subject: So You Want to Be a Musician [print this page] So You Want to Be a Musician So You Want to Be a Musician
A Relative Theory in Music
Some people try to take it up a notch and try to understand the very essence of music. They do this by dissecting each and every aspect of it with various terminologies and paradigms.
This is music theory, and theory aims to give answers as to how music is perceived by people and the different reasons and backgrounds why music has a different feel with each location, genre and era.
So if you thought it was all "just" music, prepare to be an audio geek with these different musical terminologies offered by music theory.
Western music is well established in the world thanks to radio, television and the influence of media hype. Whether it's your standard rap or usual dose of alternative rock and pop, the typical scale used, is the Ionian scale. That's the major, or parent scale to which all other scales are derived from.
Imagine music as a grand piano. Pitch is the difference between the sounds of the lowest ivory key to the highest key. Remember your classmate with the shrill voice? He or she is high-pitched.
For the geeks out there, pitch can be visualized as the frequency of the sound wave. If you try to open a.wav file in digital audio software, you'll see these wave frequencies are normally pictured.
Melody is the actual series of notes you hum which distinguishes a song. The melody element has made a lot of composers rich by creating an infectious sound that stays in the minds of many people for long stretches of time. It's popularly called the last song syndrome.
Scales are one of the most distinct elements of music theory. Most musicians who wish to sound complicated would often give references to these scales. But it's always better if you'd skip grandstanding with all the terms and just perform these scales. Let the listeners distinguish the scales for you.
An octave is normally divided into a chromatic scale or a succession of twelve notes under the paradigm of Western music. Each note in this design is called a semitone. This is also why a guitar tuner is called a chromatic tone.
With a wide perspective, music theory enables guitarists of all genres to explore various sounds. If you have had enough with Western music, the musical arrangements of Persian, Arabic and Indian all have different dynamics ripe for the picking. An example of this would be the harmonic minor scale.
There are other elements of music theory as well such as structure, form, texture, timbre, harmony and consonance and dissonance. All these contribute to the overall scheme of things. But when it comes to music, the sum is always greater than the parts combined.
If when you were young you were complaining about mathematical theory and how you weren't able to see the practicality behind it, you could at least appreciate music theory. There are terms and different perspectives about understanding music and its structures. Yet in the end, the human heart is the best appraiser of musical beauty.
