Music After All

What’s the sound? Sound is defined for four different attributes: loudness, duration, pitch and timbre. Of course, when we paint a sound in our mind, we think about a sinusoidal wave. A wave have some properties, like the amplitude and the frequency. When we move to the music world, the amplitude is translated as volume (loudness), and the frequency as the musical note. We know that the spectrum of frequency is kind of infinite, and even the humans can only hear a part of that infinite (20 Hz – 20000 Hz), this part keeps being an infinite continuous. A musician can divide the continuous of frequencies in notes, as C, D♭ or G♯ (pitch). For example, when the particles we were talking about are moving 440 times in a second, we have an A. That’s the definition of note.

To simplify the conception of music, we defined 12 different notes, going from the lowest to the highest, and every time we play 12 notes we find the same note again, but higher. We use the same name because the frequency we find after 12 notes is a multiple of the frequency of our first note. If we play a note that vibrates 130 times in a second, we have a C, but we keep having a C if the note vibrates 260 or 520 times every second (these multiples are called harmonics). And yes, we have 11 more notes between the first C and the second, and 11 between the second and the third. If we play the C in a guitar, it will be different than the C we play in the piano, because of the combination of harmonics of C that they emit (timbre, and is also the main reason of why do you recognise people for their voices).

When we play different sounds at the same time, we are talking about harmony. And when the sounds evolve through the temporal dimension, that’s the melody. When two different melodies are played independently at the same, like if they were dancing with each other, we are mixing harmony and melody. That’s the counterpoint.

With these concepts we can listen what the universe is telling us, and they are also the basics of one of the most amazing things that humans do to decorate time. Cause science, is music after all.