Music Appreciation
Every day we listen to music in all forms. Be it a conversation where frequencies and pitches alternate between person, or listening to a composition composed by a band or a single artist. Music influences are daily lives involuntarily. Music helps you set a mood in a room, the emotion you currently feel, or gives you a sudden mood swing to something completely opposite of what you felt. Music is part of everyones life as a part of culture, religion, or daily tasks in general. Music is everywhere and will remain until time ends. So we thank all that music has done for us and hold close to us how music has grown from simple sounds to complex rhythms and beats to the very core of music in its entirety.
What Makes A Musical Note Musical?
Musical sounds are created through simple vibrations; created either by strings, tubes or electronics. In turn these vibrations disturb the air around its source that is then taken in though our ears and perceived by our brain as music.
As we exemplified in our monochord demonstration simultaneously voiced tones create either harmony or dissonance. In fact singularly voiced tones are actually, in theory, such chords being played in varying strengths.
For example an A that vibrates at 110 cycles per second actually has overtones several octave above it that are vibrating at 220 cycles, 440 cycles, 880 cycles, and so on. This idea is best understand if we look back to the Pythagoras ratios concerning octaves. We have learned that a note taken an octave higher is one half of its initial frequency. So if were to take a string that makes a tone we would have to cut that string in half to bring the initial note an octave higher. Meaning when one strums a note not only is the tone that is being played the fundamental but it is also the varying degrees of its octaves being played.