Aural Skills I

Adopting note: complete the bracketed fields below and map the 15 relative weeks onto your term calendar; nothing else needs editing to go live.

What this course is

The catalog line reads: "Recommended prior coursework: MUS-101. This course introduces
sight-singing, aural skills, and melodic dictation." One honest note on that line: no prior
coursework is assumed here — this course is written for musicians who play by ear and arrive
without notation, and it is built for exactly that.

You already hear this. We're going to train the ear you already own — and teach your ear and
your eye to talk to each other. You can find the key of a song without being told. You know
when the band rushes, when the harmony singer drifts, when the last chord doesn't land. That ear
is real, and it is the instrument this course trains — deliberately, weekly, out loud. Every week
works three strands: sight-singing (see it, sing it), ear-training (hear it, name it),
and dictation (hear it, write it down).

This course is scheduled back-to-back with MUS-156 Music Theory I — same mornings, same room
area, and almost certainly the same people sitting near you. The two courses are built as a
pair and move in lockstep: what gets spelled on the board in the morning's theory session gets
sung and heard here an hour later, the same morning. Theory names it; this course proves you
can hear it, sing it, and take it down by ear. Ten minutes apart, one musicianship.

What you'll be able to do (learning outcomes)

By the end of MUS-155 you will be able to:

1. Sing at sight, in tune and in time, diatonic melodies in major and minor within a
   one-octave range, using do-based movable-do solfège and traditional metric counting.
2. Notate, from a single sounding performance, four-bar diatonic melodies in major and
   minor — meter, key, pitches, rhythm.
3. Identify by ear, without notation, melodic intervals within the octave, mode, meter
   (simple/compound; duple/triple/quadruple), and cadence type.
4. Reproduce — sing, clap, or play — patterns heard once, at tempo, in simple and compound
   meters.
5. Diagnose your own aural errors: describe what you heard, locate where it diverged, name
   the error class, and apply a targeted practice strategy.

Required materials — nothing to buy

• Your voice. It is the instrument of record here, and the one every drill assumes.
• Your phone, for recording the weekly singing submissions. The voice-recorder app already on
  it is enough.
• A free browser tone generator and metronome (links provided in week 1). A keyboard helps if
  you have one; nothing in this course requires one.
• An AI chatbot for the tutorials, practice drills, and weekly submissions — any chatbot you
  like, and free tiers are fine. See the AI-Use Policy below.
• A device with a web browser for Canvas, and a way to photograph handwritten notation (your
  phone again). MuseScore (free) or handwriting are both fully accepted, always.

How a week works

The same rhythm, every week:

• Before session 1 — the ear-training tutorial is due, right as class begins, because
  session 1 builds on it. Session 1 opens by ear-training exactly what the morning's theory
  session just named: new sounds, new drills.
• Session 2 — drill studio plus the week's skills check, in class. The studio is the working
  session: echo drills, sight-singing, partner work, dictation practice. The skills check is
  short and live: Professor Hemsworth performs every stimulus in the room — sings it or plays it —
  and you identify and notate what you actually heard. You answer through the Canvas quiz tool
  on your device, but make no mistake about what it is: it is a hearing check, not a reading
  test, and nothing on it can be answered from notation alone. Closed to AI.
• The end of the week — the practice drills and the singing/dictation submission are due.

Singing solo, on a rotation. Every session, a posted rotation brings six to eight of you up
to sing individually — brief, low-stakes, and in front of people who are all taking the same
turn. At full enrollment your solo spot comes around roughly every two and a half weeks, and
between turns you're echoing, clapping, and writing with the room the whole time. That is why
the studio grade is mostly about being there: the rotation only works if you're in the room —
and honestly, so does your ear.

Daily practice is the actual coursework. This is a 1-unit course — about three hours a week
including class time — and the out-of-class portion works best in small daily doses: five
ten-minute practice sessions beat one fifty-minute session, every time. An ear trains like a
muscle: frequency wins.

Grading

Your grade is the weighted total of the groups below. Weights sum to 100%.

Why there is no "exam weight" debate to have here — printed so you don't have to wonder:
across Professor Hemsworth's courses, work you produce is weighted over timed testing, because an
artifact built over a week measures more than a sitting does. In this course the distinction
dissolves entirely. A skills check here is not recalling a fact from a chapter — it is you,
singing and notating, live. Every assessed row in MUS-155 is a performance. Counted honestly,
produced work is effectively your whole grade, and that is by design.

Letter grades

Week-by-week schedule

Timing is relative — map Week 1 through Week 15 onto your own term calendar. Every week carries
the same graded set (weeks 7 and 15 swap in the mid-course check and the final — see the table):
tutorial, studio, skills check, practice drills, singing/dictation submission. The table lists
each week's focus and anything unusual.

Instruction ends with Week 15, and so does this course: there is no finals-week meeting — the
final aural assessment lives inside Week 15, in the regular sessions. Your prepared final material
is in your hands from Week 13, and the break maintenance plan is the bridge across the break
between Weeks 14 and 15: an ear that rests for nine days dulls, and ten minutes a day keeps it
bright.

AI-Use Policy

This course builds AI into the coursework as a learning partner, and draws a clear line
around everything else. Read this carefully — it's course policy, not a suggestion.

Any AI chatbot is allowed, and free tiers are fine. Pick one and use it consistently.

The AI-based activities

Your ear-training tutorials, practice drills, and weekly singing/dictation submissions are
completed with your chatbot — the conversation is the activity — and each drill studio
includes an AI-assisted prep step. For all of these, the chat share link is part of your
submission: treat the conversation as your work, keep it on topic, and do your own thinking
inside it.

Your chatbot cannot hear you — and the course never pretends it can

A text chatbot is genuinely useful for the naming layer of this skill: converting between
notation, solfège syllables, counting syllables, and scale degrees; diagnosing the error in a
transcription you type in; coaching your self-assessment against explicit criteria; generating
fresh practice material. That is exactly what the tutorials and practice drills use it for.

What it cannot do is hear. It cannot judge your intonation, your tempo, or your tone, and it
never grades a performance. Every performance judgment in this course is made by a human —
Professor Hemsworth, you, or a partner under a stated protocol. Never upload audio to a chatbot; no
activity in this course asks you to. And every AI activity ends the same way, off the screen:
sing it, clap it, play it, or record it. The chatbot is scaffolding; the sound is the point.

Permitted vs. not permitted

• AI may be used on the tutorials, practice drills, weekly submissions, studio prep, and any
  ungraded practice.
• AI may not be used on the weekly skills checks, the mid-course check, or the final.
  Those are live, in the room, and entirely your own ear.

The AI-based activities need no separate disclosure — your share link already documents the AI
work. If you use an AI tool to help you think about any other graded work, add a one-line note
saying which tool and how.

Recording and submitting your singing

• Your phone is the baseline. Record with the voice-recorder app already on it (Voice Memos
  on iPhone, Recorder on Android — any app works; none is required) and upload the file to the
  Canvas submission.
• Audio formats: .mp3 or .m4a recommended (m4a is the iPhone default); .aac and
  .ogg also accepted. .wav is accepted but be careful: it is uncompressed — roughly
  10 MB per minute — and a long take may exceed Canvas's upload limit. If an upload fails,
  a .wav file is the first suspect.
• Video is welcome but never required: audio-only earns full credit, always. If you do send
  video, .mp4 is the safe choice and .mov (iPhone default) is fine.
• If Canvas's built-in media recorder is enabled for our course, you may record directly into
  the submission instead of uploading a file — but nothing in this course requires it.
  [Instructor setup: enable Canvas media uploads and confirm the current file-size limit; print
  that number in the submission instructions.]

Late Work

This is the same policy, in the same words, across all of Professor Hemsworth's courses:

Late work

I would rather have you do the work and learn from it than not do the work because it is late. If
you miss a deadline, do it anyway and turn it in. I am not strict about this. A discussion post
that is a day late is not something I am going to care about.

So that you are never guessing, here is how that actually works:

• Everything except the exams is accepted for full credit through the end of the following
  week. No form, no email, no explanation. Just submit it.
• After that, message me. I will almost always say yes. What helps me is a plan with a date in
  it, not an apology.
• The exams and the timed checks are the exception, because they are scheduled events and a
  late one stops being the same instrument. If something real happens — illness, work, family —
  tell me before it, or as soon as you can afterward, and we will arrange something. That is not a
  favor. That is how this works.
• Nothing can be accepted after [last day of instruction — set by your registrar], because grades are due after that.
  That is the only hard wall on this page, and it is the registrar's, not mine.

If you are behind and it has started to feel like too much to face, message me. That is the single
most useful thing you can do, and it is the thing people do least.

One addition specific to this course: a live sung skills check cannot be "turned in late" —
there is no file to submit. If you miss one, the path is a make-up hearing in office hours or
at the start of a later session; ask, and we will set it up.

Academic Integrity

You are expected to do your own work and represent it honestly, under Kenosis College's academic integrity
standard. Using AI exactly as described above is encouraged and fully consistent with that
standard. The assessments that must be entirely your own — the skills checks, the mid-course
check, and the final — are administered live, in the room, so the line is easy to see. Beyond
that, two things count as violations here: fabricating or doctoring a chat or a recording you
submit (the share link and the audio are your work product), and signing a partner
attestation for work that didn't happen — an attestation line is a signature; treat it like
one. When in doubt about what's allowed, ask before you submit.

[Institutional boilerplate: academic integrity policy statement]

Accessibility and Disability Services

Sing in any octave that fits your voice — full credit, always. Melodies are assessed on
pitch relationships, not register, and every rubric in this course is neutral to tone quality:
matching the pitch is the skill; sounding like a trained singer is not the assignment. If you
cannot sing on a given day — illness, injury, anything — there is a stated "play it" path:
perform the material on an instrument instead. Every musical example in the course exists in
notation and in a written prose description, and no graded activity requires a particular
voice, a particular instrument, or the ability to see a staff.

Students arrange formal academic accommodations through the College's disability services office. If
you have — or think you may have — a disability that affects your work in this course, contact
that office to set up accommodations, and let Professor Hemsworth know early in the term so supports
are in place when you need them, not after.

[Institutional boilerplate: disability services statement]