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MATH AND MUSIC
You may not know it, but Math and Music are co-related: one can not exist without the other.
Any musician or singer know how important timing is. Without timing is, you might as well stop singing in public. Your audience will dissapear as fast as you can say DO-RE-MI.
One time, I read an ad here in Toronto that says a child who is good in music will be good in Math or Arithmetic.
Timing is related to mathematics. Have you ever seen a printed music sheet? Do not be intimidated by the symbols there. These could be learned and applied so after you have started studying how to read and write music, the messages in a printed music sheet will become very clear to you.
Some of the best musicians in the world are Filipinos. Singing, playing an instrument, arranging music scores, composing, writing lyrics ( which is the same as writing poetry ), etc. Name it, they can do it.
One of the good music readers from Asingan was the late Mr. Fabian Ballesteros. He can sing a music part if it is written on a music sheet. This ability is good if you are joining music groups which sing in harmony. Have you ever heard a choir singing in a Concert Hall or inside a church? It makes you feel like you are already in heaven. Heaven on Earth, that it. You will be mesmerized.
learning the ropes
I learned how to read music after about 6 months of extensively studying music theory. It consists of reading music exercises by singing. One start from the easiest and day by the day the exercises becomes more and more difficult. There is always difficulty in achieving something worthwhile. As they say, no pain, no gain. But you do need a trained teacher to tell you whether you are singing the notes correctly or not.
Just like reading ABCs, you can not learn how to read notes if you do not learn how to write them.
As you go along your music studies, you will discover how Math and Arithmetic is intertwined with music reading and writing.
If you have a pretty tune in your head, you can write it down on paper, using blank music pages. Then you have captured the tune forever. If you can not write yet, sing it to a tape recorder and send the tape to one who can write music. He/she will gladly do it for you. But you have to pay of course, because the process is also quite time consuming. Anyways, let us go back to the original topic: MATH AND MUSIC. Double M..MM in short. Sweet candy. Or another MM. A good writer in the Discussion Corner of Pangasinan.Org.
Music writing ( and reading) is a kind of language. It was used by Ludwig B. when he wrote his famous compositions. Remenber that he was deaf, yet he was still capable of writing them.
When a musician checks a music sheet, the first thing he looks for are the fractions written at the begining of the song. Which is at the very first staff atop the music sheet.
The most common ones are 4/4, 3/4, 2/4, 6/8..plus a few others. But since this short essay is about the FUNDAMENTALS OF MUSIC READING AND WRITING, I will try to explain to you what these fractions are.
By the way, if there is no fraction ( the proper term for this in music is TIME SIGNATURE ) by default, the time signature is 4/4. Sometimes the wriiter also use the letter C to indicate the music is written as 4/4. Again: no time signature written means the composition has a 4/4 signature.
Most of the songs you hear ( from the oldies to RAP if you consider RAP as music ) are all in 4/4.
Wait, I have to define to you certain terms present on a music sheet.
STAFF is the group of five horizontal lines in the music sheet. A blank music sheet ( used by kids in their elementary piano exercises ) has a number of staffs, sorry STAVES would be the proper word because the plural of staff is STAVES. .
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There are always five lines in a music staff..
FIRST ITEM WRITTEN IN THE BEGINNING OF EACH STAFF ARE SHORT VERTICAL LINES CALLED bars. Hey, these bars are not the same places you go for a quick you-know-what. Bars are like marks separating the music in parts. In music, the area between 2 bars is called..A MEASURE!
You fill up each measure with a certain NUMBER of NOTES.
NOTES are the 8 thingies called do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-si do. Other teachers use C-D-E-F-G-A-B-C. C is for do, D is for Re, and so on and so forth. These are just the WHITE NOTES in a piano. The black notes have their own names too. But we will learn their names in some future lessons.
The note groups from Do ( C) to the next Do ( C) is called an OCTAVE. A prefix meaning Eight is called an OCTO. Octopus, Octogenarian, Octet, etc. If you have started reading this article, it would be helpful if you are sitting in front of a piano. An acoustic piano have seven octaves. Try counting them...
want some pie?
Let us go back to the fractions in music. In this point, I will draw an analogy between the music note and a piece of pie.
A whole pie is the same in value as a whole note. Or the number one, althoogh 1, in terms of music value is not used. We always use the term whole note. Awright!
If you cut a whole pie into 4 equal parts, each piece is called a quarter of a pie.
If you cut a whole note into four equal parts each part is called a quarter note. Now your music education is starting.
A quarter note is a black note with a stem. Check a printed music sheet under your piano bench.
A whole note is a small oval shaped thing which looks like a zero lying on one side.
Okay, four quarter pieces of pie makes up a whole pie. Four quarter notes makes up a whole note. The first lesson a music student do is how to count 1,2,3,4..1,2,3,4..ad infinitum, over and over again while you are playing the piano exercises. If you are singing voice exercises, you have to use your hand in counting the beat. There are hand gestures for each time signature. Just check how the conductor do it next time you attend a live concert. Counting is very important when learning any kind of instrument, including your vocal chords. The voice is also a music instrument, right?
Each measure of a music composition written in 4/4 time must have only 4 quarter notes, or 1 whole note. If you wrote 5 quarter notes inside 1 measure in your music writing exercise, you will get a red mark on your test paper and the teacher would frown or scream at you. "NOT 5, NOT 3 BUT 4!!!" This is one of the music rules which music composers followed ever since the day music writing was invented. And this is quite a number of years ago. The rules of music writing never changed up to this very day.
Brahms used his hand in writing his compositions. There was no Cakewalk music writing software during his time. His original documents, if these still exist must now cost a fortune. Composers write music with bold and fast strokes. They are not rounded or artistic as you see in printed music sheets. But the music printer can read these these crude music writings and he sets them nicely on print. Not long ago, some compositions of John Lennon written with his hand were auctioned. Now those are real collectors' items which fetched good money.
More on time signatures next time! And HAPPY SINGING!!---#
BY VICTORIO COSTES
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