Rudiments & Theory of music Part 1

What is Music

What is Music

Music has a lot of definitions & we shall be looking at a few of them.
Music is the combination of pleasant sounds.
Music is the combination of sounds that are pleasant to the ears.
Music is the combination of melody, harmony, & rhythm pleasant to the ears.

What music does for the body

Music is food for the soul & spirit.
Music uplifts the spirit of man.
Music revives the spirit & the soul.
Music exercises the mind & the soul.
Music refreshes the mind

What is sound

Sound is anything that can be heard and it depends on our sense of hearing. Different individuals have different abilities when it comes to detecting sounds. Also different animals have different sound detecting abilities. 

Types of Sounds

Sounds can be divided into two broad categories which are:

1. Musical sounds(music)
2. Noise 

The way & manner that sound is produced is actually what decides whether it is noise or music.
Musical sound is produced by when a body is vibrating at regular frequency.
Noise is produced by vibrations of irregular frequency.

Musical Alphabet

We use the first 7 letters of the alphabet (A,B,C,D,E,F,G) in music. Each letter represents a specific sound. 

Tonality

Tonality is the arrangement of sounds into scales and keys.

There are 12 keys unique keys in music. We have various scales such as the major scale, minor scales, pentatonic scales(minor & major), blues scale etc

Tonic Solfa

Tonic solfa gives you a feel of the song you are playing or singing & enables you to visualize the song. You can't really feel or visualize a song using musical alphabets. Solfa makes it easy for a song to be broken into parts. 

The solfas are do, re, mi, fa, so, la, te do or doh, ray, me, fah, soh, lah, te, doh. We actually use their first letters to represent them as d, r, m, f, s, l, t, d.

You can as well listen to the song "Doe a deer a female deer" to have a better understanding of solfa.    

Watch out for our next post.
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