moir and Nikki Moran taught together--one just doesn't want to let them down!--and particular thanks must go to Zack, whose 'electronic blackboard' video, "Modulations II "during Week 5, provided just the extra boost many learners probably needed to master some very difficult material. Thanks to all involved!!