How to Read Music: Intro

Oh boy, here we go.

This post starts another series, on a topic that is searched for constantly on the internet: How to read music.

Let's be real: it's similar to learning a new language. It takes time, effort, practice, and if you go years and years without using it, you can lose it. Whether you've read music before or are a fresh newbie, we're going to start at the most basic concepts and build your knowledge from the ground up.

Let's get started.

All music exists on what we call a "staff". It consists of five lines, and four spaces.

We always count the lines and spaces from the bottom going up.

An oval on the staff is called a note. Notes can be either on the spaces, or on the lines.

Now, we will place one note on the second line, and one note on the third space.

Try answering the following question: Which note is on the fourth line?

The answer is B. If you count up from the bottom line, the second note (letter B) is on the 4th line. Practice doing two more:

Which note is on the 3rd space?

Which note is on the 2nd line?

The answers are C and A. Get the idea? Each music note is either on a line or a space.

The higher the oval is located on our staff, the higher the sound. The lower the note is on the staff, the lower it sounds. Can you tell which notes are higher?

In the top example, the second note is higher. In the bottom example, the first note is higher.

Other parts of the staff look like this:

Double Bar Line : It means the song is over.

Bar line: Line that separates beats of music in order to read them more clearly.

Measure: The unit that contains a small grouping of beats. Beats are usually grouped in units of 2, 3, and 4 most commonly.

The Clef: The clef tells the musicians how to read the notes on the lines and spaces. Different instruments can use different clefs, depending if their instrument is high sounding, or low sounding. The piano uses two clefs at once.

Out of the clefs above, we're going to start with the first one on the left: The Treble Clef.

Here are some of the instruments that use the treble clef:

-Female voice

-Child's voice

-Violin

-Clarinet

-Flute

-Trumpet

-French Horn

-Saxophone

-Bells/Xylophone

-Right hand of the piano

-Guitar

The Treble Clef circles around the second line on the staff. We call this line the "G" line. This is also why the treble clef is sometimes called the "G" clef.

All notes that we place on this second line are the note G.

To read music, all you really need to know are the letters of the alphabet. If you know that, you're set! The musical alphabet uses only 7 letters out of the 26 letters in the alphabet.

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

What happens once we get to G? There is no "H". We simply start over again on "A".

Moving up the staff (higher), we go forward in the alphabet.

Notice again that we can start with our second line "G", and then we start over on A. Then we progress up and forward through the alphabet. Notice that each line and space steps up to the next letter.

Likewise, when we go lower on the staff, we go backwards in the alphabet.

When we get all the way back to A, we jump backwards to G, and continue to go backwards in the alphabet again. As long as you remember the 2nd line (the one the treble clef curls around) is G, you can just count up or down to identify notes. Next, I'll show you a few tricks and cheats to help remember which lines and spaces are which letters. The tricks are helpful, but first make sure you understand the relationship between the lines and the spaces. Each time you go up one line to the next space, or one space to the next line, you are going forward to the next letter (or backwards, if you're going down).

Here are some cheats to make it easier to remember note names.

All line notes (starting from the bottom, of course) use the phrase "Every Good Boy Does Fine". Each beginning letter of each word represents the musical note name. For space notes, you can spell the word "FACE" starting from the bottom and going up, using the note names of each space note.

That's it! (Really?!) Well, for today anyway. We learned how to identify pitches, or how high or low of a note you should play. What we will touch on next time is how to read rhythm; how long to short to play a note. You need to know how to read both pitch and rhythm in order to successfully read music!

Now comes the hard part: Practicing. I'm going to link you to an amazing website where you can play a game to practice learning your note names:

https://www.musictheory.net/exercises/note

After you think you're pretty good at identifying the notes, you're ready for the next lesson in the series. If you see a symbol show up on the practice exercise that looks like a hashtag or a lowercase b, don't worry about it for now. Just match the symbol with the correct pitch. Sometimes the note may go above or below the five lines and spaces. Those are called "ledger lines". Just keep counting up or down your lines and spaces, and you'll get the correct note. :)

See you next time!

Music and Therapy

Music therapy is a field I've always been interested in as I've studied my own field: I do feel a lot of what we do in the music education world can sometimes be similar to what music therapists do. I started doing more in-depth research on exactly what Music Therapy is and isn't; and I wanted to share some of those discoveries with you today.

The American Music Therapy Association has an amazing website full of a ton of resources; many of the things I'll share today were learned on their website. To get started, here is a really neat clip about Larry, and what music therapy did for him after suffering a seizure later in his life.

Music therapy can be an amazing, life altering source of comfort for many different people. Before we get any further, I did want to dispel a few things about what music therapy IS and ISN'T according to the American Music Therapy Association.

Music therapists must have a bachelor’s degree or higher in music therapy from an accredited college or university, which includes 1200 hours of clinical training. Music therapists must hold their own credentials that are issued through the Certification Board for Music Therapists. They have to study and pass those board exams like many others in the medical field. Some states also require specific licenses for board-certified music therapists. Music Therapy is an evidence-based health profession with a strong research foundation. There are many clinical studies that prove the medical benefits and effects of music therapy on patients.

These are medical professionals with very specific knowledge who work with patients on very specific goals. Music therapy is NOT:

1. Famous people singing at hospitals

2. Music educators/teachers

3. A teacher playing background music while her class works

4. A piano player playing in a hotel lobby

What music therapists ACTUALLY do: (per the musictherapy.org site)

-Work with patients to regain speech after surviving a wounds and other injuries

-Work with older adults to lessen the effects of dementia.

-Work with children and adults to reduce asthma episodes.

-Work with hospitalized patients to reduce pain.

-Work with children who have autism to improve communication capabilities.

-Work with premature infants to improve sleep patterns and increase weight gain.

-Work with people who have Parkinson’s disease to improve motor function.

It's AMAZING that music can have such profound medical differences. The following video is lengthy in its entirely (20-25 minutes) but I'll give you specific places to visit.

1. Start at 9:25 (Nine minutes, twenty-five seconds in) to follow the story of Forrest, who couldn't talk at all after an accident, to completing learning how to speak again.

2. Start at 42:00. (Forty-two minutes in). They will discuss the medical benefits specifically of music therapy on cancer patients, and how it's used for pain managements. Watch for at least 10 minutes to see the two patients and difference music made for them.

The biggest takeaway we need to remember is that music therapy is a legitimate, science-based method of treatment for many individuals. If you visit the Association's official website, they offer many resources on very specific ways music therapy can help those with Alzheimer's, Autism, those in the military (PTSD), those in hospice, those in correctional facilities, in regards to trauma, and coping with emotions.

I learned that this is something I could easily add to my own knowledge base; I lack all of the necessary medical training despite having the musical training. My respect for this profession has exponentially increased, and I'm glad to know there are avenues out there to help heal people where traditional medical interventions have failed. I hope that this post has helped educate others to not only the legitimacy of music therapy, but as an option for treatment if you or ever a loved one may need it.

The next post will start focusing on how to actually read music! It will more than likely be another series! Thanks for reading.

-DMM

The Science of Sound: Part III

Have you ever wondered what your vocal cords look like? Why do some people sound the way they do? Today we will dig into those topics during the third installment of the Science of Sound.

If you missed Part I or II, just scroll down the page.

Remember, all sound waves are created by vibrations: this includes your own voice. When we speak (or make any other vocal noise) air passes through our vocal cords, causing vibrations. The tighter your vocal cords are, the higher the pitch of the sound they make. If we were to put a camera straight down our throat to look at our vocal cords, we'd see something like this:

Basically, when we go to breathe, our vocal cords open like the picture on the left. When you go to speak, the folds close up. When you push air through them, it creates a vibration, which in turn creates the sound of your voice. Since everyone's vocal muscles are shaped slightly differently, everyone has a unique sound to their voice.

Neat stuff, right? The folks at PowertoSing have created an excellent resource, and the video below shows you live action shots of your vocal cords in action. It also shows you how we make high pitches and low pitches, and what our vocal cords look like making those sounds. It's about five minutes, but well worth it:

When I showed this video to middle school students, half of them were always grossed out by it. Then again, I think middle school students tend to be grossed out by literally everything or nothing at all!

While we're talking about vocal cords, I wanted to talk about some common misconceptions about voice. Remember, everyone's vocal cords are unique to them. In general, females have vocal chords that produce higher pitches, and males lower. However, that's not always the case. Boys start with higher voices that lower in pitch as they mature; but some men (through practice and development of the vocal muscles) are able to keep that higher pitched voice and sing well with it. (Think Justin Timberlake, Michael Jackson, etc.)

In fact, in the Renaissance Era it used to be quite common for young boys within church choirs to be castrated so that they retained their higher pitched voices for use in the chorus. (Women were not allowed to sing at this point in history). These castrated, male singers were called "castrati" singers. Unfortunately, this practice continued well into the 1800s. Below is a link to a recording of Alessandro Moreschi, singing Ave Maria. He lived 1858-1922, and is widely considered to be the last castrato singer.

Thankfully, there are many successful male singers today who don't need such drastic measures to sing high. Since the vocal cords are muscles, they can be trained like anything else. Here is a short clip of Mitch Grassi singing with Pentatonix; he has the highest pitched voice of the singers in the group. Traditionally, male voices are grouped lowest to highest as follows: Bass, Baritone, Tenor. Mitch is a classified in a group above Tenor, known as a countertenor. The whole video is long, but you'll get the idea quickly.

Just as males can have naturally higher voices, females can have naturally lower voices. Traditionally, female voices are classes low to high as alto, mezzo-soprano, and soprano. Just like the males however, there are women who can sing lower. They are classified as contralto singers. Here is a fun video of Helen Leahey attempting to break the world record of the lowest note recorded by a female.

My point in all of this is that everyone's vocal sound is unique; you shouldn't be swayed one way or the other that you should sound a certain way. If you would like to sing higher or lower, you can train your voice to do so through patience and hard work. (Similar to how an athlete trains to run longer distances, lift more weights, etc).

If you're interested in hearing more of Pentatonix, I highly recommend them. There is a link at the top of the page you can click to check out their albums.

I went a bit longer than I wanted on that, but I had fun! We'll save my other topic for next week: Why does sound carry over water? How does sound travel in general?

Thanks for reading! If you like what you see, be sure to subscribe here and follow me on Facebook and Instagram!

-DMM