SUBSCRIBE
A: The desire to educate people about music theory.
Please don’t laugh too hard.
Do you know what a scale is? How about some other types of scales? What song can you use to easily know what an octave is?
Find out by listening to the CultureCast above (by pressing the little blue play botton), or by clicking through and checking out the transcript and further sources.
Scales and Octaves (CultureCast #038)
(To play the audio directly in this page, click the little blue play button. To download the file, right click the text link and choose “Save Link As…”)
Visit the home page to play this podcast directly through your browser and to view the whole collection of 90 Seconds to Culture podcasts.
Transcript
Hello CultureCats, this is Joshua Hwang singing you another 90 Seconds to Culture podcast.
Scales and Octaves
(Singing) Do Re Mi Fa So La Ti Do
This familiar tune is a musical scale. This is one type of scale that is very popular. Scales are a collection of notes either going up or down with a fixed spacing between the notes.
This spacing is represented commonly as semitones or whole tones. For example in the diatonic major scale the spacing between the notes is always the same: tone-tone-semitone-tone-tone-tone-semitone. So that is the spacing between the first and second note, then the second and third, so on and so forth.
The spacing between the first and last note of this scale is called an octave. Octave because they are eight notes apart. This is a very natural division found in most cultures, and it is where we hear notes to be, quote, the same. And in physics the frequency of a note that is one octave above another is double.
An easy to remember example of what an octave sounds like is from the beginning of the song “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” (Somewhere over the rainbow first notes.)
It is important to remember though, that there are many, many other scales, not only within Western music, but from other cultures as well. A scale need not have seven distinct tones. The pentatonic scale (five notes) is used a lot in traditional Eastern music. And Indian ragas employ scales with spacing between notes smaller than a semitone.
Sources / Further Reading:
Wikipedia: Musical scale
Wikipedia: Indian musical scale
Dictionary.com: scale
[tags]music, music theory, scale, culture, podcast[/tags]
(image from Xtream_i via flickr)
Subscribe via RSS
{ 0 comments… add one now }