Music Note Theory

Friday, January 06, 2006

When you learn how to play piano, you may wonder what actually composes each note and what makes one note different from another. To try to ease any confusion about notes and how they came to be I am writing this article. I will try to hit on the basics of music theory, frequency, how musicians notate all the scientific stuff, and what its good for.

Basic Music Theory
Every song that we hear has significance behind how it is arranged. The study of music theory is the study of how artists compose pieces of theirs. There are several basic concepts behind music theory. One of these concepts is that music is a grouping of notes and rests. If music does not have rests it often will be too consistent and be boring to the listener.

Multiple notes can be played either at the same time or they can be broken up into a melody. This is a particularly useful bit of music theory for a piano player. You may find that playing a chord on the bass hand, and then playing individual notes from that chord on the melody hand sounds pretty nice. This is because you made a harmonic melody by breaking up the chord to be played as separate notes.

What makes a note?
The basic concept behind what makes a note is a single pitch. A pitch is the frequency of a vibration in a second, which dictates the highness or lowness of a particular sound. These vibrations are measured in the units of Hertz, which is a scientific unit for the number of specified events that occur in a second.

You may have heard of the term Hertz used before in computing. The idea there is that a computer's processor will have a certain number of cycles per second. This is measured in Hertz. They then use the term Mega or Giga to denote Million or Billion respectively. In music, there are also cycles in the waves of the note. However, in music the cycles are much slower. Middle C for instance is 262 Hz, or 262 vibrations per second.

How musicians notate these frequencies
Now that you understand that a note is simply a specific number of vibrations per second, you can consider how musicians notate this. Musicians discovered that certain ratios of vibrations make notes that are very distinct and sound "on key." When they were writing music, they needed a common language so they knew that they knew another musician could interpret their writing. This is why they came up with the staffs and notes we use today in music.

More Piano Theory Coming Soon