This week’s blog is all about the dots and dashes we use when we write music down. Most of us will never actually write music down, but many will read music that has been written down by someone else.
In order to get our heads around the science behind writing music as we do, it might be helpful to liken it to something like shorthand.
Why shorthand is similar to music
If you’ve ever seen shorthand written down it can look very confusing. My Mum showed me some of her shorthand, which she learned many years ago. It is literally dots, squiggles and dashes.
It is very confusing to the untrained eye. But what she impressed on me was that, although it is a sequence of dots on lines, it very much depends where on the line the dot is placed as to what it actually means.
Similarly, with the English language. When we write English down we use capital letters to signify the beginning of a new sentence. When we speak English we don’t use capital letters. We have to signify the beginning and end of a sentence using pauses and intonation.
When we write notes, we use a line to guide us. Where we place our capital letters (which can often look nothing like their lowercase equivalent) on the line helps us to define what each word is.
Written music
We use lines to write music down too. However, with music we have five lines. And the placement of the dots in and on those lines helps us define which notes we are looking at.
These lines are vital for the musician to decode the music. And so it is vital that those lines and dots are super clear to enable musicians to know what is going on at a glance.
For that reason, music rules are rigid.
Maths and music
Think about the X axis and the Y axis you learned about in school. We have an X axis in music too – your stave or the five lines we talked about earlier.
The Y axis is the pitch – On or between which line your dot is makes the pitch differ. And so a line of written music becomes a little graph of pitch against time. Time ticks along from left to right and the musician can see which note to play next because the Y axis delivers that information.
And thus, music is a language.
Check out my video on this subject and don’t forget to read last week’s blog about music as a language too.
