Musical note
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
|
"Scents, like sounds, appear to influence the olfactory nerve in certain definite degrees. There is, as it were, an octave of odors like an octave in music; certain odors coincide, like the keys of an instrument. [...] The metaphor is completed by what we are pleased to call semi-odors, such as rose and rose geranium for the half note."--The Art of Perfumery (1855) by George William Septimus Piesse |
Illustration: Sheet music to "Buffalo Gals" (c. 1840)
|
Related e |
|
Featured: |
In music, a note is a symbol denoting a musical sound. In English usage, a note is also the sound itself.
Notes can represent the pitch and duration of a sound in musical notation. A note can also represent a pitch class.
Notes are the building blocks of much written music: discretizations of musical phenomena that facilitate performance, comprehension, and analysis.
The term note can be used in both generic and specific senses: one might say either "the piece 'Happy Birthday to You' begins with two notes having the same pitch", or "the piece begins with two repetitions of the same note". In the former case, one uses note to refer to a specific musical event; in the latter, one uses the term to refer to a class of events sharing the same pitch.
Two notes with fundamental frequencies in a ratio equal to any integer power of two (e.g., half, twice, or four times) are perceived as very similar. Because of that, all notes with these kinds of relations can be grouped under the same pitch class.
In European music theory, most countries use the solfège naming convention do–re–mi–fa–sol–la–si, including for instance Italy, Portugal, Spain, France, Romania, most Latin American countries, Greece, Albania, Bulgaria, Turkey, Russia, Arabic-speaking and Persian-speaking countries. However, in English- and Dutch-speaking regions, pitch classes are typically represented by the first seven letters of the Latin alphabet (A, B, C, D, E, F and G). Several European countries, including Germany, adopt an almost identical notation, in which H is substituted for B (see below for details). Byzantium used the names Pa–Vu–Ga–Di–Ke–Zo–Ni (Πα–Βου–Γα–Δι–Κε–Ζω–Νη).
See also
