Musical Notation
The system for writing music is known as ‘musical notation’. Throughout several cultures different systems of music notation were developed. There are also many computer orientated representations of music that are designed to be changed into notation, or recognised by the computer.
HISTORY A tablet from Nippur was found and dated back to 2000b.c. Anne Draffkorn Kilmer from the university of California at Berkley published a decipherment of the said tablet. She explains that the tablet represents fragmentary instructions for performing music. She also discovered that the music was composed in harmonies of thirds and it was written in the diatonic scale. This tablet represented the earliest recorded melodies though fragmentary, from anywhere in the world. Ancient Greek musicians had also developed their own notation system. It was sophisticated yet it was practical. This form of notation was used from the 6th century b.c until roughly the 4th century a.d. Today, several compositions and fragments of compositions from that era still survive. Examples of this form of notation can be seen in the Seikilos epitaph which is dated to the 2nd century b.c. Also three hymns in Crete on manuscript. These Delphic hymns dated to the 2nd century b.c also use this notation, but they are not completely preserved. Knowledge of ancient Greek notation was lost around the time of the fall of the Roman Empire.
Information found from wikipedia.com, answers.com.
Musical Notation on a Computer.
There is a wide variety of software programs designed to produce musical notation, they are called musical notation software. Musical notation software is software used to write and engrave sheet music. There are also many file formats that are used to store musical information. These are a particular way in which to encode information for storage in a computer file. The most popular file format used is a file format known as MIDI.A MIDI is a file format which is used to store the pitch and the time signature of a piece of music and it then can be used to control a MIDI instrument which will produce the desired sound. There are also more file formats known as Hybrid Formats, such as ABC notation (ABC notation is a language designed to notate music, tunes and lyrics. It was written originally for folk and traditional tunes of the West which can be written on a single stave). These are text files that can be read by a person but can be manipulated by a computer. Lastly there are notational forms which are not initially intended to be processed on a computer but are and they are transmitted through via computer. Files such as guitar tablature, this is where the specific notes of a song can be transferred or written on a computer and can then be seen. This has become very popular following the growth of the internet. Information found at Answers.com , Britannica.com and Wikipedia.com
Standard Notation There are two basic approaches to notating music. Tablature (such as guitar chord diagrams) depicts the actions a performer is to take (in particular, showing where to put the fingers to produce a given sound). Symbolic notation describes the sounds themselves and includes methods that vary from assigning pitches different letters of the alphabet to representing a given combination of notes by a graphic sign. The Western notation system combines rhythmic notation (the appearance of a note indicates its duration) with pitch notation (the line or space on a staff where a note is placed indicates its pitch). A single symbol shows both pitch and duration, and a string of these symbols notates both melody and rhythm.
Other frequently used types of notation: Figured Bass: Figured bass is used extensively in accordion notation, and for jazz. For jazz parts, it implies improvisation by the performer; for accordion it is used to notate the bass button to be used. Shape note: The shape note system is found in some church hymnals, sheet music, and song books. Letter notation: The notes of the 12-tone scale can be written by their letter names A-G, possibly with a trailing sharp or flat symbol, such as A♯. This is the most common way of specifying a note in speech or in written text. Solfege: Solfege is a way of assigning syllables to names of the musical scale. In order, they are: Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, Ti, and Do (for the octave). Another common variation is: Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, Si, Do.
Information found at Answers.com , Britannica.com and Wikipedia.com MUSICAL NOTATION Barry Moore - 0668435 Eddie Ryan - 0661147 Pádraig Ó Dubhghaill - 0651184 The topic we selected for this assignment was ‘Musical Notation’. It is a topic that interests the three of us as we all play an instrument. We were also hoping maybe to learn something new on the topic. The way we decided to do this assignment would be that each of us take a main section of the topic. The topic itself is very vast so we picked sections we thought were the most important and relevant to our course. The sections we chose were the history of musical notation, samples of the notation itself and computer music notation. We chose the internet to be our source of Information and there wasn’t a lack of information to be found. We started at Wikipedia and then explored other encyclopedia sites. Answers.com turned out to be the most helpful site we found, containing all the information we needed. What we had to do then was to dissect the vital information we needed. As the article was only to be 600 words long, we couldn’t have our sections too long. We targeted to have each section in or around 200 words long. Barry took the history section, Eddie chose to do the notation on computers and I did the notation itself. We found it difficult to keep the sections under 200 words as even those sections we chose had a lot on information in them. When we had our three sections finished, we put them together and made them into one article. We were happy that the article was informative enough to become useful as a glossary for the students who choose these courses in the future.