1: What is Music?

We have to start our discussion at the most basic level: what is music? Fundamentally, it’s what happens when the three dimensions of a 3D system interact: sounds through linear time, sounds in simultaneous time, and sounds through the passing of time. This may sound confusing now, but let’s unpack.
Sounds happen one after the other. A collection of sounds one after the other—in a linear ordering such that one sound comes before another—are what we call “melody.” Sounds that occur in simultaneous time are those which are played at the same time, and we call those interactions between simultaneous notes “harmony.” Finally, sounds (or silence) happen at certain specified points in time. Tracking the pulse of those sounds with respect to the passing of time and realizing where they fall is finding rhythm. Music, therefore, is simply the interaction of melody, harmony, and rhythm through time.

The basic unit of time (the musical equivalent of the “second”, one could say), is the “beat.” These “beats” are grouped into equivalently-sized sets (here, think perhaps of the minute, made up of many seconds) called a measure. Most commonly, there are 2, 3, or 4 beats per measure, but in theory, there could be any number. Measures with 6, 9, and 12 are also common, but less so than 2, 3, or 4.

Western music is written on a staff—a set of five parallel lines with four spaces in between, which is subdivided with vertical lines between the top and bottom horizontals into the measures we talked about. It is read left to right and top to bottom just like text. Measures are (hopefully, but not always) numbered every so often so you or a conductor can have an easier time finding where you are, exactly. Measure 1 is followed by measure 2, then 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and so on.

How high or low the note is placed on the staff indicates its pitch, or in other words, the frequency of the sound you are expected to produce; and the shape of the note, and its ordering, indicate how much time each note gets, in which order, and this is how we notate rhythm. If you look, for example, at a piano score, you will see two staves bound together. When this is the case, you see both staves at the same time, and you get a better idea of how harmony is written. I like to think—and will often refer to this—about music in horizontal terms for melody and rhythm, and vertical terms for harmony.

There are a number of special symbols we need to discuss, which we will do in the next post, that calibrate our expectations of what to read where on the staff.

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