Music Theory
(under construction)
Hopefully, I'll fill this out more one day.
Meanwhile, you can watch my videos about theory.
This one needs some explanation.
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This will be very consice (as is the video) so think about what I'm saying.
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MUSICAL NOTES
Everything in the world, if it vibrates, it's making a sound. The speed at which it vibrates is measured in Hertz, or Hz. That means CYCLES PER SECOND. Like a swing in a park, it swings back and forth. That's a vibration. Let's say it goes back and forth once in 2 seconds. That's one CYCLE, or one back and forth. So that comes out to 1/2 a cycle per second, or .5 Hz. That's very slow, much too slow for a human to hear. We need at least
20Hz to hear anything, and even then it's way to low of a note to really hear anything. If a swing swung that fast you'd probably fall off.
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The highest a human can hear is 20,000 Hz.
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OCTAVES
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Don't worry about the name right now.
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Everytime you double a note's Hz, or frequency, the note sounds "the same", or has the same quality. That's what we mean when we call a note by the same name, even though it sounds higher. Let's do this by a piano. Find the note "D". That's the one between 2 black keys. (The black keys are in alternating groups of 2 and 3. Of the groups that have 2 black keys, the white key between them is always a "D". The ones on the left side of the piano are lower notes than the ones on the right.) If you play one "D" and then another one somewhere else on the piano, you can hear that they sound the same. From one "D" to the next is called an octave. We'll explain that name later. You can call one "D" an octave higher than the other. You can also refer to the space in between the "D"s as one octave (or 2 or 3, depending on the specific case).
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In music theory, the struture we will impose on the notes will be the same regardless of which octave we are looking at. So we can disregard the different octaves for now and just think about the notes between one octave and the next.
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WHAT ABOUT THE VIDEO?
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So far, that's the first 17 seconds of the video. Let me run through what's happening in the video with what we explained so far.
The video starts off by stretching out a line between the number zero and the symbol for infinity. This represents the possible frequencies, or cycles per second, or Hz that something can vibrate at. It's really an infinite scale.
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Then, numbers appear above the line, marking off the octaves. Afterwards, the numbers spread out to make an even space between them to show that music theory will relate more to the space between the octaves than to between the actual Hzs. (In other words, when discussing the relationship between notes as far as scales and chords are concerned, it matters not if the particular note we're disussing is 440 Hz or 880 Hz. What matters is the ratio of the numbers. In this case it's double.)
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Finally, the lines between the octaves round out to show that they are to be viewed a reccuring system, and then they all merge together to demonstrate that the theory will apply equally to every octave, and therefore we only need to talk about one octave.
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OK, let's get back to the longer explanation.
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12 NOTES
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Where does the division of 12 notes come from? I'll tell you, I've heard a bunch of theories and they all sound a little loose to me.
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I'm not going to explain all the different approaches here. In the video, I put the symbols of the Zodiac by each note to say that in my opinion the real answer is that it is part of the structure of the universe. In Jewish Mysticism, the number 12 comes from the number of edges on a cube, which is the abstract shape of the universe.
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