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Music. you hear the word on a daily basis, and you probably hear a lot about it, as well. But what does it mean? What is Music?

Music can be defined in many ways. Shakespeare said that it was "the food of love." Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz, in his infinite wisdom, said that music is "sounding mathematics". This is a definition that I found recently in the dark caverns we call the internet :

Music is the art, the craft, and the science of organizing sound and silence in the framework of time.

Huh. That certainly gives you an idea, but I think that it's a little too... complicated. So, here is my working definition :

Music is a succession of tones put to a specific rhythm.


Wicked. Now we have some semblance of what it is we are here to talk about today. However, I mention another word in that definition which might be confusing to some : tones. We can't really know what music is if we don't know what it's built from. so...

Tones

I'll start with the boring definition :

A tone is a sound that is played or sung at a specific pitch.

Let's do some examples.

When you hum (go ahead...), you are humming a tone. Same goes for whistling, singing, gargling, screaming... anything to do with your vocal chords. A tone is being made there. If you get a buddy to scream a different tone from you, now you have music.

You can do any of the things described above at multiple tones, some higher, and some lower. This is where the word 'pitch' comes in. Pitch is how high or low the tone is. When you talk about the high pitched squealing that your neighbor's cat was making last night, what you are really saying is that the cat was producing tones that sounded higher up than usual.

To get this idea, try this : hum a note, then hum a note that is higher than the first one. You just demonstrated pitch. The first note was lower pitch, the second note was higher pitched.

Different things produce different pitches. Human voices vary in their pitch. Usually, women have higher pitched voices than men. Instruments vary in pitch as well. Rule of thumb : The bigger the instrument, the lower the pitch will probably be. Take for instance the tuba. It is a large instrument. It also produces low pitches, unlike the flute, which is quite small by comparison.

Time for another exercise : Hum the lowest note you possibly can; stretch those vocal chords. Now, gradually raise the pitch of your voice until you can't go any higher. That is the full range of your voice. There are a lot of tones that you just sang there. So, here's the question : How do you identify them all? What makes a certain tone a "C", or an "E"?

Describing Tones

You can describe unique tones however you want. You can give them fun names, like Bob, or Larry if you like. The problem with this, of course, is that if you ask someone to sing in the key of Larry, well... they might have you committed. So, let's figure out a way to avoid that.

Caution : Math, Science, and other awful things ahead.

Tones are identified by their frequency. Frequency is the number of cycles per second that the air is vibrating to make that sound happen. This is measured in Hertz (Hz). An Oscilloscope is a device used to precisely measure frequency. If you plug a microphone into a oscilloscope and hum, It will tell you the number of times per second that your vocal chords are vibrating back and forth.

So, one way to identify tones is by their frequency. This should work great, right? Every single tone would have a unique identifier and everything! Well, let's put this awesome new system of measurement into practice!

This is 'Mary had a little lamb", notating the pitches with their frequencies.

659Hz 587Hz 523Hz 587Hz 659Hz 659H 659Hz
587Hz 587Hz 587Hz
659Hz 783Hz 783Hz

I'm not going to do the rest of the song. It's bad enough as it is. ewww...

That's pretty awful, huh? That's why identifying notes with frequency is a bad idea. People who play instruments will sympathize with me here : Think about having a page of that to play. Think of all of the memorization. Bad. Very bad.

So we don't use that. What are other ways to get unique identifiers?

Well, how about numbers? If we assign a unique number to different pitches, we can tell them apart. That wouldn't be too bad. Before we get into that, however, you need to know a little more about pitches, and how they relate to each other.

Here is another exercise for you. Hum a pitch, and slide it up or down, just like a trombone. There were a LOT of unique pitches there, right? Every time you changed your voice slightly, it was a new tone. There are pitches at 256Hz, 257Hz, 258Hz and so on. This numbering system might not be so great after all.

However, there is one detail that makes it all better.

Human ears aren't very sophisticated. Some experts have trained themselves to be, and some can do great things. But the average human is sadly not that well off. So, lucky for the musician, it is actually almost impossible to tell the difference between 256Hz and 257Hz. There just isn't enough of a difference.

So, by a process which I will not explain to you, some incredible music scholars decided what notes are actually notes and which ones aren't quite notes. There is a mathematical way to determine this, but that's for another lesson. So, after they worked their scholarly magic, they came out with something called a 'scale', which you will learn more about in later lessons. Each scale starts on a tone, and ends on a higher pitched version of that same tone.

In the Western world, these scales have been divided into 7 unique notes (8 if you count the first note, which is repeated at the end of the scale). Because there are only 7 notes, and not the thousands that you would have by saying their frequency, it's not actually too bad. This is the first half of 'Mary had a little lamb' again, done in these numbers.

3 2 1 2 3 3 3
2 2 2
3 5 5

That's a little nicer. This is a form that is widely used today when talking about theory. These are called scale degrees, and we will learn about them a little later on.

The problem with scale degrees is that they aren't specific. If you tell your buddy to start on the 3rd note of the scale, and you start on the 3rd note of the scale, you might actually be starting in two different scales, which will make it sound... unique. ahem. So, to make the pitches more exact, and to be sure that you and buddy start on the same note, we use note names.

Note names and visually representing them is a big deal... it will take up some space for sure. So, I'm going to break up the lesson into two parts. Go have a coffee. Sing a song. Do whatever you have to do... just take a break and let this wash over you. When you are ready to start back at this, have a look at Music 101: Tones II & Musical Notation, the second half of this lesson.