WEBVTT

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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
what to say and when to say it.

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A piece of written music
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
and when to play it.

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Aesthetically speaking,
there's a world of difference

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between, say, Beethoven 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
can sound quite complicated,

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the logic behind musical notes
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
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
or what note to play,

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and the left-to-right axis

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tells the performer 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
any instrument you can think of.

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In the Western music tradition,

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pitches are named after
the first seven letters of the alphabet,

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A, B, C,

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D, E, F, and G.

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After that, the cycle repeats itself:

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A, B, C, D, E, F, G,

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A, B, C, D, E, F, 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
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,

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can play 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 weird-looking figure
placed at the beginning of the staff,

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which 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
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 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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(Ticking)

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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
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 add 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
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, 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, 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, two, three, four;

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one, two, three, 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
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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(Music)

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

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Let's add another instrument
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
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 Justin Bieber.