DU 1. Repeat, please!
Remembering
What do you remember about what you did last year in Music lessons?
(Work in group of 3 with your classmates and brainstorm).
The qualities of the sound
When an object vibrates, your body has a reaction: your eardrum receives that vibration and carries it to your brain.
That is a sound. The world, as you can see, is full of them
Each of these sounds has some qualities that make them unique. Let’s learn them:
- Duration: a sound can last a second or a minute: short or long.
- Intensity: a sound can scare you or be almost imperceptible: strong or weak.
- Timbre: it depends on what produces the sound: animal, person, instrument, etc.
- Pitch: it depends on the number of vibrations of the resounding object: deep and high.
All of these qualities will help us understand how music is done.
In order to check that you have understood it, you can do the following exercise.
Activity about the qualities of the sound.
Read and complete:
Notes and rests
To represent sounds in music, we use some signs called notes.
These are the notes we are going to work with:
When there are no sounds, we use the signs called rests.
The scale. Tone and half-tone.
The scale is a group of notes ordered in a rising or descending way.
There are different types of scales, but the most common is the one made up of 7 consecutive sounds.
The one we all know is C major. Why don’t we review it?
A tone is the largest distance between two sounds, whereas a half-tone is the smallest distance.
One tone is made up of two half-tones.
In C major scale the distance between the sounds are the following:
We will listen to these audios so as to distinguish a tone and a half-tone:
Tone
Half-tone
Dynamics. Tempo. Accent.
Let´s remember the terms referred to dynamics, tempo and accent, because they will be used in the new scores.
There is a group of terms to refer to the speed to play a song:
Not all the songs are played in the same way: some are more cheerful, some are for dancing, some others are for sleeping, etc.
We use different terms that help us mark that character:
Review
Decide whether these statements are true or false:
Feedback
False
This term of character denotes mellowness/softness.
Feedback
True
It means that the speed of the score is fast.
Feedback
False
A tone is the one made up of two half-tones.
Feedback
False
A quarter note is made up of four sixteenth notes.
Feedback
False
The language used is Italian.
Feedback
True
It is the abbreviation of mezzo piano
Feedback
False
Vivo together with Vivace and Presto denote that the scale needs to be played very fast.
Feedback
True
This terms means cheerful
The voice
Human beings have the voice to produce sounds.
This is the result of our vocal tract where the respiratory system, vocal cords and resonators (mouth and nose) take part.
How it works: the air we take with our respiratory system makes the vocal cords vibrate and these produce the sound that will be amplified in the resonators.
Voices can be classified according to the pitch they cover:
- Female voices: they can be soprano (the higher ones), mezzosoprano and contralto (the deeper ones).
- Male voices: they can be tenor (the higher ones), baritone and bass (the deeper ones).
- Treble voices: these are the voices of boys and girl, that is, your voices.
Voices group in a formation called choir. There can be different types: mixed, only for men, only for women, for treble
voices, etc.
Families of instruments
Instruments can be classified in different ways.
Today we are going to classify them according to their resounding principle (that is, how the sound is produced in each of them):
- Chordophones: the sound is produced when a cord vibrates. In this group we find the violin, cello, piano, guitar, harpsichord, lute, koto, large guitar, Jew’s harp, hurdy-gurdy, banjo, among others.
Aerophones: the sound is produced by the action of the air in a elements that vibrates. Here we have the accordion, clarinet, flute, trumpet, harmonica, tuba, among others.
- Idiophones: the sound is produced by the own vibration of the instrument. Like for example the reco-reco, harpsichords, rattle, castanets, etc.
Membranophones: the sound is produced by the vibration of a membrane when it is struck, like the tambourine, tabor, taiko, kettledrum, bass drum, etc.
- Electrophones: they need electricity to produce the sound, like synthesizers or computers.
Instrumental groups
In previous years we learnt the different families of instruments, types of voices and voice groupings.
Now we will work with instrumental groups.
Throughout history instruments were used as soloists or in groups. Among the different groups we can distinguish:
- Small groups: formations with less than 10 instrumentalists. The name of the groups depend on the number of components, like for example: duet, trio, quartet, quintet, octet, etc. One of the most popular ones is the string quartet (2 violins, viola and cello).
- Big groups:
* Chamber orchestra: it is mainly made up of string instruments, with 20 musicians.
* Band: it is made up of wind and percussion instruments, between 50-70 musicians, but this number is higher nowadays.
* Symphony orchestra: it is made up of string, wind and percussion. It can have between 70-100 musicians and it can sometimes include choirs.
All the groups are directed by an orchestra conductor who uses his/her baton.
The voice, the instruments and their groups
Read and complete:
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