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In instrumental music, a style of playing that imitates the way the human voice might express the music, with a measured tempo and flexible legato. cantilena a vocal melody or instrumental passage in a smooth, lyrical style canto Chorus; choral; chant cantus mensuratus or cantus figuratus (Lat.) Meaning respectively "measured song" or "figured ...
Musical symbols are marks and symbols in musical notation that indicate various aspects of how a piece of music is to be performed. There are symbols to communicate information about many musical elements, including pitch, duration, dynamics, or articulation of musical notes; tempo, metre, form (e.g., whether sections are repeated), and details about specific playing techniques (e.g., which ...
In Western music, scale notes are often separated by equally tempered tones or semitones, creating 12 intervals per octave. Each interval separates two tones; the higher tone has an oscillation frequency of a fixed ratio (by a factor equal to the twelfth root of two, or approximately 1.059463) higher than the frequency of the lower one. A scale ...
In atonal, twelve tone, or musical set theory, a "pitch" is a specific frequency while a pitch class is all the octaves of a frequency. In many analytic discussions of atonal and post-tonal music, pitches are named with integers because of octave and enharmonic equivalency (for example, in a serial system, C ♯ and D ♭ are considered the ...
The Oxford Companion to Music describes three interrelated uses of the term "music theory": The first is the "rudiments", that are needed to understand music notation (key signatures, time signatures, and rhythmic notation); the second is learning scholars' views on music from antiquity to the present; the third is a sub-topic of musicology ...
In terms of frequency (measured in cycles per second, or hertz, where f is the fundamental frequency), the difference between consecutive harmonics is therefore constant and equal to the fundamental. But because human ears respond to sound nonlinearly , higher harmonics are perceived as "closer together" than lower ones.
Both of these systems, and the vast majority of music in general, have scales that repeat on the interval of every octave, which is defined as frequency ratio of 2:1. In other words, every time the frequency is doubled, the given scale repeats. Below are Ogg Vorbis files demonstrating the difference between just intonation and equal temperament ...
A tuning system is the system used to define which tones, or pitches, to use when playing music. In other words, it is the choice of number and spacing of frequency values used. Due to the psychoacoustic interaction of tones and timbres, various tone combinations sound more or less "natural" in combination with various timbres. For example ...