Many different kinds of symbols can appear on, above, and below the staff. A note stands for a sound; a rest stands for a silence. Other symbols on the staff, like the clef symbol, the key signature, and the time signature, tell you important information about the notes and measures. Symbols that appear above and below the music may tell you how fast it goes , how loud it should be , where to go next and even give directions for how to perform particular notes .
Because it fixes the pitch C, the alto clef is referred to as a C clef. The alto clef is used less often than the treble or bass clefs. Middle C is above the bass clef and below the treble clef; so together these two clefs cover much of the range of most voices and instruments. The bottom line of the bass clef staff is the letter G.
Pitch Symbols and Their MeaningsNumber in FigureWhat It’s CalledWhat It Means1StaffComposers write music on a five-line system called a staff. In talking about the individual lines of the staff, refer to the bottom line as the first line. As the note heads get higher on the staff, they get correspondingly higher in pitch. The distance from one line to the next higher space is one letter of the alphabet .2ClefThe staff alone doesn’t tell you the pitches of the various lines and spaces. But a symbol called a clef, at the left edge of each staff, identifies a particular note on the staff. From that note, you can determine all the other notes by moving alphabetically up and down the staff .
In each of the following exercises you will be asked to identify by name some of the notes in an excerpt from a song. Stem direction wtoe news is also used to differentiate between voices in a condensed score where multiple parts are written on the same staff.
Notice how the accidental is always placed before the note even though when you say the note name the accidental is said after the letter name. A pitch standard is the conventional pitch reference a group of musical instruments are tuned to for a performance. Concert pitch may vary from ensemble to ensemble, and has varied widely over musical history. A sound or note of indefinite pitch is one that a listener finds impossible or relatively difficult to identify as to pitch. Sounds with indefinite pitch do not have harmonic spectra or have altered harmonic spectra—a characteristic known as inharmonicity.
Notes on grand staff from Low F to High G, including inner ledger lines . Most of these clefs are far less common than the treble, bass, alto, and tenor clefs. In the following exercises, you will see notes written next to a C clef . This example shows a very common format for writing four-part music on a single grand staff.
In sharp keys, the note that names the key is one half step above the final sharp. Choose a clef in which you need to practice recognizing notes above and below the staff in Figure 1.13. Write the clef sign at the beginning of the staff, and then write the correct note names below each note.
A small “8” at the bottom of a treble clef means that the notes should sound one octave lower than written. Beginning at the top of the page, they are read one staff at a time unless they are connected. If staves should be played at the same time , they will be connected at least by a long vertical line at the left hand side. Staves played by similar instruments or voices, or staves that should be played by the same person may be grouped together by braces or brackets at the beginning of each line. In almost all of these systems interval of the octave doubles the frequency of a note; for example, an octave above A440 is 880 Hz.
The last note letter, G, is always followed by another A. Scientific pitch (q.v.) is an absolute pitch standard, first proposed in 1713 by French physicist Joseph Sauveur. It was defined so that all Cs are integer powers of 2, with middle C at 256hertz. As already noted, it is not dependent upon, nor a part of scientific pitch notation described here. To avoid the confusion in names, scientific pitch is sometimes also called “Verdi tuning” or “philosophical pitch”.