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
Famous quotes containing the word note:
“There is a note in the front of the volume saying that no public reading ... may be given without first getting the author’s permission. It ought to be made much more difficult to do than that.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)
“There was a saviour
Rarer than radium,
Commoner than water, crueller than truth;
Children kept from the sun
Assembled at his tongue
To hear the golden note turn in a groove....”
—Dylan Thomas (1914–1953)
“This morning the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German Government a final Note stating that, unless we heard from them by 11 o’clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.”
—Neville Chamberlain (1869–1940)