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All music—whether folk, pop, symphonic,
modal, tonal, atonal, polytonal, microtonal, well-tempered, ill-tempered, music
from the distant past or imminent future—all of it has a common origin in the
universal phenomenon of the harmonic series.
—LEONARD BERNSTEIN
PAGE
INDEX
3.1.1 “Anything You Can Do”
3.1.2 Pitch: “I Can Sing Anything Higher Than You”
3.1.3 Loudness: “I Can Sing Anything Softer Than
You”
3.1.4 Duration: “I Can Hold Any Note Longer Than
You”
3.1.5 Tone Color: “I Can Sing Anything Sweeter Than
You”
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3.1.1
“ANYTHING
YOU
CAN
DO”
As discussed in Chapter 1, humans use discrete pitches, or discrete
tones, in both speech and music, unlike the sliding vocalizations of
most primates.
A music dictionary will tell you that a tone (or note) is a sound of
a definite pitch. And a pitch? A tone.
Not terribly helpful.
The truth is, you can use words to describe a tractor or a tiger lily
or a tuba. But not a tone. Like that other critical element of music,
time, tone defies verbal description because it’s a phenomenon you
perceive with one of your senses. You sense tone, just as you sense
color, odour, taste, and touch.
You have to actually hear a tone to understand what a tone is.
Once you know what a tone is, you can get to know its
properties.
Don’t Get Lost Between Tones
Potential Point of Confusion: The term tone
has several different meanings in music. Here in
Chapter 3, tone and overtone refer to the
musical sound sensations your brain processes
when a string or membrane (such as your vocal
folds) or column of air vibrates.
When you get to Chapter 4, the term tone will
refer to something completely different, namely,
the pitch distance between two notes.
If you don’t understand the
distinction, you will get lost. And then Marshal McDillon will have to organize
a search party to fetch you back from the wilderness. Which he doesn’t want to
have to do because the whole search party might get lost, and horses aren’t much
good at getting their bearings straight. And, of course, as in any Classic
Western, global positioning systems haven’t been invented yet.
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If you haven’t heard this excellent song, look up the details at www.GoldStandardSongList.com. Have a listen to it at one of the music download services such as iTunes or
PureTracks.
3.1.2
PITCH:
“I
CAN
SING
ANYTHING
HIGHER
THAN
YOU”
Here’s the tone
property pitch, as Annie and Frank explain it:
Any note you can reach, I can go higher.
I can sing anything higher than you.
(High)
No you can’t.
(Higher) Yes I can.
(Higher) No you can’t.
(Higher) Yes I can (etc.)
As creatures with keen visual imaginations, humans like to
convert the properties of tones into visual metaphors, like this:
Pitch = “height” of
sound
We
all use expressions such as “high pitched” and “low pitched.” A tune goes “up”
and “down” as it steps from tone to tone.
Visual Metaphors: The Height, Depth, and Length of Sound
Sonic Height
So, if the sound equivalent of the visual
perception of height is pitch, what’s the sound equivalent of
depth? And what’s the sound equivalent of length?
Sonic Depth
The sound equivalent of the visual perception of
depth is harmony, the subject of Chapter 6. A group of related
tones played simultaneously—a chord, in other words—gives sound a 3-D depth-like
quality. As you’ll see in Chapter 6, tones more related to each other provide a
clearer sense of sonic depth than tones less related to each other. Completely
unrelated tones blur off into noise, the sound of the wind in the poplars or
Niagara Falls.
Sonic Length
The sound equivalent of the visual perception of
length (or width, if you prefer) is beat or rhythm,
the subject of Chapter 8. Beat measures time,
the duration or length of a piece of music. Metaphorically, when you
listen to a song, you go on a train trip. You go up and down hills (melody) and
travel though a three-dimensional landscape (harmony). The “length” of the train
trip depends on the total number of beats (the clickity-clack of
the rails) and the speed of the train (tempo).
Everybody talks
about the time dimension of music in terms of how “short” or “long” it is. Music
notation visually captures the train trip as a one-way, left-to-right,
measure-by-measure, ever-changing series of symbols embedded in five-rail train
tracks called the staff.
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Some people have absolute pitch, informally called perfect pitch.
A rare skill. If you have it, you can name a particular note without
reference to any other sound.
For example, if you had absolute pitch, someone could blindfold
you, then play any single note on a piano or other instrument. You
would be able to identify the exact note:
“That’s
F sharp, two and a half octaves above Middle C.”
An extraordinary few with absolute pitch can even hum an exact
note on demand, without even hearing it played:
“Hum E below Middle C.”
“Okay. Hmmmmmmmmmmmm.”
“Dang, you’re good!”
To
acquire absolute pitch, you need training as a young child, during a critical
period of roughly 3 to 6 years. Also, it appears you need a particular gene
variant. If you don’t have both—training during the critical period and
the genetic endowment—you won’t acquire absolute pitch.
Hardly anybody has absolute pitch, although many claim to, as
if it confers musical superiority.
Fortunately,
absolute pitch has little practical value for musicians. If you don’t have it,
you're in good company. Composers such as Tchaikovsky
and Wagner did not have it, yet did pretty well.
This
is only a guess, but it’s unlikely Lou Reed has it, or Kris Kristofferson. Or
William Hung.
The Lowest Note in the Universe
A huge pipe organ can produce infrasound. An
infrasound frequency is so slow that it sounds
like a gigantic cat purring. You feel the sound it
more than you hear it. (When it stops purring,
you worry.)
In nature, tornados and storms generate
infrasound.
But if you want the
most “infra” of infrasound, you have to listen to the stars. Some clever
astronomers claim to have discovered the lowest note in the universe. It’s
coming from a black hole in the Perseus galaxy cluster, roughly 250 million
light years from earth.
And what is that note, exactly?
Why, it’s B♭, 57
octaves below the B♭ nearest Middle C on the piano.
If you wanted to
duplicate that B♭ here on Earth, you’d have to build a gigantic piano. If you
succeeded in building a big enough piano, and then you hit that low B♭, you’d
have to wait 10 million years for the first sound wave to complete its cycle.
And, of course, you wouldn’t be able to hear the sound because it would be about
53 octaves below the threshold of human hearing.
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3.1.3
LOUDNESS:
“I CAN
SAY
ANYTHING
SOFTER
THAN
YOU”
Annie and Frank on the tone property loudness:
Anything you can say, I can say softer.
I can say anything softer than you.
(Soft)
No you can’t.
(Softer) Yes I can.
(Softer)
No you can’t.
(Softer) Yes I can (etc.).
Like most people, you probably refer to loudness as volume.
As in the “volume” control on your radio or remote. You experience loudness
subjectively as sound intensity. The louder the sound, the more intense it
seems.
You
may have a sound system with both a “volume” control and a “loudness” control.
That loudness control does something quite different from the volume control.
The loudness control compensates for a natural pitch bias that everyone has. As
a human, your hearing system evolved to hear mid-pitched
sounds—the pitches of human speech—as relatively louder than bass and
treble pitches. In short, you’re born with a hearing mechanism that’s more
sensitive to mid-pitched sounds. Especially at a relatively soft volume
level, you don’t hear extremes of bass and treble nearly as well as you hear
mid-pitched sounds. So, when you listen to music at soft volumes, the music
seems to lack adequate bass and treble.
To
compensate for this, the loudness control boosts both bass and treble, but not
the middle pitches. With the loudness control engaged, you can listen to music
at a soft volume level, but still hear the bass and treble pitches at
satisfactory levels. As you turn up the volume (increase overall sound
intensity), your sensitivity to middle pitches lessens, relative to bass and
treble. So you can cut back on the artificial boost of the loudness
control—unless you happen to like bass-heavy and treble-heavy music.
Loudness
as a property of tone has no obvious visual analog, except, perhaps, the
offensive, garish appearance of colorful, “loud” clothes. That metaphor doesn’t
really apply to music, though. Loud music ain’t (necessarily) garish and
offensive. You seldom hear anyone saying, “Turn it down, it’s as loud as a
fluorescent Hawaiian shirt!”
Like pitch and the other properties of a tone, loud sound and
quiet sound elicit different kinds of emotions. More on this in a while.
3.1.4
DURATION:
“I CAN
HOLD
ANY
NOTE
LONGER
THAN
YOU”
Annie and Frank:
Any note you can hold, I can hold longer.
I can hold any note longer than you.
No
you c - a - a - n - ‘t.
Yes I c - a - a - a - a - a - n.
No
you c - a - a - a - a - a - a - a - a - n - ‘t.
Yes I c - a - a - a - a - a - a - a - a - a - n (etc.)
Usually, duration refers to the length of time a single
pitch sounds, as in a “short” note or a “long” note—the sound equivalent of
visually-perceived length, as discussed above. But you can also
perceive a unity of duration when you hear multiple pitches, as, for
instance, when you hear a sung syllable that stays the same but
varies in pitch:
“Oooo-oooo-oooo-oooo-oooo-ooooh, baybah”
where each group of
“ooohs” represents a different pitch. The musical term for this is a melisma. You hear a lot of melismas
(sometimes pluralized melismata) in highly expressive genres such
as R & B, gospel, soul, and certain species of country music.
3.1.5
TONE
COLOR:
“I CAN
SING
ANYTHING
SWEETER
THAN
YOU”
Annie and Frank demonstrate tone color like this:
Anything you can sing, I can sing sweeter.
I can sing anything sweeter than you.
(Sweetly)
No you can’t.
(Sweeter) Yes I can.
(Sweeter)
No you can’t.
(Sugary) Yes I can (etc.).
What Did the Big Bang Sound Like?
As you know, the particular universe we allegedly
live in (perhaps one of zillions of parallel
universes) started with a big bang some 13.7
billion years ago. Roughly. If someone had
thought to set up a microphone and maybe a
cassette recorder (or whatever the prevailing
recording technology was back those days) to
tape the event, what would it have sounded like?
John Cramer of the
physics department at the University of Washington, has re-created the sound of
the big bang, just for you. It’s not exactly a “bang”—it’s more a like the sound
of a chorus line of 100,000 bass crickets in top hats. The sound gradually
builds to a crescendo, then gradually fades away. If you listen closely, you can
hear the faint tenor of a lone cricket, singing “When you wish upon a star ... ”
Here’s the big bang sound link:
Sound of the Big Bang
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Why does a gruff voice sound different from a sweet voice? You
can easily tell one from the other when each voice sings, in turn, the
same pitch at the same loudness level for the same duration.
Why
does a guitar sound “different” from a piano, even when you play exactly the
same note on each instrument?
Before
getting into the “why” of tone color, a little bit on the subject of acoustics . . .
~ • ~ • ~ • ~
~ • ~ •
~ • ~
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You are reading the FREE
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How Music REALLY Works!, 2nd Edition.
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TABLE
OF
CONTENTS
PART I
The Big
Picture
Introduction
1.
W-5 of Music
2.
Pop Music
Industry
PART II
Essential
Building
Blocks
of Music
3.
Tones/Overtones
4.
Scales/Intervals
5.
Keys/Modes
PART III
How to Create
Emotionally
Powerful Music
and Lyrics
6.
Chords/
Progressions
7.
Pulse/Meter/
Tempo/Rhythm
8.
Phrase/Form
9.
Melody
10.
Lyrics
11.
Repertoire/
Performance
PART IV
Making a
Living In
Music
12.
Business of
Music
Appendixes
Notes
References
Index
Top
TABLE
OF
CONTENTS
PART I
The Big
Picture
Introduction
1.
W-5 of Music
2.
Pop Music
Industry
PART II
Essential
Building
Blocks
of Music
3.
Tones/Overtones
4.
Scales/Intervals
5.
Keys/Modes
PART III
How to Create
Emotionally
Powerful Music
and Lyrics
6.
Chords/
Progressions
7.
Pulse/Meter/
Tempo/Rhythm
8.
Phrase/Form
9.
Melody
10.
Lyrics
11.
Repertoire/
Performance
PART IV
Making a
Living In
Music
12.
Business of
Music
Appendixes
Notes
References
Index
Top
TABLE
OF
CONTENTS
PART I
The Big
Picture
Introduction
1.
W-5 of Music
2.
Pop Music
Industry
PART II
Essential
Building
Blocks
of Music
3.
Tones/Overtones
4.
Scales/Intervals
5.
Keys/Modes
PART III
How to Create
Emotionally
Powerful Music
and Lyrics
6.
Chords/
Progressions
7.
Pulse/Meter/
Tempo/Rhythm
8.
Phrase/Form
9.
Melody
10.
Lyrics
11.
Repertoire/
Performance
PART IV
Making a
Living In
Music
12.
Business of
Music
Appendixes
Notes
References
Index
Top
TABLE
OF
CONTENTS
PART I
The Big
Picture
Introduction
1.
W-5 of Music
2.
Pop Music
Industry
PART II
Essential
Building
Blocks
of Music
3.
Tones/Overtones
4.
Scales/Intervals
5.
Keys/Modes
PART III
How to Create
Emotionally
Powerful Music
and Lyrics
6.
Chords/
Progressions
7.
Pulse/Meter/
Tempo/Rhythm
8.
Phrase/Form
9.
Melody
10.
Lyrics
11.
Repertoire/
Performance
PART IV
Making a
Living In
Music
12.
Business of
Music
Appendixes
Notes
References
Index
Top
TABLE
OF
CONTENTS
PART I
The Big
Picture
Introduction
1.
W-5 of Music
2.
Pop Music
Industry
PART II
Essential
Building
Blocks
of Music
3.
Tones/Overtones
4.
Scales/Intervals
5.
Keys/Modes
PART III
How to Create
Emotionally
Powerful Music
and Lyrics
6.
Chords/
Progressions
7.
Pulse/Meter/
Tempo/Rhythm
8.
Phrase/Form
9.
Melody
10.
Lyrics
11.
Repertoire/
Performance
PART IV
Making a
Living In
Music
12.
Business of
Music
Appendixes
Notes
References
Index
Top
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