Hearing in Color:
Level Up Your Music Listening
SPRING 2026
Notice and enjoy more in your favorite music by naming and hearing new qualities of organized sound in time. Topics include fundamentals of music notation and analysis: aspects of pitch and rhythm, staff notation, twelve-tone equal temperament, the circle of fifths, major and minor scales, intervals, chords and their inversions, and harmonic analysis. The course format balances group exercise with self-directed practice in interactive web applications: we will develop our ear through dictation, sight-singing, and rhythmic coordination exercises, and then we will apply our knowledge by attending and reflecting on concert experiences at San Francisco’s world-class performing arts institutions. In lieu of conventional tests and quizzes, we will build a class web site to reflect on our learning.
Prerequisite: a keyboard instrument (a piano or digital keyboard with at least 4 octaves (49 keys)), at least one year of experience performing music, and the ability to read music in either treble or bass clef.
Synchronous meeting requirements:
- Weekly virtual classes: a weekday evening (hopefully on Wednesday or Thursday evenings) 7-8:30pm
- In-person: We will attend three concerts, to be scheduled (hopefully) on weekend afternoons at Civic Center locations like Davies Symphony Hall (San Francisco Symphony), the War Memorial Opera House (SFOpera), Miner Auditorium (SFJAZZ), etc.
UC Approved: Interdisciplinary 
About the Instructor
Jeff Treviño – Lick-Wilmerding High School
Jeff is a data solutions architect and internationally performed and exhibited artist-composer who teaches Creative Code + Design at Lick-Wilmerding High School.
The MIT Museum exhibited his comparative data visualizations of sixty pianists’ interpretations of Anton Webern’s solo piano variations. His work has also been featured in Art in America, Computer Music Journal, San Francisco Classical Voice, the Association of Computing Machinery’s Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage, Ecopsychology, the International Conference on Technologies of Music Notation and Representation (A Coruña, 2017), and JupyterCon (NYC, 2018).