Music Theory 101 - Notes and Pitch

It's hard to have a conversation about music without eventually getting to the fundamental building blocks of music.  In chemistry, we speak of atoms; in language, we speak of words. In music, the most basic structural unit is, of course, the note.

There are many different kinds of sounds in this world.  Most are noise - they carry no meaning.  They're just there.  Some, like speech, or alarms, or sounds like your phone ringing or your microwave beeping, have meaning, but aren't musical.  Notes are a special kind of sound.

A note, unlike other sounds, has two important defining characteristics: pitch, and duration.  Pitch refers to how high or low the note is.  Duration refers to how long the note lasts.

Today, I just want to talk about pitch.  There's a surprising amount to say about pitch in music, far more than can be said in just one day!  Today, I just want to cover the basics.

Imagine a piano being played.  The pianist presses one of the keys.  This causes a hammer to lift, which hits a string and causes it to vibrate.  That vibrating string causes vibrations in the air around it, which propagate outward towards you, the listener.  When those vibrations reach your ear, they cause your eardrum to vibrate, which sends a nervous signal to your brain.  And so you hear the note that the pianist played.  The frequency of those vibrations is what determines the pitch.  High pitched notes have a high frequency, meaning that are many many vibrations per second.  Low pitched notes have a low frequency - fewer vibrations per second.

This is why, if you look at the strings inside a piano, the low notes have long, big thick cables for strings, and the high notes have short, skinny little strings under high tension.  

All Western music is based around the scale and the octave.  Donald Duck can explain these ideas better than I can:

A scale consists of a specific series of notes - usually 8, but not always.  The first note of a scale, and the last note of the scale, are exactly one octave apart.  So when you play a scale, you end up right back where you started, just one octave higher.  Take a look at the keys on a piano:

Notice how they repeat, in a pattern?  You've got three white keys together, with two black keys in between.  Then there's four white keys together, with three black keys in between.  And then it's another three white with two black all over again.  All the way up and down the keyboard.

Each note has a name that's based on where it falls in the pattern.  Here's the piano keyboard again, but this time with the note names on each key.

One of the Cs is called middle C.  It's called middle C because it's in the middle of the keyboard.  It's also in the middle of the human vocal range.  For most women, it's toward the bottom of their range; for most men, it's in the upper part of their range.  Even if you're a very low bass, or a very high soprano, a middle C is almost certainly going to be a note you can hit.

Find middle C on a piano and play each white note in turn, until you get to the next C.  The notes you will play are:

   C  D  E  F  G  A  B  C

If you don't have a keyboard handy, it sounds like this:

What you're hearing here is called a C major scale.  It's a scale, because it has eight notes that start and end on the same note, one octave apart.  It's a C scale because it starts on C and ends on C.  What makes it a C major scale is the pattern of notes in between.  Most Western music uses either a major scale, or a minor scale.  We'll cover the difference between the two a bit later on.

Here's how a C major scale looks in musical notation:

There are five lines on the staff, with four spaces in between.  Each line or space corresponds to one note.  The scale starts at middle C, and ends at the C above middle C.

• Middle C sits one line below the staff.
• D is the next note.  It sits on the space below the staff.
• E is on the bottom line.
• F is on the bottom space.

And so on, up to C again.  Some people like to remember the lines on the staff:

E, G, B, D, F.   Every Good Boy Does Fine.

What if we want to start a C major scale on the C above middle C?  We can do that.  Just keep going.

C, D, E, F, G… wait a minute!  We've run out of space!  We're at the top space above the staff!  What do we do now?  The answer is, we add lines for the notes A, B, and C so that they have someplace to go.

These lines are called ledger lines, and we can add as many of them as we like, to accommodate notes that are as high or low as we please.  Let's finish the scale!

What about the notes below middle C?  The ones that the guys would sing, or that the bassoons might play?  And what's that funny looking thing way on the left side of the staff?

That funny looking symbol on the left of the staff, the one that kinda looks like an & symbol but not really, that's called a treble clef.  The function of a clef is to tell which lines and spaces correspond to which notes.  When a staff has a treble clef on it, as all these examples do, that means that middle C is on the ledger line below the staff.  It means that the Every Good Boy Does Fine rule for the lines applies.

In some countries, a treble clef is referred to as a G clef.  It's a little hard to see, because it's quite stylized, but the treble clef kinda looks like a letter G with a loop on top of it.  That line on the bowl of the G?  That's the line that the note G sits on.

There is another clef called the bass clef that handles notes below middle C.  We'll look at the bass clef a little bit later.

Next time - where did the black keys on the piano go?  Where do they fit onto this staff thing?  And what about scales that start on notes other than C?