When we design software, we want to reduce the cognitive cost to the user as much as possible. Staff is no exception, certainly at the beginning of the design is also trying to make it easy to learn. The author and most of the guitar children shoes, also never read staff, but a lot of music works and music books are using staff, as the universal language of music, or it is worth spending some time to learn, interested children shoes can follow my footsteps, to learn together.
The nature of Music
The essence of music as I understand it is the arrangement of sounds in space and time.
If we forget about cell phones, recorders and other technologies that can record sound by sampling, and we hear a piece of music, what can we do so that our children, our children’s children, our children’s children can hear the same melody?
The method of appeal is simple in my imagination, and in this way, it should not be necessary to learn to read music. But if it’s a violin, a trombone or something like that, it doesn’t work, and it’s very difficult to record. We need a better way of recording.
At a higher level of abstraction, the great pioneers of music discovered that almost all melodies can be expressed through the following basic elements:(Here’s a personal summary, which may not be entirely correct)
Well, all notation is based on these five basic elements. Staff, is used to abstract the melody of a set of language system, through this music language to achieve the purpose of copying the melody. With this understanding, let’s start learning staff.
Where is the do sound?
This is probably the first question that many beginners ask, but before we answer that question, let’s look at something called the equal temperament of the twelve.
Two monophonic notes with a physical frequency ratio of 1:2 are defined as one octave. Within an octave, we break it into twelve parts, and the difference between the frequencies of each adjacent note becomes a semitone, which is the smallest unit of the interval, which is the equal temperament of the twelve(For more on the physics, see the extension.).
The individual notes are basically meaningless. When we express a melody, we are actually expressing the relative relationship of the notes within the melody. 1234567 is used to express one of the most common scale relationships, which we call natural major.
1234567, which is known in music as singing, is a convenient way to indicate relative relationships between sounds. When it is necessary to distinguish different octaves of pitch, a number will be added to the end of the name. The central C is C1, the higher octave is C2, and the lower octave is C. The following uses piano as the control of the relationship between the name and the staff:
Notes and clefs
The staff, in fact, is not really only five lines, it is possible to add lines above and below. The staff is very compact, and both lines and gaps are used to represent pitch, with pitch (frequency) axis from bottom to top and time axis from left to right. If there is a rising and falling semitone, a # or b is added to the note.
To play more than one note at a time, such as a chord, add notes along the horizontal axis:
If you think about it, if you want to express a very low note, wouldn’t you have to put a lot of lines under it? The notation was ugly and wasted a lot of paper, so people thought of using clef to deal with the problem, using it to determine the pitch of different positions in the score.
Figure: Wikipedia, where G4 represents the G in the 4th octave of the piano and F3 represents the F in the 3rd octave of the piano.
A key signature
1234567, since it is only a relative relation, must have a reference frame to indicate how high the sound is. In music, it usually uses the name of the sound as its reference frame, such as 1 = C.
As you can see, the key in B major is difficult to read because it has many elevations, so people thought of another way to mark the key of a spectrum by moving those elevations to the left of the spectrum, so that the spectrum in B major can be changed into the following form:
Isn’t it a lot better? And there’s a very curious pattern here, the correspondence between the other keys, which is very easy to see, we just have to look at the # or the b on the left to figure out what the key is.
Fifth ring
After reading the above content, I wonder if you found do? In the next chapter, we will discuss the soul of music: rhythm.
The content of this article is a personal summary, it is hard to avoid mistakes, if you have found, welcome to leave a message to me.
Further reading
1. Zhihu: Why is it 12 equal law, but not 13 equal law: http://t.cn/EMDunpn
2. Music Theory for science and engineering students: t.cn/RQPSZ10
3. The ultimate guide to the fifth Circle: http://t.cn/EMDdBey
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