This Is Your Brain on Music (Daniel Levitin)
39 flashcards · Music · by lakesare
What's tempo?
Tempo refers to the overall speed or pace of the piece. In classical music, tempo is typically indicated with an instruction at the start of a piece (often using conventional Italian terms) and is usually measured in beats per minute (or bpm).
What's contour?
Contour describes the overall shape of a melody, taking into account only the pattern of "up" and "down" (whether a note goes up or down, not the amount by which it goes up or down).
What's reverberation?
Echo. Reverberation refers to the perception of how distant the source is from us in combination with how large a room or hall the music is in; often referred to as “echo” by laypeople, it is the quality that distinguishes the spaciousness of singing in a large concert hall from the sound of singing in your shower. It has an underappreciated role in communicating emotion and creating an overall pleasing sound.
What's meter?
Meter is created by our brains by extracting information from rhythm and loudness cues, and refers to the way in which tones are grouped with one another across time. A waltz meter organizes tones into groups of three (triple meter, written as 3/4 time), a march into groups of two or four.
What's key?
The key is the scale the piece of music uses, - a group of pitches that forms the basis of a music composition in classical, Western art, and Western pop music. If a melody is based on the C major scale, for example, we generally say that the melody is “in the key of C.” This means that the melody has a momentum to return to the note C, and that even if it doesn’t end on a C, the note C is what listeners are keeping in their minds as the dominant and focal note of the entire piece.
Why is our current system called A440?
Because the note A that is in the middle of the piano keyboard has a frequency of 440 Hz. This is entirely arbitrary. We could fix A at any frequency, such as 439, 444, 424, or 314.159; different standards were used in the time of Mozart than today. Many purists insist on hearing baroque music on period instruments, both because the instruments have a different sound and because they are designed to play the music in its original tuning standard, something that purists deem important.
Although there is not an equal change in cycles per second (Hz) as we climb from one note to the next, the distance between each note and the next sounds equal. How can this be?
The frequency of each note in our system is approximately 6 percent more than the one before it. Our auditory system is sensitive both to relative changes and to proportional changes in sound. Thus, each increase in frequency of 6 percent gives us the impression that we have increased pitch by the same amount as we did last time. Every tone is 6 percent higher than the previous one, and when we increase each step by 6 percent twelve times, we end up having doubled our original frequency (the ac…
If A-minor and C-major scales use exactly the same set of pitches, how do I know which key one I'm in?
The simplest way to establish a key, then, is to play the root of the key many times, play it loud, and play it long. And even if a composer thinks he is writing in C major, if he has the musicians play the note A over and over again, play it loud and play it long; if the composer starts the piece on an A and ends the piece on an A, and moreover, if he avoids the use of C, the audience, musicians, and music theorists are most probably going to decide that the piece is in A minor, even if this w…
What are the stereotypes about major vs minor scales?
Major - happy and triumphant emotions Minor - sad and defeated emotions For reasons that are largely cultural, we tend to associate major scales with happy or triumphant emotions, and minor scales with sad or defeated emotions. Some studies have suggested that the associations might be innate, but the fact that these are not culturally universal indicates that, at the very least, any innate tendency can be overcome by exposure to specific cultural associations. Western music theory recognizes t…
What's the difference between the major and minor scales? Name most popular major & minor scales.
Major scale: T–T–S–T–T–T–S (e.g. C-major) Minor scale: T–S–T–T–S–T–T (e.g. A-minor) Both the major and minor scales have 7 pitches per octave (heptatonic scales), with 5 tonest and 2 semitones (diatonic scales). The difference is in the distribution of these tones and semitones.
Major scale: T–T–S–T–T–T–S (e.g. C-major) Minor scale: T–S–T–T–S–T–T (e.g. A-minor) Why are both major scale and minor scale heptatonic?
They both contain 7 pitches per octave, as opposed to e.g. chromatic scale, that contains 12 pitches per octave.
Major scale: T–T–S–T–T–T–S (e.g. C-major) Minor scale: T–S–T–T–S–T–T (e.g. A-minor) Why are both major scale and minor scale diatonic?
They both contain 5 tones and 2 semitones.
What did John Chowning invent? John Chowning, an avant-garde composer, has had a professorship in Harvard since the 1970s, and was among a group of pioneering composers at the time who were using the computer to create, store, and reproduce sounds in their compositions.
He invented FM synthesis algorithm in 1967. FM synthesis democratized music synthesis. Before FM, synthesizers were expensive, clunky, and hard to control. Creating new sounds took a great deal of time, experimentation, and know-how. But with FM, any musician could obtain a convincing instrumental sound at the touch of a button. Songwriters and composers who could not afford to hire a horn section or an orchestra could now play around with these textures and sounds. Composers and orchestrators…
What's a synthesizer?
Synthesizers is an electronic musical instrument, that generates audio through methods including: subtractive synthesis, additive synthesis, and frequency modulation synthesis (developed by John Chowning) FM synthesis democratized music synthesis. Before FM, synthesizers were expensive, clunky, and hard to control. As electricity became more widely available, the early 20th century saw the invention of electronic musical instruments including the Telharmonium, Trautonium, Ondes Martenot, and th…
What's an attack?
Brief period after we blow into/strike an instrument, - noisy sound at many different frequencies that are not related to one another by simple integer multiples. For the brief period after we strike, blow into, pluck, or otherwise cause an instrument to start making sound, the impact itself has a rather noisy quality that is not especially musical - more like the sound of a hammer hitting a piece of wood, say, than like a hammer hitting a bell or a piano string, or like the sound of wind rushi…
What's the "cut bell" experiment by Pierre Schaeffer? Pierre Henri Marie Schaeffer (14 August 1910 – 19 August 1995)Pierre Schaeffer was a French composer, writer, broadcaster, engineer, musicologist and acoustician.
Schaeffer recorded a number of orchestral instruments on tape, and, using a razor blade, deleted the attack of these sounds. He played back the tape and found that it was nearly impossible for most people to identify the instrument that was playing! Without the attack, pianos and bells sounded remarkably unlike pianos and bells, and remarkably similar to one another.
What happens if you splice the attack of one instrument onto the body of another instrument?
In some cases, you hear an ambiguous hybrid instrument that sounds more like the instrument that the attack came from than the one the steady state came from. Michelle Castellengo and others have discovered that you can create entirely new instruments this way; for example, splicing a violin bow sound onto a flute tone creates a sound that strongly resembles a hurdy-gurdy street organ. These experiments showed the importance of the attack
Name 3 elements of timbre.
Relative amplitudes of the overtones! Attack! Flux The third dimension of timbre—flux—refers to how the sound changes after it has started playing. A cymbal or gong has a lot of flux— its sound changes dramatically over the time course of its sound—while a trumpet has less flux—its tone is more stable as it evolves. Also, instruments don’t sound the same across their range. That is, the timbre of an instrument sounds different when playing high and low notes.
Rhythm vs tempo vs meter?
Rhythm - the relative lengths of notes The relationship between the length of one note and another.Tempo - pace of a piece of music, the rate at which you would tap your foot to it Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean" has a tempo of 116, meaning that there are 116 beats per minute. If you dance to "Billie Jean", it is likely that you will be putting a foot down 116 times per minute or perhaps 58, but not 71 or 95.Meter - when you tap your foot hard versus light, and how these hard and light taps gro…
What's the Shave and a Haircut - two bits rhythm? "Two bits" is an archaism in the United States for 25 cents;
It's a 7-note musical call-and-response rhythm popularly used at the end of a musical performance, usually for comic effect. An 1899 recording by Charles Hale, “At a Darktown Cakewalk,” is the first documented use of this rhythm. Lyrics were later attached to the rhythm in a song by Jimmie Monaco and Joe McCarthy called “Bum-Diddle-De-Um-Bum, That’s It!” in 1914. "Shave and a Haircut" was used in many early cartoons, particularly Looney Tunes cartoons, played on things varying from car horns to…
What's the stereotype about slow VS fast tempo?
Slow - sad. Fast - happy. Songs with fast tempos tend to be regarded as happy, and songs with slow tempos as sad. Although this is an oversimplification, it holds in a remarkable range of circumstances, across many cultures, and across the lifespan of an individual.
What's the Waltz meter?
Waltz is any music in triple meter, or in 3/4 time. STRONG - weak - weak STRONG - weak - weak.
How long does a whole note usually last?
The standard duration is called a whole note and it lasts 4 beats, regardless of how slow or how fast the music is moving - that is, irrespective of tempo. At a tempo of sixty beats per minute - as in the Funeral March - each beat lasts one second, so a whole note would last four seconds.
What does it mean for a song to be 4/4 time? In notation and conversation, we refer to each of these groups of four notes as a measure or a bar.
numerator - song is organized into groups of 4 notes. denominator - basic note length is 1/4 note. The standard duration is called a whole note and it lasts 4 beats. A note with half the duration of a whole note is called, logically enough, a half note, and a note half as long as that is called a quarter note. For most music in the popular and folk tradition, the quarter note is the basic pulse—the four beats that I was referring to earlier are beats of a quarter note. We talk about such songs…
Name 6 notes (by lengths) and draw how they look.
breve - double whole, 2 semibreve - whole, 1 minim - half, 1/2 crotchet - quarter, 1/4 quaver - eighth, 1/8 semiquaver - sixteenth, 1/16
Despite himself, a little quaver was in his voice.
A shake or tremble in a person's voice. A note having the time value of an 1/8-th of a semibreve.
Which of these can fit into a semibreve 4 times?
A crotchet.
Why do we need a measure (or a bar)?
Measures are helpful, because they imply the accents. E.g. 3/4 (Waltz): strong - weak - weak. E.g. 4/4: strong - weak - quite strong - weak. E.g. 6/8: strong - weak - weak - quite strong - weak - weak. Dividing music into bars provides regular reference points to pinpoint locations within a musical composition. It also makes written music easier to follow, since each bar of staff symbols can be read and played as a batch.
What's syncopation?
Syncopation is a disturbance of the regular rhythm. A "placement of rhythmic stresses or accents where they wouldn't normally occur". Whenever a note anticipates a beat—that is, when a musician plays a note a bit earlier than the strict beat would call for—this is called syncopation. This is a very important concept that relates to expectation, and ultimately to the emotional impact of a song. The syncopation catches us by surprise, and adds excitement. Syncopation is used in many musical style…
Name 2 ways how we differentiate a trumpet and oboe playing together. Trumpet Oboe
[if they play different notes] We group harmonics Our auditory system exploits the harmonic series in grouping sounds together. Our brains coevolved in a world in which many of the sounds that our species encountered—over the tens of thousands of years of evolutionary history—shared certain acoustical properties with one another, including the harmonic series as we now understand it. Through this process of “unconscious inference” (as von Helmholtz called it), our brains assume that it is highl…
What's cadence?
A sequence of notes that creates a sense of resolution [finality or pause]. A cadence is labeled more or less "weak" or "strong" depending on its sense of finality.
Although her English has improved over the years, she still speaks in Spanish cadences, and her consonants are so soft that every word sounds whispered.
A modulation or inflection of the voice. A sequence of notes or chords comprising the close of a musical phrase. Latin cadentia, "a falling"
What's gap fill principle? (Not googleable, probably called something else in other books)
In a sequence of tones, if a melody makes a large leap, either up or down, the next note should change direction. E.g.: Somewheeere over the rainbow.In “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” the melody begins with one of the largest leaps we’ve ever experienced in a lifetime of music listening: an octave.
What does SSRI stand for?
Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor.
What would happen without neurotransmitter reuptake?
Without reuptake (neurotransmitter absorption), the neurotransmitters would continue to stimulate or inhibit the firing of a neuron.
How do SSRIs function (Prozac/Zoloft)?
By stopping the serotonin reuptake - allowing it to affect the neurons for a longer time. The new class of antidepressants, including Prozac and Zoloft, are known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) because they inhibit the reuptake of serotonin in the brain, allowing whatever serotonin is already there to act for a longer period of time.Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor.
What is a Shepard tone? Roger Shepard (Born in 1929, age 91)
Sound that creates the auditory illusion of a tone that continually ascends or descends in pitch. It's a sound consisting of a superposition of sine waves separated by octaves. The sound: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard_tone
What's a binding problem?
Problem of how objects, background and abstract or emotional features are combined into a single experience. E.g., some patients can tell you where an object is in their visual field but not its color, or vice versa. Firstly, there is the segregation problem: a practical computational problem of how brains segregate elements in complex patterns of sensory input so that they are allocated to discrete "objects". In other words, when looking at a blue square and a yellow circle, what neural mechan…
What's: syncopation VS reverberation?
syncopation - disturbance of the regular rhythm A "placement of rhythmic stresses or accents where they wouldn't normally occur".reverberation - echo Reverberation refers to the perception of how distant the source is from us in combination with how large a room or hall the music is in; often referred to as “echo” by laypeople, it is the quality that distinguishes the spaciousness of singing in a large concert hall from the sound of singing in your shower. It has an underappreciated role in com…