38 lines
5.3 KiB
Markdown
38 lines
5.3 KiB
Markdown
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# Music
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Music is an auditory [art](art.md) whose aim is to create [pleasant](beautiful.md) sound of longer duration that usually adheres to some rules and structure, such as those of melody, harmony, rhythm and repetition. Music has played a huge role throughout all history of human [culture](culture.md). It is impossible to precisely define what *music* is as the term is [fuzzy](fuzzy.md), i.e. its borders are unclear; what one individual or culture considers music may to another one sound like [noise](noise.md) without any artistic value, and whatever rule we set in music is never set in stone and will be broken by some artists (there exists music without chords, melody, harmony, rhythm, repetition... even without any sound at all). Music is mostly created by singing and playing musical instruments such as [piano](piano.md), guitar or drums, but it may contain also other sounds; it can be recorded and played back, and in all creation, recording and playing back [computers](computer.md) are widely used nowadays.
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**Music is deeply about [math](math.md)**, though most musicians don't actually have much clue about it and just play "intuitively", by feel and by the ear. Nevertheless the theory of scales, musical intervals, harmony, rhythm and other elements of music is quite complex;
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## Modern Western Music + How To Just Make Noice Music Without PhD
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{ I don't actually know that much about the theory, I will only write as much as I know, which is possibly somewhat simplified, but suffices for some kind of overview. Please keep this in mind and don't eat me. ~drummyfish }
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Our current western music is almost exclusively based on a 12 equal temperament diatonic scale -- basically the 7 tone (12 semitone) scale in which a semitone step corresponds to the multiplying factor of 12th root of 2 -- this we usually nowadays find on our pianos. 4/4 rhythm is most common but other ones appear, e.g. 3/4. Yeah this may sound kinda too nerdy, but it's just to set clear what we'll work with in this section. Here we will just suppose this kind of music. Also western music has some common structures such as verses, choruses, bridges etc.
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**Why are we using this specific scale n shit, why are the notes like this bruh?** TODO
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**If you wanna learn music, firstly you should get something with piano keyboard**: musical keyboard, electronic piano, even virtual software piano, ... The reason being that the keys really help you understand what's going on, the piano keyboard quite nicely visually represent the notes (there is a reason every music software uses the piano roll). Guitar or flute on the other hand will seem much more confusing; of course you can learn these instruments, but first start with the piano keyboard.
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```
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| |C#| |D#| | |F#| |G#||A#| | |
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| |Db| |Eb| | |Gb| |Ab||Bb| | |
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| |__| |__| | |__| |__||__| | |__
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... | | | | | | | | | ...
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| C | D | E | F | G | A | B | C |
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_|___|___|___|___|___|___|___|___|__
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```
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*Tones on piano keyboard, the "big keys" are white, the "smaller keys on top" are black.*
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OK so above we have part of a piano keyboard, tones go from lower (left) to higher (right), the keyboard tones just repeat the same above and below. The white keys are named simply A, B, C, ..., the black keys are named by their neighboring white key either by adding *#* (sharp) to the left note or by adding *b* (flat) to the right note (notes such as C# and Db can be considered the same withing the scales we are dealing with). Note: it is convenient to see C as the "start tone" (instead of A) because then we get a nice major scale that has no black keys in it and is easy to play on piano; just ignore this and suppose we kind of "start" on C for now.
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Take a look at the C note at the left for example; we can see there is another C on the right; the latter C is one **octave** above, i.e. it is the "same" note by name but it is also higher (for this we sometimes number the notes as C2, C3 etc.). The same goes for any other tone, each one has its different versions in different octaves. Kind of like the color red has different versions, a lighter one, a darker one etc. Octave is a basic interval we have to remember, **a tone that's one octave above another tone has twice its frequency**, so e.g. if C2 has 65 hertz, C3 has 130 hertz etc. This means that **music intervals are [logarithmic](log.md), NOT linear!** I.e. an interval (such as octave) says a number by which we have to MULTIPLY a frequency to get the higher frequency, NOT a number which we would have to add. This is extremely important.
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Other important intervals are **tone** and **semitone**. Semitone is a step from one key to the immediately next key (even from white to black and vice versa), for example from C to C#, from E to F, from G# to A etc. A tone is two semitones, e.g. from C to D, from F# to G# etc. There are 12 semitones in one octave (you have to make 12 steps from one tone to get to that tone's higher octave version), so a semitone has a multiplying factor of 2^1/12 (12th root of two). For example C2 being 65 hertz, D2 is 65 * 2^1/12 ~= 69 hertz. This makes sense as if you make 12 steps then you just multiply 12th root of two twelve times and are left simply with multiply by 2, i.e. one octave.
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TODO: chords, scales, melody, harmony, beat, bass, drums, ...
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## Music And Computers/Programming
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TODO: midi, bytebeat, tracker music, waveforms, formats, procedural music, AI music, ...
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