Music Concepts You SHOULD Know - No Music Theory Required!

On this channel, I talk a lot about terminology that musicians use colloquially. These are terms that the average person won't necessarily understand if they've never studied music. But it doesn't have to be that way. I want to help bridge the gap of understanding between musicians and non-musicians. After all, music is something universal, whether you study it formally or not. In this video, I'm going to briefly explain the eight basic elements of music, which at their core, are really very simple. There's no music theory required to understand them. First, a super quick welcome to music theories. If you're returning, welcome back. I appreciate you. Comment below so I can tell you personally. If you're new here, this channel is my dedicated space for all things music. Pop music, music theory, and music history. Don't forget to like and subscribe and hit the notification bell if you haven't already. Rhythm is not something exclusive to music. But within music, it's described as the placement of sounds in time. The reason I mention this first is because music cannot exist without rhythm. In fact, it's the only element that can stand alone, as in a percussive piece. Within the umbrella of rhythm, we study the concepts of beat, which is the basic unit of time in music. This is the pulse that is within a song, or what I like to refer to as the song's heartbeat. Often, this remains unchanged throughout a song. It's measured, or monitored rather, by a metronome. Tempo is the frequency of this beat, measured in beats per minute, more commonly referred to as BPM. The higher the BPM, the faster the song is. Duration is how long a sound or silence lasts, typically notated using music notes and rests. And lastly, meter is the organization of these beats and durations. These are recurring patterns throughout the piece. This is notated by time signatures. Check out my video on time signatures to learn how all this works. Melody is the part of the song that most people recognize. It's defined as the linear or horizontal representation of pitch and rhythm that a listener perceives as a single entity. We see this written across a piece of sheet music. Melody is monophonic, meaning there's only one voice or one line of music occurring. Anything with more than one voice is polyphonic, but more on that in a moment. Melodies are built from scales. It's common for them to stay within a key, but they don't have to. In the most basic sense, melodies can be major or minor. If we're thinking about vocal music, this is really simple to recognize. This is usually what the lead singer is singing. When it comes to instrumental music, it's a little more complicated, but there is still a single, linear, predominant melody present amongst the many instruments playing. Now many sources will tell you that harmony is vertical, but I don't want you to visualize harmony this way. Harmony still moves horizontally. It's even simpler than that. When there are multiple pitches playing at the same time, it's called harmony. Like I said a moment ago, this is referred to as polyphonic. This also describes what we call a Chords are harmony and vice versa. Harmony does not have to be human voices singing together, although this is also considered harmony. Yes, a chord itself is typically stacked vertically. However, chords move horizontally as a chord progression. Harmony can be described as consonant or dissonant, which typically depends on the context within the piece. Dynamics in music refer to the general loudness or quietness of the sound itself. However, dynamics are not just volume. They're also expressive. The traditional western terms to describe loudness are as follows. Pianissimo or very quiet. Piano or quiet. Mezzo piano or moderately quiet. Mezzo forte or moderately loud. Forte or loud. Fortissimo or very loud. The tricky thing about dynamics is that moderately quiet, for example, is different to everyone. There's no practical way to measure this the way we measure tempo with a metronome. So dynamics rely heavily on the feel or expressiveness of the player. This plays a huge role in the emotional range in a piece of music. Think about a song like Never Enough from The Greatest Showman. This is one that many of you designated as an emotional piece in my last video. The very end of the song is very loud, something I'd consider fortissimo. But then in her very last phrase, she makes a drastic shift to very quiet or pianissimo. This next one is something even some professional musicians overlook. This is the structure of the song, better known as song form. This is extremely important to understand if you ever want to play with a band or ensemble. Song form is how the sections of a song are organized. This is what people are referring to when they talk about the verse or the chorus or the bridge of a song. This is one way to describe song form. However, in professional settings, to avoid any confusion, sections are commonly labeled with letters known as rehearsal marks. A, B, C, D, E, etc. There are some very common structures like A, A, A or verse refrain style. For example, I Walk the Line by Johnny Cash, which has the same section repeating throughout. A, B, A, B is a style that varies depending on the song, but it can be considered a verse chorus style. For example, the jazz standard Fly Me to the Moon has distinct A and B sections. But a more modern example is Galway Girl by Ed Sheeran, which has distinct verse and chorus sections. A, A, B, A is another type of verse chorus style song. For example, Somewhere Over the Rainbow from The Wizard of Oz starts with a double A section before going to the B section. Or to make things even more complicated, A, B, C, A, B, C or verse pre-chorus chorus style. Mr. Brightside has a cut and clear example of verse pre-chorus and chorus sections. A, B, A, B, C, B or verse chorus bridge style. Ocean Avenue by Yellowcard has distinct verse and chorus sections with a proper bridge section that sounds different from the rest of the song. I know it's a little confusing when I present it this way, but I'll be making a more in-depth video about song form very soon. Here's a plot twist. This word is pronounced timbre. Timbre refers to the unique quality of certain instrument sounds. Timbre is why A on the piano sounds different than A on the guitar, even though they're technically the same pitch. It can also be described as tonal color, and these timbres are used to create different effects within a piece, the same way that paint does on a canvas. Timbre is our best attempt at describing the sound itself. For example, the timbre of a flute is light, soft, and clear. A bassoon is gentle, velvety, and dark, perhaps buzzing. A trumpet might be described as bright, piercing, and forceful, while a French horn might be described as smooth, rich, and mellow. If timbre describes the quality of a single instrument, texture describes the quality of a whole piece. Texture is defined by the number of instruments in an ensemble. A duo might be called sparse, while an orchestra might be called dense. Texture also characterizes the layers of the music, not only their quality, but their relationship to each other. These words monophonic and polyphonic are actually also terms used to describe texture. However, in that context, they're a bit more specific. In regard to texture, the most basic types are as follows. Monophonic, or a single, unaccompanied melody line. We don't see a lot of modern monophonic music, but if someone is singing a cappella by themselves, this is technically monophonic. Or, if you've ever been to Catholic Mass, the cantor leading the congregation. Homophonic, or a melody with accompaniment. This is more or less every popular song that we know. For example, you have a singer singing the melody and chord progressions aboard underneath it. Polyphonic, or more than one melody performed at the same time. Simon and Garfunkel, though not particularly modern, are a great example of this. Specifically, Scarborough Fair. This can also be heard in Blackwater by the Doobie Brothers, where a vocal melody and a guitar melody occur simultaneously. Heterophonic, or two melody lines that follow each other, but with more ornamentation in the main melody. This one is less common in western music altogether, but it is present in some folk music of the Appalachias. By the nature of traditional folk, there are limited samples online, but I did link what I could find below. There's some reference to this type of music on the soundtrack to Oh Brother Where Art Thou. It mostly can be found in a lot of traditional eastern music, particularly Indonesian, Turkish, Arabic, Japanese, Indian, etc. And our last element we'll be discussing today is called tonality. Tonality refers to the tonal center of a piece of music. It defines the relationship between the melody and the harmony. This, in the study of western music theory, typically refers to the system of keys that make up western music as we know it, which is most simply defined as major or minor tonality, but also has to do with consonants and dissonance. In other words, tonality is whether the song is major or minor. I hope all of that makes sense. This is the most surface-level explanation of these concepts. There will be a series to follow this video, providing more in-depth explanations of these topics. But in the meantime, feel free to ask any questions in the comments, and check out my music fundamentals playlist to start learning about how each of these function in music. Thanks for watching!