How Music Works

John Powell

First annotation on Mar 21st, 2025.

17 quotes

Chapter 1

The point is that sometimes we can be familiar with something we really enjoy, but have no idea what it actually is. This is the relationship most of us have with music—pleasure without understanding.
Many people think that music is entirely built on art, but this is not true. There are rules of logic, engineering and physics underlying the whole creative side of music. The development of music and musical instruments over the past couple of millennia has depended on a continuous interplay of art and science.
A musical note consists of four things: a loudness, a duration, a timbre and a pitch. One of these features can be summed up in just one sentence but the other three will require a whole chapter or more each. "Duration" is the easy one, so let's do it now: some notes last longer than others.
If you hum any tune you like, you will be choosing a duration, a loudness and a pitch for each note you produce. Subtle changes in loudness and duration during a song can carry a lot of emotional information—but as we're only going to be humming the first four notes of "Baa Baa Black Sheep" we don't need to worry too much about that. So, try humming notes for these four words at the same loudness with the same duration for each note. All you are choosing now is the pitch. The first two notes have the same pitch; then there is a shift up in pitch to "Black"; and then "Sheep" is the same pitch as "Black."
For example, there is an extra note between A and B, which can be called either "A sharp" (meaning "one step higher than A") or "B flat" (meaning "one step lower than B").
Let's say we are tuning a violin. The first step could be to tune our thickest string to the correct note, G, and then tune the other strings using the "Baa–Black" difference between each one. You would get the initial G by matching your violin note to a tuning fork* or the correct note on a (tuned) piano. But what happens if you don't have a tuning fork or piano handy?
As long as the difference between your strings is the same as "Baa–Black," the music you produce will sound fine and other musicians with stringed instruments could tune to match your notes and join in. However, if one of your friends is a flute player he will not be able to play along. This is because the notes on a flute (or any other wind instrument) are fixed—you can't choose any old notes on a flute. Your flute-playing friend can play, for example, an "E" or an "F" but he can't choose "E and a bit."
Let's say that you and your string-playing friends are all playing a tune that goes "E and a bit—F and a bit—C and a bit"—this will sound just as pleasant as the flute-playing E–F–C but if you both play at the same time it will sound horrible
There are only two ways to make music together: 1. You violin players must hold the flute player down while one of you saws a few tenths of an inch off the end of his flute. Then you'll have to file all the holes until they are in suitable positions for this new, shorter flute; or 2. You can all tune your violins to match the flute notes. Once you have done this, any other instrument can join in with you because you are now playing the standard notes.

Chapter 2

1. Although the notes go up and down in pitch at the right places, they sometimes jump a little too far and sometimes don't jump quite far enough. This is how most of us sing (which is why we should stick to our day jobs). 2. The note she started on was not the same note that Abba started on. In fact, the note she started on doesn't appear anywhere on a piano keyboard (why should it?). It's just some note she picked from the middle of her vocal range and, if you checked, you would find that it was somewhere between two adjacent notes on a piano. Once again, this is what most of us do.
What Cecilia is demonstrating is that she has memorized all the notes on a piano (or flute, or some other instrument) and it is just about certain that she managed this incredible memory feat before she was six years old.
An interesting point here is that, although perfect pitch is rare in Europe and the USA, it is far more common in countries such as China and Vietnam, where the language involves an element of pitch control. The sound you make to produce a word in these tonal languages is a cross between singing and speaking. The pitch at which you "sing" a word in a language like Mandarin is vital to communication: each word has several unrelated meanings depending on its pitch
The reason why very few Westerners develop this note memory is because it isn't very useful to us—in fact, it can be a bit of a pain to have perfect pitch because it makes the whistling or singing of most people sound terribly out of tune.
This lack of usefulness is one of the reasons that musical training never involves any attempt at perfect pitch acquisition. The other main reason is that it is very difficult to achieve after the age of six.
By the way, your singing or humming will probably be much more accurate if you stick a finger in one of your ears—which is why you will see some solo singers doing this. This works because we are designed not to hear our own voices too loudly, in case they drown out any other noises we should be paying attention to—lions, avalanches, the last-call bell, etc. Sticking a finger in your ear improves the feedback between your mouth and brain and helps you monitor your own pitch much more carefully. You may have noticed that your voice–ear feedback also improves if you have blocked sinuses
A typical pedantic view would be that we should play Mozart's music exactly as he wrote it. Another, equally understandable, pedantic view would be that we should play Mozart's music exactly as he heard it in his head as he wrote it down. Now here we have a problem, because although Mozart had "perfect" pitch, the notes he had memorized were not the same as those chosen by the committee in 1939.

Chapter 3

Each of these vibrations creates a ripple pattern in the air, but they do not join together to create an overall repeating pattern—so we hear a noise rather than a note. Musical notes are only created when all the vibrations collaborate to produce a regularly repeating ripple, like the ones in the illustration above. For this to occur, the vibrating object must only produce ripples which are strongly related to each other and can join together in an organized way. This happens most easily if the vibrating object has a very simple shape.