Above are all the notes that exist in music.Well, that is western music. Chinese music tends to consist of five whereas Indian music consists of many many more as there are notes between the 12 that we see above. Alas, that is another story, for another time, from a storyteller that knows the plot.
So, I said there are 12 notes in Western music but as you can see there are 18 letters above. Firstly, let's learn why there is an A at the start and an A at the end. These two notes are what is known as an "octave" apart. A note that is an octave higher will have the same quality as its lower counterpart, it will just sound higher in pitch.
An intuitive explanation can be found by comparing sound to colours. Below is a colour spectrum.
Humans only see in one octave. If you were a bee you would be able to extend the colour spectrum past violet to ultra violet- into the next octave.
The other extra letters, as you can see have symbols next to them. # is a sharp symbol and b is a flat symbol. To sharpen a note one would move their hands closer together by one fret on a guitar like instrument or move one adjacent key to the right on a piano (sorry fretless instrumentalists, I don't have a way to describe it for you!). To flatten a note one moves one fret downwards on a guitar or one adjacent key to the left on a piano- thus making the note lower in pitch.
The distance between a note and its flattened or sharpened neighbour is referred to in traditional musical theory as a semitone and in the more descriptive Americanisation as a half-step. Both ways of description are fine no matter what others tell you.
SO, if you sharpen an A you move up one semitone in pitch and end up at an A#. If you flatten a B you move one semitone down to a Bb. If you look at the note timeline above you can see that A# and Bb are bunched together. Alternatively if you refer to your instrument of choice you can see that A# and Bb occupy the same fret/key (void? My apologies once more, fretless musicians.) A# and Bb are the same note- the same pitch- and are referred to as A# or Bb depending on the context you find them in. The term for these couples of notes is an "enharmonic equivalent". They exist for a reason, but that reason is for another time.
Finally if you see this symbol ♮ it is referred to as a "natural". If this symbol precedes a note it means it is not a sharp or a flat. Simple.
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| "Track pads and paint." The name of my next [first] novel I think. |
PHYSICS!
For those of you that like physics an octave is when you take the vibrational frequency of a note and double it. for example, an A vibrates at 440Hz; if you were to program a computer to produce a sound of 880Hz it would be another A but an octave up. A quirk of how our brains interpret sounds means that a doubled frequency is interpreted as being the "same" note but higher in pitch. A very unwieldy analogy would be comparing flourescent green to normal green. They have the same quality, they are both green, but they are different to each other.
CULTURE!
In Germany the note B is referred to as H. Why? You know what, I'm not sure why but I know that this allowed a compositional quirk. Composers would sometimes open up a piece of music by spelling out their name. For example- B-A-C-H. Kind of like a musical autograph. Cool, huh!? The example in this paragraph also works because their Bb is a B. Craaazy!
UPDATE!
I now know why it is an "h". It apparently comes from a transliteration error where some dude wrote an h instead of a b. It just caught on.
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