Talk:Note

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[edit] Older comments

I have not found a discussion in Wikipedia about the reason for the letter "A" representing the pitch at 440 Hz (and its octaves). I tell my music theory classes that it seems arbitrary. If I were to invent the system of assigning letters to pitches, I would assign the letter "A" to the pitch that is normally called "C." After all, C is the most basic scale of tonal music, having no sharps or flats. I asked a theory professor about this, and he related the assignment of specific pitches to specific letters to an ancient Greek system of notation, but I have forgotten what he said. I would appreciate it very much if someone would address this issue. --G DeBenedetti


This needs a re-write. The picture is great, but:

  • the notes A,B,C... are not seperated by tones.
  • "rung" is ambigious. notes are placed across lines or in spaces.
  • accidental signs change pitch, but accidental notes are those which have been modified by sings to be out of the scale of a piece. This definition becomes shaky in pieces that don't use the diatonic scale.

Part of the problem lies in that the terminology of the subject itself ambiguous. A note is a piece of sound, eg the C sharp key on my piano plays a note. On the page is printed a note, which is C sharp. These two uses of the word to me are different in some way which I can't yet qualify. A rough attempt:

  • Generally: a single sound of constant pitch
  • Musically: a pitch which has a name assigned to it. (eg C sharp; mi )
  • Specifically: the event of a sound being played in a piece of music, or the symbol in printed music representing the sound to be played.


I have the funny feeling I wrote the above, a long time ago. déjà écrit? -- Tarquin

Tarquin's bold moves on the tuning page inspired me to tackle this article. Here's what I deleted and why:

A note in a piece of music either belongs to the scale of the music or is a whole number of octaves away from a note of the scale. It also has a name and a symbol in the notation of the music.
I felt this was unecessarily complex and didn't really add any useful information.
A
tone
B
semitone
C
tone
D
tone
E
semitone
F
tone
G
tone
A


The tone is almost twice a semitone and in modern western music is exactly twice a semitone.
A lot of this stuff is info that belongs on the Scale and Notation pages and is not relevant to an article on notes
after the letter (e.g. C# or F#)
this usage of sharp and flat nomenclature is really secondary and relates only to the verbal usage of speaking about notes. I replaced it with the common usage in notation.
A given piece of music will define at it's beginning The set of accidentals used defines the key signature of their scale.

In Italian notation the notes of scales are given in terms of Do - Re - Mi - Fa - Sol - La - Si rather than C - D - E - F - G - A - B. These names follow the original names given by Guido d'Arezzo, who had taken them from the first syllabs of the first seven verses of a Gregorian Chant. "Do" replaced the originary "ut".

Gen    Ita

 C     Do
 D     Re
 E     Mi
 F     Fa
 G     Sol
 A     La
 B     Si
Again this is all key/scale/notation stuff that is duplicated (over and over again) elsewhere.

JFQ

This article really needs to be integrated with quarter note, half note, etc., and probably also the sharp and flat articles. The stuff about score and staff really belongs somewhere else. There is already a solfege page, which could use some of the info scattered in this talk page and elsewhere. I want to start on this pretty soon, but we shgould really generate some ideas about what exactly belongs in the note article. Specifically, should sharps and flats be discussed here? If not, where should they go? -- Merphant

This seems a logical place for sharps and flats. A "note" notates pitch and duration, and a flat or sharp is part of the indication of pitch. Whether it's noted in the key signature or nearby is simply "accidental". -- Someone else 02:10 Nov 3, 2002 (UTC)

In continental Europe (or parts thereof), the B is replaced by a H. This deserves a mention, by someone knowledgable of the subject. -- Egil 19:26 Mar 16, 2003 (UTC)

I think you pretty much said what needs to be said ;-) B flat is written B, B is H -- Tarquin 19:27 Mar 16, 2003 (UTC)
Does anybody know why this is, by the way? I looked in Grove the other day to find out, but it didn't explain it. I'm losing sleep over it. --Camembert

My Oxford Companion has plenty on this, but it'll take me a while to write up ... I'll try & work on it tonight - Tarquin 19:35 Mar 16, 2003 (UTC)

Excellent! I look forward to it. --Camembert

Done. And I forgot to put a source note in -- it's the Oxford Companion to Music, 10th ed, 1970. (which I bought for a quid in a library sale!) -- Tarquin 19:56 Mar 16, 2003 (UTC)

Marvellous. Thanks, tarq --Camembert

There's something wrong, here, but I'm not sure what. Which is B and which is H is more complicated than that, but I've never heard what the correct rule is. See, though, for example, Brahms' B-Flat Piano Concerto: In German, the key is given as "H-dur." --Clayton D. Jones 04:46, 5 Apr 2005 (UTC)


Nice work, but it's very Western-centric. There are 24 note octaves and so-on. Indian, Arabic, etc. Anyone with an in-depth knowledge of non-Western music out there? --echidna 15:15, 1 Sep 2003 (UTC)


♯ and ♭ -- will these show on all platforms? -- Tarquin 10:16, 1 Oct 2003 (UTC)

  • Probably not on platforms where Unicode is not supported; there should be something like alt text for Unicode characters..... Dysprosia 10:20, 1 Oct 2003 (UTC)
  • Neither characters show on Windows 5.1 XP Professional, IE6 4.65.244.206 08:03, 16 Mar 2004 (UTC)
IE still doesn't show it :O (lack of fonts?) Firefox shows it very well :) :)

[edit] Individual articles for notes

Maybe this would be a little overkill, but how about a group of articles, one for each musical note? (E.G. an article about A, an article about B flat, etc.) The articles would contain facts about each note, similar to the group of articles about numbers. For example:

A is the standard tuning pitch (440 Hz).
B flat is one of the common trumpet pitches.
F is the most common car horn pitch.
I dunno... it doesn't seem to me that there would be enough to write about each note to justify giving each one its own article. Such facts could probably be presented in a list here at note. --bdesham 04:31, 11 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I rather like that idea; we could also include lists of compositions in respective key. --Adam J. Sporka 21:33, August 26, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Note name

The phrase "note name" is used in two senses in this article: the letter name and the duration. I propose that the the term "note value" is the standard term encompassing quarter notes, eighth notes, and so on.

Speaking of which, the table of note values could be expanded with small graphics of each one. I'd be happy to do that. --Wahoofive 04:46, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Sounds good. Hyacinth 05:33, 5 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Looking at JFQ's comment above, how about to include a table that would contain a comparison of the note names across different languages? I will be happy to collect all contributions on my talk page. --Adam J. Sporka 21:57, August 26, 2005 (UTC)

I have created a table collecting most namings. I moved in the frequencies (one octave) as well. It would be nice to add a row with small pictures of each note on a staff. I do not have the tools. Who volunteers? −Woodstone 12:41:35, 2005-08-28 (UTC)

The table under Note Names seems to have some problems. AFAIK, the entries in the rows named "Flat (text)" and "Sharp (text)" are excusive to German, and should be included in the German row. The English names are simply "F sharp" or "B flat", and could just be included in the row of English note names. Also, the "French/Italian/Spanish/Portuguese" row should include names for the sharp and flat notes. I don't know the specifics for each language, but they likely follow solfege names. --Pesto 18:25, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Do sostenido for sharp, e.g., and Si bemol for bemol. In Spanish. --euyyn 19:14, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Staff position

I notice there is no page for "staff position" and no entry (including this one) refers significantly to the lines and spaces of the staff as determinants of the name of the note. Notes can't be placed just anywhere on the staff but must be on a line or space (or ledger line). Is this a policy decision? --Wahoofive 04:46, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)

[edit] History of Note Names

Would someone please add the note names shown in CAPS and lower case letters, with and without apostrophes, to this article? Perhaps under History of... I tried to type examples like a lower case g with 3 apostrophes, but that is apparently code for text formating, because half the preview was in italics. I know the Capital Letters and lower case letters are significant and the apostophes somehow modify the octave, but I can not find definitions anywhere. Maybe if I insert symbols... I think A“ is in the bass clef and g”” is above the treble, but I do not know specifics. Wikipedia has everything else. Please add this soon. --ds5 22:30, 22 April 2006 (UTC)

I had a first go at this. Please have a look. −Woodstone 11:28, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Octave numbering

This page has systematic errors about MIDI octave numbering, and those errors have led to incorrect frequency values in the table at the end of the "Note name" section. In fact, as the page on MIDI correctly states, MIDI pitch number 0 is C(-1). Thus, the MIDI gamut runs from C(-1) to G9, rather than from C0 to G10. In the table at the end of the "Note name" section, the last two columns agree with each other, but both of those columns should be moved up one line in order to agree with the preceding columns. --Lyle Ramshaw

You are partially right. a′= A4 = 440 Hz = MIDI note 69. I have adjusted the octave numbers. −Woodstone 11:54, 27 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Note Frequency

As someone who knows almost nothing about music, one sentence in the "note frequency" section seems problematic to me. It says:

music can be composed of notes at any arbitrary frequency. Since the physical causes of music are vibrations of mechanical systems, they are often measured in hertz (Hz), with 1 Hz = 1 complete vibration per second. For historical and other reasons especially in Western music, only twelve notes of fixed frequencies are used.

This seems just plain wrong. There may be only 12 designated pitch classes, but there are clearly more than twelve labeled frequencies. The beginning of the article says:

a note is either a unit of fixed pitch that has been given a name, or the graphic representation of that pitch in a notation system

There are more than 12 named fixed pitch units, and more than 12 graphic representations....

[edit] Something's missing

The article gracefully fails to explain why is Do represented by C and not by A, which would be the logical choice.

The French language article doesn't explain why "tree" is represented in French by "arbre" rather than "très", which would be the logical choice. </smartaleck> Seriously, the answer is that thinking of "Do" as the beginning of note-naming, or the "first" note in a scale, is a very recent invention, whereas the association of solfege syllables with note names is much more ancient. I don't think it's necessary to explain this misunderstanding in the article, however. —Wahoofive (talk) 03:15, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

Well, actually, I think this explanation is missing. I just searched(!) for this very question and I am glad to have found at least a small piece of discussion about it here. So, when and why (and by whom) was it decided to start from C (Do) and not from A (La)? Would be nice if somebody knowledgable could include this in the article. Thanks! Madmaxx 23:01, 17 December 2006 (UTC)

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