In the most recent post, we talked about music as a language, and written music. During that video and blog, we started talking about how music is not only its own language, but it also has similarities to maths.

That’s what we’re going to examine in this blog. Let’s start with rhythm.

‘I’ve got rhythm, I’ve got music, I’ve got sunshine. Who could ask for anything more?’

George and Ira Gershwin

Rhythm is the name of the game and written music has a very clever way of making sure we know what that rhythm is. And that’s where the similarity to maths comes in. In the last blog I talked about the Y axis versus the X axis. Where the Y axis of the graph can be considered the pitch and the height of the dots on the lines (the Y axis), the higher the pitch of the note.

Music on the X axis

The X axis in music is telling us the time. Sadly, as we all know, time keeps ticking and waits for no man.

But back to music. Across the bottom of our graph, the X axis, our time is ticking. The same goes for the lines (or staves) of music. But how long do you hold these notes?

Let’s go back once more, final time I promise, to that maths lesson where you draw a graph. You have your Y axis and your X axis, and you plot music on it it. Now really that is kind of the only information you can put on it – or is it?

You can colour code your graph. You can use different types of dots to denote different things on your graph, if you are trying to show two sets of information and compare the two.

And we do the same with music. Frankly we have to be inventive in the ways we get that information to the musician as quickly as possible. Which is where the dots we use in music come in.

Music dots

The first dot is a circle – that’s what we call a semibreve. A semibreve is worth four beats. A minim, which is worth two beats, is a circle with a stem. Next is the crotchet – a circle filled in, with a stem. That’s worth one beat. Finally, for this lesson, we have a quaver – the filled circle with a stem and a tail. That is worth half a beat.

In America, they call these whole notes, half notes, quarter notes, and eighth notes. Which is great until you start getting onto the 16th and 32nd notes when it all goes a little awry.

So the position of that dot on the Y axis is telling us the pitch, the type of dot it is, tells us how long to hold that note for before we move on to the next.

It’s simple – or not. But it is language.