sunday funday

Did everyone watch the playoffs tonight? Yeah, me neither hah. But I didn't need to since I practically had a play-by-play on facebook all night.

Any who, lets talk about notation.

Music notation is much more precise and complicated than written language. when we notate music, we use symbols that show three of the four properties of sound we previously discussed: pitch and duration are given accurately, and relative intensity is indicated. Furthermore, pitch and duration are shown simultaneously.

In music notation, pitches are represent by symbols positioned on a staff and identified with letter names.

The Staff
The staff consists of five equally spaced horizontal lives

The various pitches are named by the first seven letters of the alphabet A B C D E F G (unless youre in Germany where they use H for a note but that's another story) For the record, although the alphabet starts with A the musical alphabet starts with C.

The Clefs
A clef is a symbol placed at the beginning of a line of music that establishes the letter names of the lines and spaces of the staff.

The treble clef (or G clef) is a very ornate letter G. The curved line ends at the second line of the staff, which designates the letter name of a note on that line is G.

The bass clef (or F clef) has its name because it is derived from the letter F. The dots are placed above and below the fourth line of the staff, designating this life as F.
(if you haven't already noticed, the lines are always counted from bottom up)

Together, the treble and bass staves make up the (taadaaa!) grand staff.

This staff is usually associated with keyboard music.

It gets a bit more complicated when we really dissect the staff, which I'll do with my next lesson.