11. Glossary

Accidentals – notes that are not normally found in a given key

Acoustics – the study of how sound behaves in physical spaces

Acoustical Engineer – a person who works in the area of acoustic technology

Acoustician – a person who studies the theory and science of acoustics

Amplitude – refers to how high the wave form appears to vibrate above zero when seen on an oscilloscope; louder sounds create higher oscilloscope amplitude readings

Bar – see “measure”

Beat – the basic unit of time in music

Brass – instruments traditionally made of brass or another metal (and thus often producing a “bright” or “brassy” tone) whose sound is generated by blowing into a mouthpiece that is attached to a coiled tube

Chord – the simultaneous sounding of three or more pitches; like intervals, chords can be consonant or dissonant

Chord Progression – a series of chords

Chromatic – musical pitches which move up or down by successive half-steps

Composition – the process whereby a musician notates musical ideas using a system of symbols or using some other form of recording

Conjunct – a melody that moves mostly by step, in a smooth manner

Consonant – term used to describe intervals and chords that tend to sound sweet and pleasing to our ears; consonance, as opposed to dissonance, is stable and needs no resolution.

Cycles per Second (cps) – a definition of frequency of vibration; replaced by Hertz in 1960

Disjunct – a melody with wide leaps and rapid changes in direction

Dissonant – intervals and chords that tend to sound harsh to our ears; dissonance is often used to create tension and instability, and the interplay between dissonance and consonance provides a sense of harmonic and melodic motion in music

Dynamic – the variation in the volume of musical sound (the amplitude of the sound waves)

Equalization (EQ) – the process of raising or lowering different frequencies of sound, either in a recording, or within a tone (overtones)

Form – the structure of the phrases and sections within a musical composition (Does it repeat?)

Frequency – how quickly or slowly a medium (solid, liquid, gas) vibrates and produces a sound

Fundamental Pitch – the lowest pitch in the harmonic series

Guido of Arezzo – a medieval music theorist who developed a system of lines and spaces that enabled musicians to notate the specific notes in a melody

Harmony – any simultaneous combination of tones and the rules governing those combinations (the way a melody is accompanied is also another way to define harmony)

Hertz (Hz) – the unit of frequency defined as one cycle per second and named after Heinrich Hertz (1857–1894) in 1960

Homophonic – musical texture comprised of one melodic line accompanied by chords

Improvisation – the process whereby musicians create music spontaneously using the elements of music as building blocks

Instrumentation – the instruments comprising a musical group (including the human voice)

Interval – the distance in pitch between any two notes

Key – the set of pitches on which a composition is based

Keyboard – instruments that are characterized by keyboards, such as the piano, organ, vibraphone, and accordion

Measure – a unit of time that contains a specific number of beats defined by the meter/ time signature

Melody – a succession of single tones in musical compositions

Meter – the way in which the beats are grouped together in a piece

Monophonic – musical texture comprised of one melodic line; a melodic line may be sung by one person or 100 people

Motive – the smallest musical unit of a melody, generally a single rhythm of two or three pitches

Music – sound and silence organized in time

Noise – a disorganized sound with no observable pitch

Octave – the distance between two musical pitches where the higher pitch vibrates exactly twice as many times per second as the lower

Oscilloscope – an electronic device that displays a visual representation of the different types of sound waves

Overtones (also known as harmonics) – musical tones heard above a fundamental pitch

Partials – the sounds of different frequency that naturally occur above a fundamental (primary) tone

Percussion – instruments that are typically hit or struck by the hand, with sticks, or with hammers or that are shaken or rubbed by hand

Performing Forces – see instrumentation

Phrase – smaller sub-sections of a melody

Pitch – a tone that is composed of an organized sound wave

Polyphony – musical texture that simultaneously features two or more relatively independent and important melodic lines

Polyrhythm – two or more different rhythms played at the same time

Range – the number of pitches, expressed as an intervallic distance

Register – the low, medium, and high sections of an instrument or vocal range

Rhythm – the way the music is organized in respect to time

Scale – a series of pitches, ordered by the interval between its notes

Sequence – a repetition of a motive or phrase at a different pitch level

Seventh Chord – a chord that has four pitches stacked in intervals of thirds

Sine Wave – the simplest sound wave that occurs in nature. A pure sine wave contains no partials and is perfectly smooth and rounded in appearance on an oscilloscope.

Sound – the mechanical movement of an audible pressure wave through a solid, liquid, or gas

Sound Waves – longitudinal waves (compression and rarefaction waves) that travel through a solid, liquid, or gas

Step – the distance between adjacent notes in a musical scale

Strings – instruments whose sound is produced by setting strings in motion

Syncopation – the act of shifting the normal accent, usually by stressing the normally unaccented weak beats or placing the accent between the beats themselves

Synthesizers – electronic instruments (often in keyboard form) that create sounds using basic wave forms in different combinations

Tempo –the speed at which the beat is played

Texture – the ways in which musical lines of a musical piece interact

Timbre – the tone color or tone quality of a sound

Time Signature – the numeric notation at the beginning of a line of music where the top number indicates how many beats are in each measure and the bottom number indicates which type of note will represent that beat

Tonic – the most important pitch of a key; the note from which the other pitches are derived

Triad – a chord that has three pitches stacked in intervals of thirds

Twelve-Bar Blues – a twelve-bar musical form commonly found in American music

Vocal – having to do with the human voice

Woodwinds – instruments traditionally made of wood whose sound is generated by forcing air through a tube, thus creating a vibrating air column