Week 12 — Drill Studio · Harmonic Listening II

Course: MUS 155 Aural Skills I · Kenosis College
Instructor: Professor Hemsworth
Unit: Learning Unit 12 of 15 (Week 12) · two sessions per week
Objectives: SLO 1 · SLO 3 · SLO 4
Drill Studio 12 · 20 points · Drill-studio group · In session, both meetings (session 1 and session 2) · documented make-up path below, full credit, submit by the end of the week
Format: one game played many ways: the music stops one chord early, you sing where it's going, then you find out what it actually did — and name it.

Named in Music Theory I: PAC and IAC, the half cadence, deceptive, plagal, the cadential six-four, phrase, antecedent and consequent, period. An hour later those names become the stops your ear has been predicting all term.

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Part 1 — The big picture

Every song you love breathes. It moves, it arrives, it pauses mid-thought, it lands home — and you have always heard the difference between a comma and a period, because you know when a verse is finished and when it's still leaning forward. This week that instinct gets its names: a cadence is where a phrase stops, and there are only a handful of stops to know. Your ear meets them the honest way: it predicts them, out loud, before anyone labels anything.

Part 2 — The four bass moves

Last week you sang the bass as the harmony's spine. A cadence is the spine's last two steps, and there are four to own. Sing them on solfège from the fences below — bass clef, as the theory class reads it, and as always, any octave that fits your voice is right. First, the full close: the bass walks do–fa, then sol falls home to do — the authentic arrival:

KEY: C major    METER: 4/4    CLEF: bass
| C3/q F2/q G2/h | C3/w |

Second, the sidestep. Same walk, same sol — but the promised do never comes; the bass steps up to la instead. That swerve is the deceptive cadence, and singing sol–la until it feels natural is this week's core rep:

KEY: C major    METER: 4/4    CLEF: bass
| C3/q F2/q G2/h | A2/w |

Third, home without sol: the bass settles fa–do, the soft "amen" landing you know from a hundred hymn endings — the plagal close:

KEY: C major    METER: 4/4    CLEF: bass
| C3/q G2/q F2/h | C3/w |

And fourth, the stop that isn't home at all: the phrase pulls up on sol and waits there, a musical question mark — the half cadence:

KEY: C major    METER: 4/4    CLEF: bass
| C3/q A2/q F2/h | G2/w |

Part 3 — What we do

Where does it land (both days). Professor Hemsworth plays a short progression and stops one chord early. The whole room sings the bass note it expects — then the real arrival sounds. Promise kept? Authentic. Sidestepped to la? Deceptive. Landed by fa? Plagal. Never landed? Half. You vote the name only after you've sung the expectation.

Hymn cadence-hunt. Old Hundredth, Joy to the World, and Nettleton — public-domain tunes whose phrases stop every way this week teaches. Hear a phrase, sing its last two bass notes, name the stop.

Question and answer (session 1), the period (session 2). Two phrases: the first stops mid-thought, the second starts the same way and lands home. You'll call them question and answer by ear first; then we diagram the pair on the board and give it this morning's name — a period, antecedent and consequent. Sound before symbol, one more time.

Dictation, plus one new line. A four-bar melody, four hearings, the standing protocol — and at the bottom you now also label the cadence you heard. One in major, one in minor.

Solo hearings. Quick individual turns inside the formula ladder and the expected-note singing — 6–8 per session as always, so at a full section of 36 every voice is heard solo about every two and a half weeks; in a small room, everyone, every time.

Part 4 — Before session 1 (the prep step)

Run Tutorial 12 first. It drills the conversion table this studio assumes — cadence name to bass move to letters in the week's keys — and works the one distinction the room always wrestles with: a close can be authentic and still not finished, if the top voice hasn't come home.

Part 5 — What counts, and how

Participation is the grade: sing the formulas, sing your expected note even when you're wrong, vote, fix it out loud. 20 points, graded in session across the two meetings.

Criterion weights: perception 50 · realization 35 · labeling 15

A student who sings the right pitches with the wrong syllables loses only the labeling points. A student who sings the right syllables on the wrong pitches fails the item.

Criterion	Full	Partial	None
Perception — expected-note calls and cadence votes show real prediction; wrong votes get revised by re-listening (10)	9–10	5–8	0–4
Realization — the four bass formulas and expected notes land, in any octave that fits, sung or played (7)	7	4–6	0–3
Labeling — cadence and phrase names applied rightly after the singing (3)	3	2	0–1

Part 6 — Missed a session? The make-up path

Full credit, no penalty, by the end of the week: (1) run the practice page's daily loop for the missed days; (2) record the four bass formulas from Part 2, one take, on solfège; (3) record yourself playing any three chords of a song you know, stopping early, singing the note you expect, then finishing it — say out loud which cadence it was; (4) three sentences of self-diagnosis in the error classes. Submit clips + sentences under this studio's make-up assignment in Canvas.

Why this makes you a better musician

On a worship team or a wedding gig, the deceptive cadence is where the arrangement breathes one extra time — and the player who hears it coming doesn't step on it. After this week you sing the expected do, feel the band bend to la, and wait with them. That's not theory trivia; that's ensemble ears.

Canvas placement block

canvas_object    = Assignment
title            = "Unit 12 Drill Studio — Harmonic Listening II"
assignment_group = "Drill studios"
points_possible  = 20
grading_type     = points
submission_types = [on_paper]        # graded in session; make-up: online_upload (clips + sentences)
due              = in session, both meetings; make-up by the end of the week
published        = true

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