User:Skierpage/Music intervals

= Notes =

All musical instruments except some percussion can make more than one note. On a keyboard there's a key for each note. On a fretted instrument like a guitar you press a string against each fret to produce a range of notes as you pluck one string.

Some sounds distinguishes one note from another is its pitch. Birdsong sounds higher; in general men have lower (or deeper) voices than women. If you sing along to a sound, you matching its pitch

Let's work through the intervals. You can experiment with intervals on a guitar by moving up fret-by-fret. ,but rather than starting at the smallest and ending at the largest, we'll start at the simpler relationships

Unison
The same note! Example: the obvious example is "One Note Samba", which makes a song out of staying on one note (" So I come back to my one note, as I must come back to you... Better play the note you know!"). This shows another feature that distinguishes notes in a piece – their duration. The pattern of long and short notes keeps the song from being dull.

Octave
If you've got a string instrument or a guitar handy, play an open string, then hold the string down at half way. You're playing a note at twice the frequency. To most people it sounds alike. If someone asks you to sing something outside your vocal range, if you sing an octave higher or an octave lower it sounds like you're singing the "same" notes.

Example: an octave is a big jump, usually songs have some notes in the gap. But a classic octave up is "Some-where Over the Rainbow"

Perfect Fifth
Halving the string

= Other intervals = in Western music there are You can express it in semitones (for example 5 semitones up, or 7 semitones down). It is the convention is to measure it in the intervals of a scale. In the C major scale (the white notes on a piano)

All the intervals are present in a major scale. What makes intervals hard is they have a very different "feel" depending on not their position in the key's scale.

Minor 2nd down, m2v
Joy to the World (do ti la so) Chicago (fa mi do)

Perfect 4th Up, P4^
Here Comes the Bride (do fa fa-fa, do so mi-fa) it's also the jump up from the Perfect 5th to an Octave (so do). In perfect tuning, the frequency increases by 4/3 It's less than a perfect 5th, and it wants to resolve