Music Study Topics

  1. Tone/Pitch

This is simply whether a note is high or low. Fluctuations between tone and pitch make for melodies. Emphasis upon them can make for dynamics. Matching tone in some way can create a harmony. Those who are unable to match or recognize tone are known as being "tone-deaf" because they cannot accurately recreate or recognize the sound they are hearing for one reason or another.

  1. Time/Rhythm

This is one of the most important features of music. Being able to keep time is essential to playing with others, getting audiences to understand your music, and making sure there is overall symmetry or recognizable "shape" (metaphors of vision are often required to describe musical concepts) to the music. It is hitting all your basic notes at predictable intervals. Whether it is stomping or clapping in time (to a simple 1, 2, 1, 2 count), rapping to a meter, playing drums to a metronome, etc.; keeping rhythm is essential to the playing and construction of music. Being unable to keep time/rhythm can ruin the experience for everyone. However, there are forms of music built around departing from this (like certain types of jazz and freestyle that play around with unconventional time and rhythm. Even then, though, they are simply working in contrast to understood or exposed time.

One thing that's interesting about time and tempo (which is the pacing of the timing which can be sped up or slowed down) is that it can be played with to interesting results. For instance, Beethoven's works are famously played much slower than he wrote them. Playing them in their intended time makes for a frenetic and unsettling experience. Some theorize that this is because he was mostly deaf when he composed his later works and wouldn't be able to recognize how unsettling his arrangements were.

Your book also mentions meter which is simply a section or portion of time in a piece of music.

  1. Dynamics

Dynamics is essentially how much you stress a note. Do you slam on a piano key or lightly press it? Do you lightly tap on the cymbals of your drum set or do you smash them for a loud class? The idea here is that different levels of stress of the same tones and timing can create variability in the mood and experience of that particular note or portion of a song.

  1. Melody

This is one that's very important to keep straight. Melody is simply a group of tones in a "shape" that the ear can recognize as together making up a single song or portion of a song. You can hum your favorite jingle from a commercial and that's a melody. Some melodies get reused for different purposes. Some are very repetitive (your book mentions jingle bells).

  1. Harmony

Without having to speak about things like scales and octaves and whatnot, the idea of harmony is a little challenging to express simply. Most simply, it is the tone above or below another tone that matches with it in time. So, when people sing together (in harmony) it "works" because one might be singing the high part while another is singing the low part. Different tones come together to form a nice pairing called a harmony. However, there can be much more than two tones in harmony and the more one adds to it, it often makes it that much more powerful and moving. The idea of harmony is so pleasant that it often gets used for non-musical explanation. Groups working well together, nations getting along, an athletic duo or team, a romantic couple's love, and more can all be described as being in harmony.

  1. Form

Form is simply when all these above elements come together in a particular way to make up a distinct way of doing music. Experimenting with form can give rise to new kinds of music and new ways of composing and arranging music within an already established form of music. You can think of form as the collection of all the other stuff (time, tone, dynamics) into one distinct whole. It is making use of all the tools in the toolkit to organize things into a musical piece.