[1] Hah good question! I'm pretty sure it's just a dumbed-down physics elective with the excuse to bring in a new professor for research!
[2] The course describes it as the context of the production and perception of music,
[2a] emphasizing the historic and scientific interplay between physics and music.
[2b] Basic quantitative laboratories pertaining to sound, music, and waves.
[3] I wanted to use it as an opportunity to just ask as many questions as possible.
1. It is a good question if you want to screw with the new professor!
There is no definition of music ... Or rather; there are several definitions of music but all of them have gaping holes and are therefore not "definitive".
2. The "perception of music" is all about subjective qualitative judgement and therefore has very little to do with physics, except in regards to the brain's electrical activity which enables the ability to make subjective judgements.
2a. The history of the interplay between physics and music starts with Pythagoras and his discovery of the mathematical relationship of harmonics. One could argue that not only did it start with Pythagoras but it ended with him too! Although there is of course a lot of physics (contained in the field of "acoustics") in for example the manufacture of musical instruments, musical instruments don't inherently produce music, which brings us back to perception. There's a considerable amount of mathematics in music but again, it's mathematics/calculations describing perceived (rather than actual) relationships (contained in the field of "music theory"/"musicology").
2b. If you broaden the course name to include sound and waves, rather than just music, then there's quite a bit of physics: The physics of electrical and analogue waves, the physics of sound waves (acoustics), "Information Theory" (digital audio) and the physics/mathematics of converting or transducing between them.
3. There are countless potential questions, depending on which way you want to go. For example, there's a lot of questions one could ask that pertain to the audiophile world, because the audiophile world routinely flouts/contradicts the established physics of digital data, analogue and sound waves, as well as the anatomy and physics of the human ear itself but virtually none of it is "cutting edge", despite marketing claims to the contrary.
G
