Musical Sound

Welcome. Before you read a single note, let's take a few minutes to listen. Reading music means knowing two things: the signs used to write it, and the laws that organize them. This is called music theory, and it's what we're going to learn together, one lesson at a time.

How this course is organized

In the preface to his book, Danhauser explains that solfège has two parts. There is the practical part: singing while saying the names of the notes. And there is the theoretical part: understanding the signs of music notation and the rules that tie them together, both for the pitch of sounds and for their duration. In French, the word solfège covers this whole training; in English, it often refers only to the singing syllables.

We follow the order of his book. There are five parts: the signs, then the scale and intervals, then keys, then meter, and finally performance. After them comes a supplement on ornaments, abbreviations, chords and instruments. Each lesson is short and ends with an exercise. You learn a little at a time, but you understand what you learn, instead of memorizing it by rote.

Musical sound or noise: what's the difference?

Let's start at the very beginning. A sound is what your ear perceives when something vibrates: a guitar string, the air inside a flute, the skin of a drum, or your own vocal cords. That vibration sets the air moving in tiny changes of pressure, and the movement travels all the way to your eardrum.

So what makes a sound a musical sound? It's that its pitch can be measured exactly. In other words, you can sing it. A note on the violin has a definite pitch. The rustle of a sheet of paper doesn't: try to sing it, and you'll see that it can't be done. That is a noise.

The three qualities of sound

Every musical sound can be described with three words. Learn them well, because they'll come back throughout the course.

• Pitch is what makes a sound high or low. It depends on the number of vibrations in a given time: the more vibrations there are, the higher the sound; the fewer there are, the lower it is.
• Intensity is the loudness of a sound. It depends on the amplitude of the vibrations, that is, how wide they are: a string struck harder vibrates more widely, and the sound gets louder.
• Timbre is the color of a sound, the tone color that belongs to each instrument or voice. It's what lets you tell a violin from a trumpet, even when they play the same note at the same loudness.

Now listen to the same note, an A, played three times, higher each time:

You heard it: it's always an A, but higher and higher. And each time it moves up like this, the number of vibrations doubles: 220 per second, then 440, then 880.

Next, the same note three times, without any change in pitch. This time, only the loudness changes:

Listen to the difference harmonics make:

Both sounds have exactly the same pitch, 220 vibrations per second. Yet they don't sound alike: the second one contains harmonics, and that's what changes its color.

Now you know what a sound is. In the next lesson, we'll see where it's written: on the staff. But first, check that everything is clear with these few questions.