World Music Cultures: Sound, Setting, and Significance is an entry-level course in the study of world music. Music will be used as a framework to understand and challenge conventions related to politics, gender, race, sexuality, class, ethnicity, and identity in select geographic locales. This course is designed to study music's meaning, role, function, and importance in different societies. World musics will be studied for their musical characteristics and for the insights they convey regarding culture. Students will also be introduced to the discipline of Ethnomusicology. As a term project, each student may be required to visit and document a local musical culture selected by the student and approved by the instructor.