<^Music > What’s the sound that’s heard the world ’round? That makes you feel happy one minute, and sad the next? That gets your voice a-humming, your hands a-clapping, and your feet a-tapping? That sound is music, of course! What turns a sound into music? There are many different kinds of music played by people around the world. But humans everywhere love musical sounds that have pleasing and easy to remember patterns of both pitch and rhythm. In other words, we all love a tune with a beat!
Drumming is mostly rhythm in patterns than can be as simple as hand-clapping, or extremely complex. We sing songs by voicing words, one after the other, at different frequencies, or pitch, in the combination we call a melody. Most music mixes together different sounds from different instruments. Every one of these sounds has its own individual properties of pitch and loudness. Mix together different amounts of each, in bursts of sound, one after the other, and you’re making beautiful music!
Most European and American music is played with instruments designed to make sounds all in a similar group of pitches, or frequencies, so they will sound good together. Each different and precise pitch is called a note, and the notes are marked with one of the seven letters A, B, C, D, E, F, G. Together they make up a musical “scale,” like the white keys on a piano. But different kinds of music, and different countries, have their own unique scales. Often, the distinctive sound of a particular kind of music comes from which particular scale, or combination of pitches, it uses to make music.
