You’ve heard an ambulance before, right? Remember what its siren sounds like? It can be a scary sound because it implies someone is really sick, but listen closely. It has a really slippery, continuous, fluid feel to it. It kind of feels like stroking a baby’s bum; it is soft, curvy, and has a smooth texture.
Well, the musical air is basically just like a baby’s bottom: totally smooth! It’s what musicians call “pitch continuum”. Remember we saw that sound was just a bunch of vibrating pockets of air? And that young Pythagoras discovered that these pockets of air repeated themselves in what are called octaves?
Well, this is why the continuum is so smooth — it is basically a bunch of air pockets repeatedly vibrating at an infinite number of speeds. Just like your cheeks become smooth and round when you stuff your mouth with toffees, the musical continuum is smooth because it is stuffed with endless acoustic frequencies.
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This characterless, contourless continuum can be quite dreary and hard to wrap your head around, just like the ambulance siren. So, it is the responsibility of the musician to cut the confusing continuum into digestible, discrete morsels called “notes” and organise them into “scales”.
Like the scale you use in maths class to measure and draw lines, this musical scale helps measure out the size of each morsel of the musical continuum and fit it into the bowl of the octave for easy digestion. The size of each morsel is called an “Interval”. This is the distance you have to travel to get across from a particular note to the next. In most forms of music, including western classical, there are 12 morsels in an octave bowl to choose from. You can ask for more chunks, but then they’d become smaller and slip down your gullet before you could even taste them!
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In fact, even 12 morsels are too small and slippery for us. So, music chefs generally like to work with seven decent-sized chunks at a time. This sort of scale is called a Heptatonic Scale (no, that’s not a ruler dripping with a sweet cough syrup called ‘Hepta’! Ancient Italians, who spoke Latin, usually said hepta when they meant seven. Go figure).
Choosing the size of these notes isn’t as easy as chopping veggies. Get it just slightly wrong, and your musical tongue will spit it out in disgust! There are two basic recipes that western music chefs use to figure out just what we like. But you can learn about these once you’ve digested your octave bowl. Come back for seconds!