Musical parameters: main elements of music

1. Definition of music
Music is an intentionally organised art form which uses sound and silence, with core
elements or parameters of PITCH (melody and harmony), RHYTHM (duration, metre,
tempo), DYNAMICS (loudness), ARTICULATION, and the qualities of timbre, texture
and spatial location.

2. Terminology
• Melody: a linear succession of musical tones that the listener perceives as a single entity.
Melodies often consist of one or more musical phrases or motifs and are usually repeated
throughout a composition in various forms.

• Interval: a difference in pitch between two sounds. In Western music, intervals are most
commonly differences between notes of a scale. The smallest of these intervals is a
semitone.

• Harmony: the simultaneous occurrence of tones, especially when blended into chords
pleasing to the ear. The study of harmony involves understanding chords and their
construction as well as chord progressions and the principles of connection that govern
them.
Harmony is often said to refer to the VERTICAL aspect of music, as distinguished from
melody, or the HORIZONTAL aspect.

• Chord: a group of three or more pitches sounded together, or a series of pitches heard
and understood as if sounded together. Chords are most often used as an accompaniment
to melodies. They make the texture of music thicker and give melodies a fuller sound.
The most common type of chord is a three-note chord or triad. A triad most often consists
of three distinct notes: the root note, and intervals of a third and a fifth above the root
note.
Chords can be named in at least two different ways:
1. by its root note and its type (whether it is major or minor, a seventh chord, etc.)
2. by a Roman numeral according to which note of the scale it is built on.

• If the notes of a chord are played together, it is described as a block chord. The notes of a
chord may also be split up and arranged into patterns. Then they are often referred to as
broken chords. An arpeggio is a type of broken chord, in which its notes are played or sung
in a rising or descending order.
Chord melodies or broken chords can create attractive backings. They are frequently used
instead of block chords because they are more flowing.

• A series of chords is called a chord progression or chord changes. Chord progressions are
the foundation of Western popular music styles.

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• Root note: the note of the scale upon which the chord is built

• Major chord: a chord in which the interval between the root and the middle note of the
triad is four semitones (called a major third)

• Minor chord: a chord in which the interval between the root and the middle note of the
triad is three semitones (called a minor third)

• Primary chords: in any major or minor scale, three chords are used more often than the
others. The chord built on the first note of the scale, I, is called the tonic. The chord built
on the fourth, IV, is called the subdominant and the V is called the dominant.
In major tonality, the primary chords are all major.

• A seventh chord is a chord which has a seventh added to it.

• Harmonic series: a harmonic series (also overtone series) is a sequence of frequencies or

musical tones in which each frequency is a whole number multiple of a fundamental.
Wind instruments use a technique called overblowing in order to play tones from the
harmonic series. Before they had a key mechanism or valves, they could only play melodies
using those notes.

• The range of a musical instrument is the distance from the lowest to the highest pitch it
can play. For a singing voice, the equivalent is vocal range. The range of a musical part is
the distance between its lowest and highest note.

• Metre (beat & time signature):

Metre can be thought of as a regular, recurring pattern of strong and weak beats (accented
and regular pulses). This recurring pattern of durations is defined at the beginning of a
composition by a time signature.

• The tempo is the speed or pace of a given piece and is usually measured in beats per
minute (bpm). In classical music, tempo is typically indicated with an instruction at the
start of a piece (often using Italian terms, e.g., largo, andante, allegro, presto).

• Articulation tells us HOW a single note is to be played: long/short, with more attack,
“connected” (slurred), etc.

• Timbre (tone colour): the combination of qualities of a sound that distinguishes it from
other sounds of the same pitch and volume. In simple terms, timbre is what makes a
particular musical instrument or human voice have a different sound from another, even
when they play or sing the same note.

• Texture: the fabric of sound created by the interaction of all the parts of a piece of music.
Texture involves everything that is going on – melody, harmony, and rhythm – and
considers how the separate strands of activity relate to each other. It specifies how many
parts or voices there are and how they are woven together. The texture of a piece outlines
the overall structure of its sound.
Texture is often described in terms of density, or thickness, and range, or width. For
example, a thick texture contains many “layers” of instruments.

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 To a certain extent, harmony and texture are related, since they both deal with the
VERTICAL aspect of music. However, while harmony describes how music is rich in a tonal
sense (i.e., whether you have intervals or chords sounding together, chord progressions
and their relationship to tonality), texture describes the layers of sound in music.

• There are different types of texture in music, with three main types being monophonic,
homophonic and polyphonic.
Monophonic texture includes a single melodic line with no accompaniment.
Polyphonic music makes use of multiple melodic voices which are to a considerable extent
independent from one another.
Homophonic texture is the most common type of texture in Western music: melody and
accompaniment. It consists of multiple voices of which one, the melody, stands out
prominently and the others form a background of harmonic accompaniment.

• Spatial location represents the perceived placement of a sound in an environmental

context, that is to say, how far away and in which direction relative to the listener the
sound is produced (left/right, up/down).