Music Theory Fundamentals
100 flashcards by MentisLibrary
Reading the staff and clefs, pitch and intervals, major and minor scales, key signatures, rhythm and meter, triads and chords, basic harmony, musical form, and expression marks, for beginning musicians and first-year theory students.
- What is a measure?
- The span between two barlines, holding the number of beats fixed by the time signature; also called a bar.
- What is an interval?
- The distance between two pitches, named by a number (letter-name count) and a quality (perfect, major, minor, augmented or diminished).
- What is a chord?
- Three or more pitches sounded together, or implied when played one after another as an arpeggio.
- What is a triad?
- A three-note chord built of two stacked thirds: a root, a third above it and a fifth above it.
- What is an octave?
- The interval between a pitch and the next pitch with the same letter name, twelve half steps away; the upper note vibrates at exactly twice the frequency.
- What is a key signature?
- The group of sharps or flats written after the clef at the start of each staff, applying to those notes in every octave for the whole piece until it changes.
- What is modulation?
- A change of key within a piece; a pivot chord modulation uses a chord that belongs to both the old and the new key to make the change smooth.
- What is syncopation?
- Rhythm that places accents on weak beats or between the beats, against the stress pattern the meter leads you to expect.
- What is the staff?
- Five horizontal lines and the four spaces between them on which notes are written. The higher a notehead sits, the higher its pitch.
- What does the treble clef do?
- Also called the G clef, it curls around the second line from the bottom and names that line G4, the G just above middle C.
- What does the bass clef do?
- Also called the F clef, its two dots straddle the fourth line from the bottom and name that line F3, the F below middle C.
- Name the lines and spaces of the treble staff.
- Lines from bottom to top are E G B D F; spaces from bottom to top spell F A C E.
- Name the lines and spaces of the bass staff.
- Lines from bottom to top are G B D F A; spaces from bottom to top are A C E G.
- What is a ledger line?
- A short line drawn above or below the staff to extend its range for notes that fall outside the five lines.
- What is the grand staff?
- A treble staff and a bass staff joined by a brace on the left, read together as one system.
- What is middle C?
- The C nearest the middle of the piano keyboard, called C4 in scientific pitch notation, sounding at about 261.6 Hz.
- How does scientific pitch notation name a pitch?
- By letter name plus an octave number, with the number increasing at each C: after B3 comes C4 (middle C), and A4 is the tuning A at 440 Hz.
- What does a sharp do?
- It raises a note by one half step; F sharp is the black key immediately to the right of F.
- What does a flat do?
- It lowers a note by one half step; B flat is the black key immediately to the left of B.
- What does a natural sign do?
- It cancels a sharp or flat, whether it came from the key signature or from an earlier accidental in the bar, restoring the plain letter-name pitch.
- How long does an accidental stay in effect?
- For the rest of the measure, for that note in that octave only; the barline cancels it unless the note is tied across the barline.
- What are enharmonic equivalents?
- Two different names for the same sounding pitch, such as F sharp and G flat, or E sharp and F.
- Half step vs whole step
- A half step (semitone) is the smallest interval in Western music, two adjacent keys on the piano; a whole step (tone) is two half steps.
- What is the chromatic scale?
- All twelve pitches inside an octave, played in order by half steps.
- What is the whole note?
- An open notehead with no stem, worth four beats in 4/4 time.
- What is the half note?
- An open notehead with a stem, worth two beats in 4/4 time, half a whole note.
- What is the quarter note?
- A filled notehead with a stem, worth one beat in any time signature with 4 on the bottom.
- What is the eighth note?
- A filled notehead with a stem and one flag (or one beam), worth half a beat in 4/4; two of them make one quarter note.
- What is the sixteenth note?
- A filled notehead with two flags or two beams, worth a quarter of a beat in 4/4; four of them make one quarter note.
- How do you tell a whole rest from a half rest?
- A whole rest hangs down from the fourth line; a half rest sits on top of the third line. Both are small rectangles.