In music, notes are distinct and isolatable sounds that act as the most basic building blocks for nearly all of music. This discretization facilitates performance, comprehension, and analysis. Notes may be visually communicated by writing them in musical notation.
In musical notation, an accidental is a symbol that indicates an alteration of a given pitch. The most common accidentals are the flat and the sharp, which represent alterations of a semitone, and the natural, which cancels a sharp or flat. Accidentals alter the pitch of individual scale tones in a given key signature; the sharps or flats in the key signature itself are not considered accidentals.
The chromatic scale is a set of twelve pitches used in tonal music, with notes separated by the interval of a semitone. Chromatic instruments, such as the piano, are made to produce the chromatic scale, while other instruments capable of continuously variable pitch, such as the trombone and violin, can also produce microtones, or notes between those available on a piano.
Guido of Arezzo was an Italian music theorist and pedagogue of High medieval music. A Benedictine monk, he is regarded as the inventor—or by some, developer—of the modern staff notation that had a massive influence on the development of Western musical notation and practice. Perhaps the most significant European writer on music between Boethius and Johannes Tinctoris, after the former's De institutione musica, Guido's Micrologus was the most widely distributed medieval treatise on music.
In music theory, the tritone is defined as a musical interval spanning three adjacent whole tones. For instance, the interval from F up to the B above it is a tritone as it can be decomposed into the three adjacent whole tones F–G, G–A, and A–B.
In music, solfège or solfeggio, also called sol-fa, solfa, solfeo, among many names, is a mnemonic used in teaching aural skills, pitch and sight-reading of Western music. Solfège is a form of solmization, though the two terms are sometimes used interchangeably.
"Ut queant laxis" or "Hymnus in Ioannem" is a Latin hymn in honor of John the Baptist, written in Horatian Sapphics with text traditionally attributed to Paulus Diaconus, the eighth-century Lombard historian. It is famous for its part in the history of musical notation, in particular solmization. The hymn belongs to the tradition of Gregorian chant.
Shape notes are a musical notation designed to facilitate congregational and social singing. The notation became a popular teaching device in American singing schools during the 19th century. Shapes were added to the noteheads in written music to help singers find pitches within major and minor scales without the use of more complex information found in key signatures on the staff.
In music, letter notation is a system of representing a set of pitches, for example, the notes of a scale, by letters. For the complete Western diatonic scale, for example, these would be the letters A-G, possibly with a trailing symbol to indicate a half-step raise or a half-step lowering. This is the most common way of specifying a note in speech or in written text in English or German. In Germany, Scandinavia, and parts of Central and Eastern Europe, H is used instead of B, and B is used instead of B♭. In traditional Irish music, where almost all tunes are restricted to two octaves, notes in the lower octave are written in lower case while those in the upper octave are written in upper case.
In music, a hexachord is a six-note series, as exhibited in a scale or tone row. The term was adopted in this sense during the Middle Ages and adapted in the 20th century in Milton Babbitt's serial theory. The word is taken from the Greek: ἑξάχορδος, compounded from ἕξ and χορδή, and was also the term used in music theory up to the 18th century for the interval of a sixth.
Musica ficta was a term used in European music theory from the late 12th century to about 1600 to describe pitches, whether notated or added at the time of performance, that lie outside the system of musica recta or musica vera as defined by the hexachord system of Guido of Arezzo.
Solmization is a mnemonic system in which a distinct syllable is attributed to each note of a musical scale. Various forms of solmization are in use and have been used throughout the world, but solfège is the most common convention in countries of Western culture.
When a musical key or key signature is referred to in a language other than English, that language may use the usual notation used in English : languages which use the English system include Irish, Welsh, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Thai, Indonesian, Filipino, Swahili, Esperanto.
Soggetto cavato is an innovative technique of Renaissance composer Josquin des Prez that was later named by the theorist Zarlino in 1558 in his Le istitutioni harmoniche as soggetto cavato dalle vocali di queste parole, or literally, a subject 'carved out of the vowels from these words.' It is an early example of a musical cryptogram.
Tonic sol-fa (or tonic sol-fah) is a pedagogical technique for teaching sight-singing, invented by Sarah Anna Glover (1786–1867) of Norwich, England and popularised by John Curwen, who adapted it from a number of earlier musical systems. It uses a system of musical notation based on movable do solfège, whereby every note is given a name according to its relationship with other notes in the key: the usual staff notation is replaced with anglicized solfège syllables (e.g. the syllable la for the submediant) or their abbreviations (l for la). "Do" is chosen to be the tonic of whatever key is being used (thus the terminology moveable Do in contrast to the fixed Do system used by John Pyke Hullah). The original solfège sequence started with "Ut", the first syllable of the hymn Ut queant laxis, which later became "Do".
Diatonic and chromatic are terms in music theory that are used to characterize scales. The terms are also applied to musical instruments, intervals, chords, notes, musical styles, and kinds of harmony. They are very often used as a pair, especially when applied to contrasting features of the common practice music of the period 1600–1900.
G, also called Sol or So, is the fifth note of the fixed-do solfège starting on C. It is the fifth note and the eighth semitone of the solfège. As such it is the dominant, a perfect fifth above C or perfect fourth below C.
G♯ (G-sharp) or sol dièse is the ninth semitone of the solfège. In the German pitch nomenclature, it is known as gis.
A musical cryptogram is a cryptogrammatic sequence of musical symbols which can be taken to refer to an extra-musical text by some 'logical' relationship, usually between note names and letters. The most common and best known examples result from composers using musically translated versions of their own or their friends' names as themes or motifs in their compositions. These are not really rigorous cipher algorithms in the formal sense, but more like musical monograms. The methods used historically by composers were either too incomplete or too simplistic to meaningfully encrypt long text messages. There is a separate history of music ciphers utilizing music notation to encode messages for reasons of espionage or personal security that involved encryption and/or steganography.
The diatonic, Guidonian, or major hexachord (6-32) is a hexachord consisting of six consecutive pitches from the diatonic scale that are also a consecutive segment of the circle of fifths: F C G D A E = C D E F G A = "do-re-mi-fa-sol-la".
