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在英语环境中学乐理

A Self-Checklist for Basic Music Concepts

Prepared for those who want to be facilitated for their communication with people interested in music in this global-village environment

刘沛

By Liu pei

This checklist is developed to encourage the students to check periodically whether the music concepts they know are understood in English.

Simply go through the following. Ask yourself, from the standpoint of an evaluator, the questions and give your responses such as:

1.Yes, I fully understand the meaning of it and I can even get the sense out of it while playing certain pieces where the concept stands a salient feature arousing much meaning in my emotion, thinking and aesthetic imagination.

2.Yes, but not quite sure. Then I might review the concept and at least get some implications or hints based on reading the descriptions provided, and then think about what I possibly could even through my intuition.

Please remember that this task does not mean to impose an extra burden on you but to provide a self-governed and self-study based opportunity for you to review and better organize what you have exposed to, pertaining to your doing, thinking and feeling in the realm of music. Having yourself equipped with the knowledge in English of music-related ideas will facilitate your communication with music interested people in this global village where talks in any topic using English is becoming a routine practice.

【 】Concepts about sound, the basic substance used in the art of music:

(1) Vibration vs. Sound: Please note that the former refers to a phenomenon in the realm of objectivity and the latter is with what we experience in the hearing mechanism being subjective in its nature. There are four physical attributes or properties considered essential in vibration—frequency, intensity, time and wave form—that determine, respectively, what we hear as sensations of pitch, loudness, duration and timbre or tone quality—the four corresponding mental parameters. These terminologies are included in the field of psychoacoustics, not normally in the study of music. However, it is necessary for music students to be acquainted with these concepts because they might be useful when your communication occurs with people out of the circle of musicians, but those such as psychologists.

 (2) A tentative definition of sound:

【 】Sound is mental reflection of vibration within a certain range of its acoustic properties. The definition given is based, among other things, on the following facts: (a) Range of frequencies that humans could possibly perceive is from the lowest possible frequency of 12 Hz to the highest 20,000Hz roughly. The higher vibrations beyond this range of frequency could be heard by, maybe, puppies. (b) If the vibration is, in terms of its intensity, too weak, then humans would not able to sense it as a sound.

(3) Considerations of tones employed in music:

【 】Music tone vs. Noise; Pure tone vs. Composite tone; Fundamental tone and overtones, partials; Relationship with timbre:  

Musical tones, or simply tones, fall into two categories when evaluated by the criteria whether the tone has a definite pitch: musical tone has but noise does not. You may conduct a quick experiment with two different sound sources. You could easily sing back, within your voice range of course, a tone produced from the piano but it is difficult even impossible for you to imitate exactly the sound emitted by clapping your hands. It is so because the former (a musical tone) is pitched but the latter (a noise) not. However it does not mean that noise makes no contributions to the art of music. In fact, it does and is so significant that African drumming and ethno-music in China resort much to the percussion instruments and many of the percussions are noise-based.

Pure tone is rarely used in music but is most often used in pychoacoustic research where it is crucial that unnecessary variables be eliminated to avoid interference of the influential elements, other than the defined independent variable, with the effect of an experiment so that the finding of the research may be secured as a function of independent variable only. The tone produced by a tuning fork, the small fork-shaped metal device as a pitch standard for helping tuning the musical instruments, is supposed to be pure tone. It is safe to claim that all the musical tones rendered by pitched music making media belong to the category of composite tones. Composite tone, simply put as the name suggests, is composed of the fundamental tone and overtones, that is, it is a blend of them. To better understand this phenomenon, you might imagine that a string of the piano is vibrating where the fundamental tone is heard most salient as its pitch that is produced by a “whole string in motion” vibration. Simultaneously, however, parts of the string at the lengths in ratios of 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, 1/5 etc. in an ideal situation, are also vibrating, thus emitting the frequencies as partials, the lowest of which is what was described above as fundamental viz. the first partial; the other partials are called overtones or harmonics. The significant role overtones play is in the perception of timbre. Before we go further to approach this marvel, note that wide differences exist among the overtone series produced by different as well as the same music media as vibrators. Rigorously, no one could possibly imitate exactly one sound produced by others. If you ever had the opportunity to view the scene of the wave form presented on the monitor of a spectrum detector, you would be convinced totally－complex! These descriptions tell us a fact that overtones vary according to types of vibrators or even the same vibrator under different conditions. The variances of overtones embody in the fact (1) the actual numbers of the overtones appearing vary; for example, the tones produced by the flute that sound “hollow” contain much fewer overtones than those by the cello (2) the sequences of thei

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