In music, the term note has two primary meanings:
- A sign used in musical notation to represent the relative duration and pitch of a sound;
- A pitched sound itself.
Notes are the "atoms" of much Western music: discretizations of musical phenomena that facilitate performance, comprehension, and analysis.
The term "note" can be used in both generic and specific senses: one might say either "the piece 'Happy Birthday to You' begins with two notes having the same pitch," or "the piece begins with two repetitions of the same note." In the former case, one uses "note" to refer to a specific musical event; in the latter, one uses the term to refer to a class of events sharing the same pitch.
Read more about Note: Note Name, Written Notes, Note Frequency (hertz), History of Note Names
Other articles related to "note, notes":
... These are pound sterling notes and equal in value to Bank of England notes, and should not be confused with banknotes of the former Irish pound ... Earlier note issues by the bank were made under the bank's previous names the Provincial Bank of Ireland Ltd ... First Trust Bank's current notes depict two generic people, one male, one female ...
... editions of Gregorian chant, using varying styles of square-note neumes, circulated throughout the Catholic Church for centuries ... the chants, and developed a standardized form of the square-note notation which was adopted by the Catholic Church and is still in use in publications ... As a general rule, the notes of a single neume are never sung to more than one syllable all three pitches of a three-note neume, for example, must all be sung on the same ...
... to have used the first fifteen letters of the alphabet to signify the notes of the two-octave range that was in use at the time ... When the compass of used notes was extended down by one note, to a G, it was given the Greek G (Γ), gamma ... derived, and the English word gamut, from "Gamma-Ut", the lowest note in Medieval music notation.) The remaining five notes of the chromatic scale (the black keys on a piano keyboard) were added gradually ...
... the theme almost whole it lacks only the last note ... a series of variations which deconstruct the theme note by note ... In the final section, the theme is rebuilt, note by note, from the middle note, until it resembles a Russian Orthodox hymn ...
... to indicate a subsidiary accent when there are five or more notes in a neume group Horizontal episema (horizontal stroke) Used over a single note or a group of notes (as ... Liquescent neume (small note) Can occur on almost any type of neume usually associated with certain letter combinations such as double consonants, consonant pairs, or diphthongs in the text Quilisma (squiggly ...
Famous quotes containing the word note:
“His ear is so sensitively attuned to the bugle note of history that he is often deaf to the more raucous clamour of contemporary life.”
—Aneurin Bevan (1897–1960)
“However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The finch, the sparrow, and the lark,
The plainsong cuckoo grey,
Whose note full many a man doth mark
And dares not answer nay.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)