1 Lab Activity 1

In this group lab activity, you will examine two of the most important elements of the organization of musical sound: how it is organized in time, and in pitch. Discuss the italicized questions and activities below with the other students on your team, and then answer them collectively, one submission per group.

If you know some music theory, help those who are less familiar with it.

Musical Sound: Temporal Organization

1. Tempo, Meter, Rhythm

Tempo refers to the pace at which a piece is played. There are two examples of up tempo vs slow tempo below, both the same piece (Rondo alla Turca by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart) .

Listen to these:

Lang Lang:

Glenn Gould:

Another example is the Habanera from Georges Bizet’s opera Carmen sung by two different sopranos.

Listen to these:

Elina Garanca:

Jessye Norman:

Before moving on to the next exercise, read the sections on Note Duration, Measures and Time Signature, and Simple and Compound Meter at https://www.musictheory.net/lessons 

Meter describes how musical notes are arranged in time. The time signature indicates how many beats, i.e. how many notes of a given length are in a subdivision called a measure – each measure in the piece has the same number of beats. A time signature of 4/4 indicates 4 quarter notes per measure, a time signature of 3/4 (the time signature of a waltz, for example) indicates three quarter notes per measure. A time signature of 6/8 sounds very similar to 3/4, but represents 6 eighth notes per measure.

Rhythm describes how the beats in a measure are accented – which are emphasized (the
pattern of strong beats and sub-beats).

Listen to the following: Steve Reich’s Music for Pieces of Wood visualized:

Musical Sound: Pitch

1. Perception of Pitch

In music, melody is associated with the notion of pitch, and is often made up of a series of pitch intervals, or gaps between notes. But how do we generate pitched sounds? A single
blast of noisy sound does not usually have a recognizable pitch associated with it. But if that noisy sound is repeated many times in succession, it can begin to sound as if it has a pitch.

There are many interesting anomalies and illusions associated with our perception of pitch. Here are a couple of examples to explore. If the terminology in the second example does not make sense, do not worry – in this class, we will return repeatedly to the idea of fundamentals and overtones, or harmonics.

The terminology used in the example below, fundamental and overtones, refer to frequencies that form part of a harmonic series in music: a sequence of notes in which the frequencies of the overtones are integer multiples of a starting frequency, called the fundamental. Alternatively, the fundamental is called the first harmonic. The second harmonic, also called the first overtone, has double the frequency of the fundamental or first harmonic. The third harmonic, or second overtone, has three times the frequency of the first harmonic.

2. Pitch: Octaves, Harmonics, Diatonic Scales

As mentioned earlier, a melodic line in music is associated with a succession of pitch intervals. The notes used have a definite relationship to one another, and that is preserved even if the melody is ‘transposed’ to another key – shifted to a different starting pitch, for example. In physical terms, this relationship between notes in an interval is determined by a set frequency ratio between the upper and lower notes. Even as the note frequencies change, the ratio for a given interval remains fixed. As Pythagoras figured out, frequency ratios that are the ratios of small integers, sound pleasing to us.

The easiest interval to recognize is the octave – notes separated by an octave are perceived to be the same, and a musical tone higher by one octave has double the frequency of the original tone, i.e. the ratio for two notes separated by an octave is the smallest possible integer other than unison: 2. But there are other recognizable intervals: notes separated by a fifth, easily recognizable to the trained ear, have a frequency ratio of 3/2, notes in an interval of a major third have a frequency ratio of 5/4, notes in a major fourth have a frequency ratio of 4/3. A major chord is formed by the most pleasing of these intervals – a major third and a fifth. Notes separated by a minor third have a frequency ratio of 6/5.

An octave is so named because many commonly used musical scales have 8 notes. The most common of these scales in many systems of music is the diatonic major. The term ‘diatonic’ implies these scales involve only notes in the relevant key without chromatic alteration (i.e. no added sharps or flats). To play the diatonic major scale, you can begin on any note, and proceed by playing a series of pitch intervals. The key is the note that the scale begins on.

To make sense of this, let us use the example of the Western music nomenclature for musical notes. In this, the notes that form the octave are named after seven letters of the alphabet. The easiest way to picture these notes is to start with a piano keyboard, in which the interval between successive keys is called a half-note, or half-step, or a semitone.

Remember, an octave is the interval separating two notes that sound the same. On a piano, the octave is sub-divided into 12 half-step intervals, or semitones (H). Two semitones form a whole tone (W). Starting on any note, the diatonic scale consists of the following pattern of intervals: W W H W W W H. For more on this, read the section on the Major Scale on musictheory.net.

The following is a picture of a portion of a keyboard. The gap between successive keys is a half step or semitone. In some cases, there is a black note between two white keys: this implies there is a whole step W between the two white keys, and a half step H between a white key and its neighboring black key. In some cases, there is no black key between the white keys, this implies there is a half-step between adjacent white keys.