A presentation delivered by Nads Hassan (http://nadshassan.com) at Interesting Monday #3.

1. Music Across Cultures-
Pitch and Tuning
Nads Hassan

2. What is music?
A form of art, who’s medium is sound.
What makes a sound music and not
noise?
• Pitch
• Rhythm

3. What is music?
A form of art, who’s medium is sound.
What makes a sound music and not
noise?
• Pitch (melody, harmony)
• Rhythm (tempo, meter, articulation)
• Dynamics, timbre

4. Watch these people sing
• What do they have in common?

5. Pentatonic Scale
• All the songs were based on the same
five notes.
• These form the pentatonic scale
• Easily played – black keys on
keyboard.

6. Pentatonic Scale
• These notes form the basis of melody
around the world.
• Human instinct – Bobby McFerrin at
the World Science Festival ‘09
• Used to introduce children to music –
toy xylophones etc
• Uses in film music, religious music
and ‘anthemic’ music

7. Scales
• Selection of notes used to form
melodies
• Notes you choose
• How high or low they are
• The pattern they make when they are
played together

8. Scales
• What’s the distance between them?
• Placed too close together, it’s difficult
to distinguish between notes
• Think of rungs on a ladder

9. Scales
• Western scales has 12 rungs -each is
called a semitone
• Arabic Maqqam (‫ﻣﻘﺎﻡ‬‎) has 12- each is
called a quarternote
• Chinese and Indian music have
potentially much more

10. Pitch
• Tells you how high or low each note is
• Every 12th rung is an octave
• The sequence continues
• C4, C5, C6 etc

11. How do we get these notes?
• Sine Waves
• Height the wave (amplitude) is
loudness
• Frequency (oscillations) is pitch

12. How do we get these notes?
• Decided that A=440Hz
• Whole octave (12 rungs) doubles to
880Hz
• Split evenly between each octave

14. Other systems
• Other cultures follow the same octave
rule but split notes differently.
• Microtonal music – notes smaller than
the ‘rungs’ of western scales, not
playable on a keyboard
• Sound strange and out of tune to an
ear not used to it

15. Thank You
www.nadshassan.com
@nadshassan