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When we watch a film or a play,

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we know that the actors

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probably learned their lines from a script,

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which essentially tells them

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what to say

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and when to say it.

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A piece of written music

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operates on exactly the same principle.

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In a very basic sense,

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it tells a performer what to play

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and when to play it.

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Aesthetically speaking, there's a world of difference

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between, say, Beethoven

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and Justin Bieber,

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but both artists have used

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the same building blocks to create their music:

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notes.

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And although the end result

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can sound quite complicated,

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the logic behind musical notes

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is actually pretty straightforward.

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Let's take a look

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at the foundational elements to music notation

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and how they interact to create a work of art.

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Music is written on five parallel lines

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that go across the page.

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These five lines are called a staff,

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and a staff operates on two axes:

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up and down

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and left to right.

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The up-and-down axis tells the performer

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the pitch of the note

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or what note to play,

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and the left-to-right axis tells the performer

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the rhythm of the note

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or when to play it.

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Let's start with pitch.

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To help us out, we're going to use a piano,

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but this system works for pretty much

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any instrument you can think of.

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In the Western music tradition,

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pitches are named after

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the first seven letters of the alphabet,

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A,

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B,

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C,

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D,

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E,

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F,

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and G.

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After that, the cycle repeats itself:

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A,

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B,

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C,

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D,

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E,

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F,

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G,

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A,

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B,

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C,

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D,

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E,

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F,

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G,

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and so on.

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But how do these pitches get their names?

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Well, for example, if you played an F

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and then played another F

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higher or lower on the piano,

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you'd notice that they sound pretty similar

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compared to, say, a B.

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Going back to the staff,

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every line and every space between two lines

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represents a separate pitch.

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If we put a note on one of these lines

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or one of these spaces,

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we're telling a performer to play that pitch.

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The higher up on the staff a note is placed,

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the higher the pitch.

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But there are obviously many, many more pitches

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than the nine that these lines and spaces gives us.

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A grand piano, for example, can play

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88 separate notes.

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So how do we condense 88 notes onto a single staff?

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We use something called a clef.

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A clef is a weird looking figure

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placed at the beginning of the staff

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and it acts like a reference point,

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telling you that a particular line or space

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corresponds to a specific note on your instrument.

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If we want to play notes that aren't on the staff,

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we kind of cheat and draw extra little lines

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called ledger lines

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and place the notes on them.

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If we have to draw so many ledger lines

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that it gets confusing,

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then we need to change to a different clef.

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As for telling a performer when to play the notes,

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two main elements control this:

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the beat

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and the rhythm.

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The beat of a piece of music is,

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by itself, kind of boring.

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It sounds like this.

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Notice that it doesn't change,

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it just plugs along quite happily.

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It can go slow

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or fast

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or whatever you like, really.

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The point is that just like the second hand on a clock

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divides one minute into sixty seconds,

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with each second just as long as every other second,

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the beat divides a piece of music

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into little fragments of time

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that are all the same length,

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beats.

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With a steady beat as a foundation,

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we can start adding rhythm to our pitches,

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and that's when music really starts to happen.

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This is a quarter note.

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It's the most basic unit of rhythm,

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and it's worth one beat.

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This is a half note, and it's worth two beats.

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This whole note here is worth four beats,

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and these little guys are eighth notes,

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worth half a beat each.

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"Great," you say, "what does that mean?"

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You might have noticed

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that across the length of a staff,

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there are little lines dividing it into small sections.

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These are bar lines

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and we refer to each section as a bar.

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At the beginning of a piece of music,

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just after the clef,

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is something called the time signature,

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which tells a performer how many beats are in each bar.

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This says there are two beats in each bar,

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this says there are three,

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this one four,

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and so on.

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The bottom number tells us what kind of note

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is to be used as the basic unit for the beat.

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One corresponds to a whole note,

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two to a half note,

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four to a quarter note,

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and eight to an eighth note,

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and so on.

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So this time signature here

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tells us that there are four quarter notes in each bar,

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one,

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two,

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three,

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four;

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one,

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two,

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three,

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four,

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and so on.

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But like I said before,

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if we just stick to the beat,

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it gets kind of boring,

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so we'll replace some quarter notes

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with different rhythms.

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Notice that even though the number of notes

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in each bar has changed,

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the total number of beats in each bar hasn't.

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So what does our musical creation sound like?

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Eh, sounds okay, but maybe a bit thin, right?

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Let's add another instrument

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with its own pitch and rhythm.

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Now it's sounding like music.

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Sure, it takes some practice

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to get used to reading it quickly

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and playing what we see on our instrument,

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but, with a bit of time and patience,

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you could be the next Beethoven

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or

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Justin Bieber.