A scale is a sequence of notes (known as ‘degrees’) that provides the raw material for a piece of music. The intervals between the notes follow a set pattern that depends on the type of scale. The ...

While major and minor scales have seven notes, pentatonic scales have only five. Essentially a major scale minus the 4th and 7th – C D E G A – the major pentatonic is a staple of folk, blues, rock and ...

Major scales can be in any key, but a simple major scale is what you get if you start C on a piano and go up, playing only white notes (listen to the audio above to hear examples of the all the ...

Going back to the piano keyboard, the notes are arranged in order from the lowest on the furthest left, up to the highest on the furthest right. So, to the right of the white note A, you would find a ...

Talking about 12 notes in music generally applies to music from the West and from some other parts of the world, but certainly isn’t an exhaustive system for all music. Arabic music had a 17-tone ...

Solmization, the practice of assigning syllables to the different “steps” of the musical scale, originated in ancient India. Fast forward a few thousand years to 6th-century Spain, when ...

The fact that singers fail to consistently hit the right notes may have implications for the development of musical scales as well. At issue is not whether singers hit the right or wrong note, but ...

The frequency of every note occurs in a simple ratio to those of other notes, such as 3:2 or 2:1. Dale Purves, a neuroscientist at Duke University, set out to understand if there was a ­biological ...