• ethnomusicology - music and culture
• there’s a context for all kinds of music
• music has always been a profession requiring division of labour
  • dependent on the kind of culture they live in
  • art music has been seen in an elitist point-of-view
  • almost all composers have jobs teaching in universities
• What is “music”?
  • universal language by which we communicate with humanity
  • fave definition - Walter Wiora (”a game with tones”)
    • simple and complex rules
    • there’s always rules that apply to every kind of music
• tone - a sound (special kind of sound) dominated by a particular frequency
  • note - name of a tone
  • A4 (440 Hz - cycles per second) - standard tuning note
    • 220 Hz - A3 pitch
    • 110 Hz - A2 pitch
    • 880 Hz - A5 pitch
  • A chord
    • A, C#, E - A (440 x 1 = 440), C# (440 x 1.25 = 550), E (440 x 1.5 = 660)
  • circle of fifths - 3:2 ratio
• psychoacoustics
  • like how singers are able sing back (vocalize) notes in a piece of music
• octave - 12 notes
• discrete pitches
• melody - sequence of pitches
  • Mary Had a Little Lamb only uses four pitches
  • talk about them like having a shape
  • we can describe the rise and fall of a melody
  • we talk about melody as if its a unified thing