hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr4078.txt

Episode: 4078
Title: HPR4078: Learning to read music, part two: pitch
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4078/hpr4078.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 19:19:38

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This is Hacker Public Radio episode 4,078 for Wednesday the 20th of March 2024.
Today's show is entitled Learning to Read Music Part 2 Pitch.
It is hosted by Ennis Tello and is about 14 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is The Basics of Pitch Musical Notation.
Hello and welcome to Hacker Public Radio.
I'm Ennis Tello and today we're going to look at the second part of my guide to learning
to read music.
But before I begin, can I ask all listeners out there maybe to contribute to show it's
not difficult.
If you've ever been on a Zoom or Gypsy call, you have the experience you need, believe
it or not, to record a show.
Any subject that might be of interest to geeks, hackers or, as I like to call them, right-minded
individuals is a good choice.
Alternatively, if you're stuck for ideas, there's a list on the Hacker Public Radio website
of podcasts subjects that the audience are interested in to give you some inspiration.
Now, learning to read music, in part one of this series I recorded last year in episode
– quickly consults notes 3792 – we looked at rhythm in music and how that's written
down.
In this episode, we're going to look at the second most important aspect of music after
rhythm and that is Pitch.
Once you have rhythm and pitch understood and, maybe, practiced a little bit, for say,
a few hours, you'll be able to read music, it's really not that difficult.
You can listen to this episode on learning to read pitch in music before the episode
on rhythm if you like, the audio listening doesn't really matter.
Now, rhythm and music is described by the shape of the notes or the dots on the page.
Black dots, for instance, become hollow for notes that last longer, or develop tails,
learn notes that come quicker and shorter.
For Pitch, things are a lot simpler.
We begin with a stave or a staff, typically that's five parallel lines that stretch horizontally
across a page, blobs or dots, notes that appear lower down those five lines sound lower,
and those higher up in the five lines sound higher.
If you count from a black dot or note that we put up against that bottom line of the
five sitting just underneath it, so just touch us that lowest line, up to the note that
sits above the top most line, we get 11 notes, here they are.
But of course, there are higher notes than those we just heard and lower as well.
So to make those extra low and extra high notes legible, we use ledger lines, that's
LEDGER.
Let's use one ledger line below our stave and one above the stave or staff.
Now we can start a bit lower and finish a bit higher like this.
If you're a visual person, you might want to have a look at the show notes to this podcast
diagram one in the handout, slightly in black at school, isn't it?
Anyway, now we've got access to a broader range of notes, 15 in all.
Now we can't go on calling all the notes low one or high one because it's rather confusing.
Instead we give each note a letter.
In English language, we give each note a letter name, A, B, C, D, E, F, G.
And we repeat them.
So those notes we just heard, those 15 we heard, B, C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, A, B.
So we started and finished on a B and we used one about half way up to.
So here are those three B notes that we heard played together.
You can hear they sound kind of the same because there are eight notes count them.
B is one, C is two, D is three, E is four, F is five, 6 is G, 7 is A and the eighth one
is B. We call the gap between those Bs in our case, an octave, octave, eight, eight notes.
Now here's some terminology which I hope self explanatory.
We began a scale from B to B, an octave higher and then went up the scale further to a B note,
an octave higher than that and you'll hear the word octave a lot.
In fact there are two octaves between the first B on which we began scale and the last
B to octaves higher.
Incidentally while I'm throwing terminology at you, I said we were using the notes A through
to G in English.
In German we would use a H C D E F G by the way.
I won't bore you with the reasons why but just say no.
Now we've learnt the phrase scale which is used to describe a run of notes close to each
other for a while, either going up or down and ascending scale is what we've heard and
here dear, listen this is a descending scale from B down to octaves.
Those of you who are looking at the show notes will have seen at the beginning of each
staff or stave, that's the five parallel lines remember, a twirly figure.
That's called the clef, French, the key and it gives musicians some idea of the general
pitch of the notes they're going to be playing.
The one we've used so far is called the treble clef, there's also a bass clef for low
sounding instruments and an alto clef which is usually only used by weirdos who play the
viola, not the violin the viola so safe to ignore.
Piano music tends to be written on two clefs at once both bass and treble which are bracketed
together because the 88 keys on a piano range from very low to very high so pianists get
to read two clefs simultaneously while they're reading music which is why when you see
a pianist out in the wild it's often very difficult to make eye contact with them.
While we're poking fun at musicians, drums and percussion tend to be written on a stave
that comprises only of one line or maybe three for the really complex instruments, thus
the old joke, what do you call a musician who had an anvil dropped on their head during
childhood answer, yeah, a drummer.
So weak gags aside, we had some more vernacular in there.
We now know about the stave, the clef at its beginning, ledger lines to make higher
and lower notes more legible and we learnt about a scale, a row of notes that descends
or ascends by, let's call it stepwise motion.
Now let's use our ears, hearing a scale running from B to B sounds a bit odd, I mean it's
okay but it's a little bit odd, let's hear just one octave up and down.
However, I'm now going to play you a scale again up and down one octave that starts and
ends on C. We could say that the piece of music, in piece of music in inverted commas
that we just heard was in the key of C. It started and it ended on C and it sort of seemed
to gravitate around those first and last notes. Do you want to hear them again? Let's
play them again.
Now let's look at sharps and flats. Sharps and flats are symbols which are placed in front
of any note in order to raise it or sharpen it by a half step or flatten it by a half note.
A sharp looks like, for you computer types of hash or a crunch or a she, as in shabang,
and a flat looks like a kind of stylized letter B. If you want to flatten a note, put
the flat symbol in front of it. Or if you want to sharpen a note, put a sharp symbol
in front of it. I'm going to play now some of that scale from C to G. So five notes up
and five notes back down without sharps or flats. A bit of an acula would say that scale
has no accidentals. Now let's hear that scale again and I'm going to put a flat sign in front
of the third note. So instead of going C-D-E-F-G, I'm going to play C-D-E-flat F-G and then
back down G-F-E-flat D-C. Now that's given our short scale. Quite a different sound. In
fact, we've moved from a major key, a happy and upbeat key, to something approaching, a minor
key, which is doer, sad, and what plays when you think the superhero is being killed or a puppy
gets ill. Now let's really mangle it up a bit. I'm going to throw in another accidental just
to make things even sadder. We'll keep that E-flat, but also flatten the A. So I'm going to
play C-D-E-flat F-G-A-flat B-C. You can see this written out in the show notes and for those of
you without the show notes in front of you, just imagine a really, really poorly puppy. So sharps and
flats are used to change the key of a piece of music. In fact, what we've just heard is a C-minus
scale or a piece of really rather dull music in C-minus. Keys tend to be major or minor, minor,
as a reminder, dead kittens, major, heroic deeds by leading actors. Now to make life easier for
musicians, if a piece of music has most of the F's in it tend to be sharp, we put the F-sharp
symbol just next to the clef right at the beginning of the stave and repeat it on each stave down the
page. We say this is a key signature denoting that the piece or a decent portion of it at least
is in, in this case, G major. You can see the clef followed by a key signature on the handout.
And for those of you listening in technicala, here's a scale from G to G over two octaves using F-sharp's
throughout. Finally, of course, we can play more than one note at once to make chord,
unless you're a percussionist. If we take the first, third and fifth notes from our scale,
we get a recognizable chord like this. Or we can take those three notes again and put a flat
in front of the middle one. That's the third note in the scale, remember? And it changes its tone
from major to minor.
Arguably, any three or more notes played together form a chord.
Cords are terribly familiar if you learn guitar. For example, you learn to play chords as one of the
first things you do usually. Cords are really useful to create things called cadences. A cadence
is used to bring a piece of music to a close, or at least to pause, like this.
So a cadence in musical terms is a product of pitch, not rhythm, or pulse. Those of you out there
talking about the release pattern of a piece of software, for instance, as a daring to a cadence,
are talking about something different, specialist, technical, vernacular. Nothing to do with timing
in music, however, cadence is about pitch. Learning to read music isn't necessarily difficult,
but it does take practice. If you're learning, you'll see the note E on the stave in front of you,
and then you have to translate that into how you'd play an E on your particular instrument,
and seeing pitch and translating rhythm, sharpening or flattening notes, remembering key signatures,
and a few other things we haven't really discussed over the course of these podcasts,
means that you've really got to practice, and so they say to reach a decent standard on most
instruments, you need about 10,000 hours practice, which sounds like a lot, and it is. And that's why,
of course, there are many more people who watch TikTok videos than learn an instrument,
one's easy, one takes some dedication and skill, unless you want to be a drummer, which is
probably easier than even watching TikTok. Right, I'll leave it there. I feel like these two
shows have been like driving lessons and the drivers test at the end of those. You now and
now enough to be dangerous on your own out there, it's time to practice and get on with it.
Thanks for listening. This has been Hacker Public Radio. I'm Enestello.
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