Effects of Consonance and Dissonance on Heart Rate

Students will listen to selections from musical compositions by Aaron Copland and Charles Ives. They will take their pulse after each piece and record the data in an Excel spreadsheet. Students will use a graphic organizer to record reactions to each piece. This will be used to illustrate the concept of consonance and dissonance. They will then use Excel to create one graph showing their pulse for each piece and another graph comparing their pulse to the class average for each piece.