14/01/2022
Musical notation, visual record of heard or imagined musical sound, or a set of visual instructions for performance of music. It usually takes written or printed form and is a conscious, comparatively laborious process. Its use is occasioned by one of two motives: as an aid to memory or as communication. By extension of the former, it helps the shaping of a composition to a level of sophistication that is impossible in a purely oral tradition. By extension of the latter, it serves as a means of preserving music (although incompletely and imperfectly) over long periods of time, facilitates performance by others, and presents music in a form suitable for study and analysis.
The primary elements of musical sound are pitch, or the location of musical sound on the scale (hence interval, or distance, between notes); duration (hence rhythm, metre, tempo); timbre or tone colour; and volume (hence stress, attack). In practice, no notation can handle all of these elements with precision. Most cope with a selection of them in varying degrees of refinement. Some handle only a single pattern—e.g., a melody, a rhythm; others handle several simultaneous patterns.
Metronome. Music. Tempo. Rhythm. Beats. Ticks. Red metronome with swinging pendulum.
General principles of Western staff notation
The position of staff notation as the first notational system to be described in this article acknowledges its international acceptance in the 20th century. As an indirect result of colonization, of missionary activity, and of ethnomusicological research—not because of any innate superiority—it has become a common language among many musical cultures.
Common symbols used in modern music
Staff notation, as it has developed, is essentially a graph. Its vertical axis is pitch, and its horizontal axis is time, and note heads are dots plotting the graph’s curve. The five horizontal lines of a musical staff function like horizontal rulings of graph paper, bar lines like vertical rulings. In practice, the system is far more complex and sophisticated than this. The vertical axis of pitch operates to represent melodic contour in music for a single instrument or voice, but, when several staves are combined to form a score, the principle breaks down, each staff being a self-contained vertical system. Representation of time (duration) by horizontal spacing is used only in a very limited way. It is in reality made almost redundant because the symbol for a note gives the necessary information itself: not its absolute duration but its duration in relation to the notes around it. These symbols are as follows; each has half the duration of its neighbour to the left:
Music notation: Duration notes.
A system of “rests” measures silence in the same way:
Music notation: system of rests.
A dot placed to the right of a note head increases by half the duration of that note. Such symbols when placed on a staff may indicate relative pitch and relative duration. In the grid, lines represent alternate notes of the scale and the spaces the intervening notes. Pitch and duration may be fixed by supplying two further indications: a clef and a tempo mark. The clef assigns a definite pitch to a given line of the staff; the first clef fixes the second line up as the G (g′) above middle C (c′):
Music notation: clef and tempo marks.
Tempo and duration
The tempo mark is a sign that lies outside the staff. It appears above and may be a precise fixing of one duration (“♩ = 120 MM” means that the quarter note lasts 1/120 of a minute, or one-half second), or it may be an approximate verbal indication setting tempo by reference to accepted conventions (allegro, or quickly; moderato, or moderate speed; etc.).
Staff notation is well adapted to two fundamental aspects of Western music: harmony and rhythm. For harmony, note symbols can easily be placed vertically together on a single stem, and these notes need not be all of the same duration; or more than one stem may be used to indicate multiple melodic lines in the musical texture. For rhythm, the existence of an underlying regular pulse, or stress, must be indicated. This is achieved by two devices: the bar line and the time signature. The bar line primarily indicates a point of main stress. Bar lines are usually equally spaced as to duration, though there are numerous exceptions. A time signature indicates, first, the duration of the space between two bar lines (a measure, or bar); and, second, the subsidiary stress patterns within that space. A supplementary system for indicating stress is the device of linking successive notes together by beaming, or stroking. Two eighth notes may be linked together as shown in (a); four sixteenth notes (b); or a mixed group of values (c):
time signature
The notes indicate the pitch of each sound, and rhythmic figures (e.g., eighth notes, or quavers, connected by beams) indicate its duration.
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Music notation: system for indicating stress, linking successive notes together by beaming, or stroking.
The implication of such grouping is generally that the first note carries a stress. Beaming thus may be used either to reinforce the stress patterns of the time signature (the metre) or to contradict it and set up a cross rhythm.
