We now move into the really great part of this introduction, the part where we get to talk about the subject of my whole blog: music. Now since it is a form of art, music carries much of the same basic description I talked about earlier. Music is anything created to stimulate the intellect, senses, and emotions. It simply does this using the medium of sound, and specifically only stimulates our sense of hearing.
And when you think about it, music really is just sound. I've thought about this a lot in the past. Really, the same thing is happening to you when you hear noisy construction down the road and when you're listening to Camille Saint-Saens' "The Swan". Your eardrum vibrates to moving air. So naturally, this got me thinking: what is the difference between music and regular noise? Because there certainly is one.
I came to the conclusion that music is just noise with a structure. Take the pounding of that hammer in the construction site and give it a definite beat and you basically have a drum. Organize the pitches of the car horns in the busy traffic into patterns and you could make a tune. Music, I concluded, must simply be structured noise.
This is very important. I feel that any piece of music must have these two basic structures: rhythm and key. They are the fundamental differences between music and noise. (Hence the picture up there...) I do think these merit a little bit of discussion.
Rhythm, according to Dictionary.com is "the pattern of regular or irregular pulses caused in music by the occurrence of strong and weak melodic and harmonic beats". I think that's a pretty good way of thinking about it: patterns of accents in a beat. Take a 4/4 rhythm, for example. We get a rhythm like this from taking four evenly spaced beats and accenting the first and third beats. 6/8 would be six evenly spaced beats, with accents on the first and fourth. The list goes on.
Now here's an interesting test: try thinking of any song you know and take out the rhythm. Just imagine the notes without any pattern in the beat at all. It's very hard to do. (Which should tell you something about how music and rhythm are joined.) But if you can manage to think of it, I believe you'll find it doesn't sound very good. It becomes random pitches without any organization of timing, and it's impossible to detect any tune. So music, I think, must have a rhythm in it to be music. It just becomes a bunch of noise without it.
Now key is the part of musical structure I find the most interesting. It's a little more difficult to define, or even really describe. But I think that Dictionary.com did okay on this one, too: "The relationship perceived between all tones in a given unit of music and a single tone or keynote."
I think that's a good way of putting it. Key is the relationship between one note and all the other notes of a piece of music. It's how the notes react together, and the conclusions they naturally lead to when put in relation to one particular note. When we say such-and-such a song is in the "key of C", we mean we figure all the notes around the note "C". And each key is different. The key of C major has certain notes that appear in it naturally, and certain notes that don't. F-sharp minor is a little different. But in each key, the notes follow a logical procession from that starting note. (The actual reason for all this is very technical and a little confusing. I believe it has something to do with things called 'overtones', but I'm not really sure about all that. So I won't talk about it too much.)
Let's stop here and try and apply the same test we did with rhythm, only with key this time. Just try and imagine that same song with a logical rhythm, but without any logical pattern in the notes at all. Just random skips and jumps. Again, the results are less than pleasing. There's no tune, and it's just like a bunch of noise.
So to sum this post up, I think we could say that music is an art form that utilizes sound, structured with rhythm and key, to stir the mind, emotions, and sense of hearing. In my next post, though, I'll go a little further and talk about the other thing that music is, that really has no definition. So be sure and check that out! :)
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