2. What is music?
•
Music is the art of combining sounds. The human being has been producing
music as a mean of expression since thousands of years ago.
From what we can tell, by the time the ancient world was beginning to establish
itself — approximately 7000 B.C. — musical instruments had already achieved a
complexity in design that would be carried all the way into the present.
• Bone flutes with five to eight drilled holes were being produced in the Henan
Province in China that could play notes in both the five-note Xia Zhi scale and
the seven-note Qing Shang scales of the ancient Chinese musical system.
Some of the flutes found from this time period are still playable, and
• short performances have been recorded on them for modern listeners to hear.
• All over the world, people were playing music — and not just on bone whistles
and empty turtle shells. Pictographs and funerary ornaments have shown that by
3500 B.C., Egyptians had invented the harp — or at least were using it a lot —
as well as double-reed clarinets, lyres, and their own version of the flute. By
2500 B.C., their neighbors across the Mediterranean, the Cycladians, eventually
responsible for forming Greek culture, had adopted the lyre as well, while in
faraway Denmark, the Danes had invented the first known trumpet. By 1500
B.C., the Hittites of northern Syria had modified the traditional lute/harp design of
the Egyptians and invented the first two-stringed guitar, with a long, fretted neck,
tuning pegs at the top of the neck, and a hollow
• soundboard to amplify the sound of the strings being plucked. Guitars may look
a lot cooler now and have a few more strings, but they follow the same basic
design laid out more than 3,000 years ago.

3. • There are a lot of unanswered questions about
ancient music, not the least being why so many
different cultures came up with so many of the
same tonal qualities in their music completely
independent of one another. Many theorists
have concluded that certain patterns of notes
just sound right to listeners, and certain patterns
don’t. Music theory, then, very simply, could be
said to be a search for how and why music
sounds right or wrong.

4. • - Harmony: is the combination of sounds
simultaneously
- Rhythm: relations of duration and
accentuation of sounds
- Melody: is the combination of sounds in
a succession.
Elements of Music

5. Staff or Stave
• The staff has 4 spaces and 5 lines, the
symbols and signs of music are written in
the staff. You start reading a staff from the
bottom lines to the top lines

6. Clefs
• The clefs name the notes accordingly to
their position in the staff and also the
range of notes. There are seven musical
clefs and they are written in the beginning
of the staff.
G clef or treble

8. Scales
• In Western musical theory there are 12
keys. There are two kind of scales:
• - Chromatic
- Diatonic: subdivided into major, minor.
The minor keys subdivide again into:
natural minor, harmonic minor,
and melodic minor

9. Notes
• Notes are the symbols that represent sounds.
There are seven musical notes:
DO RE MI FA SOL LA SI
C D E F G A B

10. Note were named by Guido d’Arezzo, an
Italian monk and music theorist, he had
the idea to name the notes after are the
initial syllables of each of the first six half-
lines of the first stanza of the hymn Ut
queant laxis.

11. Note Values
Note values represent the duration of
sounds.
The rest is the symbol that represents a
pause, the rest silences it correspondent
note value.

17. Time Signature
• In printed music, right after the clef at the beginning of the staff,
you’ll see a pair of numbers, one written over the other, these are
called time signatures, the time signature is there to tell you two
• things:
• _ Number of beats in each measure: The top number in the time
signature tells you the number of beats to be counted off in each
measure. If the top number is three, then each measure contains
three beats.
• _ Which note gets one beat: The bottom number in the time
signature tells you which type of note value equals one beat — most
often, eighth notes and quarter notes. If the bottom number is four,
then a quarter note is one beat. If it’s an eight, then an eighth note
gets one beat
2 3 4
4 4 4

18. Bars and Measures
• A measure (sometimes called a bar) is any
segment of written music contained
• within two vertical bars that span the staff from
top to bottom.
• Measures follow one another throughout a piece
of written music, and each
• one contains as many beats as is
indicated by the top number in
the time signature.

19. Tempo
• Tempo means, quite basically, “time,” and when
you hear people talk about the tempo of a
musical piece, they are referring to the speed at
which the music progresses. The point of tempo
is not necessarily how fast or slowly you can
play a musical piece, however. What tempo
really does is set the basic mood of a piece of
music. Music that is played very, very slowly, or
grave, can impart a feeling of extreme
somberness, whereas music played very, very
quickly, or prestissimo, can seem maniacally
happy and bright.

21. Tones and semitones
• The pitch of a note is how high or low it sounds.
Musicians often find it useful to talk about how
much higher or lower one note is than another.
This distance between two pitches is called the
interval between them
In Western notation, the smallest difference
between two pitches is the semitone
A Whole Step is simply two semitones distance.
• Tones and semitones are intervals. There are
also lots of other kinds of intervals.

22. Alterations
• Sharps
A sharp is a symbol ( , also ‘#’ in type)♯
placed in front of a note, increasing its
pitch by a half step or semitone. D# is a
half step higher in pitch than D; and D is a
half step higher than C#.

23. • Flats
A flat is a symbol ( , also ‘b’ in type)♭
placed in front of a note, decreasing its
pitch by a half step or semitone; Db is a
half step lower in pitch than D.

24. • Naturals
a natural is an accidental which cancels
previous accidentals and represents the
unaltered pitch of a note