Conclusion

This course has considered pitch and interval in Western, Arab, Aka and Sundanese musics. It has explored the relationships between the notes that comprise pitch systems and how these relationships are presented spatially and visually. For example, the Western gamut can be laid out as the pattern of white and black keys that comprise a keyboard instrument, or as a series of noteheads placed on the lines and spaces of a staff. Similarly, the Sundanese saléndro system can be presented as a set of keys on a xylophone or a series of numbers in cipher notation.

The course has also incorporated some practical training in the use of staff notation. You have learned to identify the symbols for notes and accidentals, and to realise notated pitches with the help of a keyboard instrument. If you are new to reading and writing music, it can take some time to internalise these skills, so it may be helpful to return to parts of this course over the coming weeks, or to work through certain activities more than once. With continued exposure and engagement, identifying notes on the staff will come more naturally.

The later sections of this course introduced three ways of organising pitch outside of the Western system. You have considered 5-note pitch systems from central Africa and Sunda, as well as the pitch system used in Arab music, with 24 possible pitches. You have seen how it is not only the number of pitches that varies from system to system, but also the size of the intervals between notes. In the 12-note Western gamut, adjacent notes are 100 cents apart, but in the Sundanese saléndro pitch system, notes are approximately 240 cents apart, and in the Arab pitch system, the idealised distance is 50 cents.

Finally, the course has explored how, although notes and intervals are discussed with reference to ideal numbers and ratios, actual practice is less straightforward. For example, singers and instrumentalists regularly perform sharp or flat of abstract ideals, and some degree of tolerance for supposed out-of-tune-ness seems built into all kinds of musical traditions. Further, some musical practices make calculated use of discrepancies in tuning to produce special musical effects; for example, the shimmering sound of gamelan music or the dense unison of Andean flute music. In fact, in some musical traditions, intervals ‘float’: they may be larger or smaller depending on the ensemble or the community. As this suggests, pitch and tuning in actual music making are anything but straightforward!