The goal of this website will be to give you a rough understanding of how music works and the science behind it. Lets dive right into it!
There are a lot of concepts going on in the background that make music what it is but with just a few basic concepts you can go a long way! The first thing to understand about music would be Notes!
These are the sounds and pitches that we are used to hearing. When making a song you are basically just using the notes and organizing them in different ways to make unique sounds. Sometimes you will play
the notes in ascending order, sometimes descending, and other times you will be going all over the place. Interesting melodies are made from using interesting combinations of notes.
The next concept we'll be covering is called Scales! Scales are interesting ways of organzing notes to target a specific sound. The important part about scales is the spacing inbetween the notes
The spacing of notes causes the feeling of them to change and results in us feeling different ways. Some scales feel happy by nature, others sad, and some even feel dark or menacing! Just like notes
you can play scales in all different orders. As long as you are targeting the key notes the sound of the scale will still be recognizable.
The final thing to understand about music is timing or Rhythm! Rythm is just the idea of making interesting sounding beats and playing them on time. When you are at a concert
and nod your head to a song you are locking into the rhythm. Usually there are many different rythms being played at once by the different instruments but generally these rythms all lock together.
This is where the timing comes in. When playing with other people it's important you're all on the same page and playing to the same time. Just like notes and scales, rhythm is made interesting
by finding different combinations or patterns to play the notes.
The sounds you hear in music can usually be attributed to just 12 different notes played in different orders and rythms. These notes can
also be played in different octaves which gives a much different sound. Starting on any note and going up or down 12 notes will bring
you back to the same note an octave higher or lower. The average piano contains 7 octaves. The 12 notes range from A - G and sometimes
contain sharps (#) or flats (b). The 7 notes containing neither sharps or flats are called natural notes. A sharp means the
tone is half a step higher and a flat means the tone is a half step lower. B and E do not usually contain sharps and C and F do not usually
contain flats.Below are examples of the 12 notes playing in ascending order.
The 12 Notes of Music with Sharps
C
C#
D
D#
E
F
F#
G
G#
A
A#
B
C
An example of the notes utilizing sharps.
The 12 Notes of Music with Flats
C
Db
D
Eb
E
F
Gb
G
Ab
A
Bb
B
C
An example of the notes utilizing flats.
One thing to keep in mind is that C# = Db and D# = Eb. These are the exact same notes and this pattern applies
to the rest of the notes.
A piano is a good visual represantation of the notes. All of the white keys are natural notes and all of the black keys are called accidentals
or Sharps and Flats. The notes are named sharp or flat depending on what scale they belong to. All 12 notes have something called a key or a harmonic sound that surrounds that note.
This leads to our next topic: Scales!
Scales are very simple on the surface and once understood can provide a great amount of depth to music. A scale is just notes played in a certain order.
Scales can make different sounds depending on the spacing of the notes used. Some scales sound very happy while others sound dark or menacing. You change the sound
by adjusting the spacing of the notes. The scales are made with patterns so that you can play them in all 12 keys. You would change the key by adjusting the starting note or by targeting
the root note and using other notes of the scale. You rememeber seeing all 12 notes in order, now lets take a look at what happens when you remove certain notes to build a scale.
C Major Scale
C
D
E
F
G
A
B
C
A C scale happens to only be made from natural notes.
A C scale is quite easy because it only consists of natural notes or the white keys on a piano! If you were to sit at a paino
and only play the white keys almost anything you could play would sound good and be in key! By starting on C and playing the white keys successively
you will automatically play a C scale. An interesting thing is that once you know the notes in a Major scale there is always a minor scale that
corresponds to it. If you count 6 notes into the scale and play the same notes in a new order it will change the sound to the relative minor. For the key
of C the sixth note would be A! If you play the same pattern starting on A it will result in an A minor scale.
A Minor Scale
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
A
A minor scale plays the same notes as C major but from a different starting point.
Both of these scales sound vastly different but also tonically similiar! You can change the entire feeling of a song just by the way you play the 7 notes of a scale. You could
spend years just mastering these two simple scales across all 12 keys! Below is a good video of someone utilizing a combination of scales.
The last thing we'll be talking about is Ryhthm! Rythm is the part of music that gets your body moving. It's essentially just the timing in which we hit the notes. You can play
music fast, slow, or in varying speeds. However, you will usually decide upon a speed and stick with that for the entirety of the song. The underlying speed of the song is usually refered to
as the BPM or Beats Per Minute. This is a number that can quickly give you an idea of how fast the song should be played. Once you have the speed of the song figured out the next thing to
think about would be the general feel or timing of the song. Music can be played in many different time signatures but most of the music we are used to hearing is in 4/4 or 3/4.
4/4 just means that there are 4 beats in a measure. When looking at a musical stave it will be divided and counted depending on the time signature chosen.
You would count these two measures 1-2-3-4-1-2-3-4 and play the note at every occurence
The above image showed basic quarter notes. The timing was 4/4 so we were able to divide both measures 4 times using quarter notes. If we were to only want to play 1 note per measure
and have a pause of 3 beats following it would look like this:
You would count this measure 1-2-3-4 but only play the first note and hold it for the remaining 3 beats
The above examples showed quarter notes and whole notes. There are also, half notes, eight notes, and sixteenths. The are named depending on how
they divide the measure. We also have something called a rest which means to not play anything during that beat. All of these differnt note sizes serve to help you
understand how long you should hold the note for. This can seem confusing at first but after looking at a few simple songs and paying attention to how long notes are being held
this concept will start to fall into place. The most important thing is to start off slow and easy and work your way up to more intricate songs. Once you really have a good idea of rhythm
you can do something like the example below! He is using a mixture of all the different notes and rests.
This is bold and this is strong. This is italic and this is emphasized.
This is superscript text and this is subscript text.
This is underlined and this is code: for (;;) { ... }. Finally, this is a link.
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Preformatted
i = 0;
while (!deck.isInOrder()) {
print 'Iteration ' + i;
deck.shuffle();
i++;
}
print 'It took ' + i + ' iterations to sort the deck.';
