Graham English

Posts Tagged ‘intervals’

How To Use Tension And Release In Your Melodies

Music, much like life, is fundamentally a swinging pendulum between tension and release. Fortunately, with music, this is easy to represent objectively and to utilize in your music composition.

Absolute Pitch Ear Training Podcast 04-09-07

Topics covered: Singing what you hear, the body/mind connection in music, exercises to improve your musicianship, and more.

 

 Absolute Pitch Ear Training Podcast 04-09-07: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Why Singing What You Hear Is Important To Your Ear Training

Singing what you hear is an important part of improving your perception. Let’s look at it from a body/mind perspective.
Recognizing that C and F is a perfect fourth is a cognitive exercise. You have to think about it. Maybe only for a split-second, but you still have to translate your physical experience, a verb, into [...]

Define: Microtones

Division of the octave into intervals smaller than the half-tone, the smallest interval used within the tempered scale. Examples include Fokker’s thirty-one-note organ, Partch’s forty-three-note percussion instruments, etc. Microtonal music, compositions based on microtones.

How To Hear Interval Quality Distinctions

If you can do a good job identifying your basic diatonic intervals (unison, major 2nd, major 3rd, perfect 4th, perfect 5th, major 6th, major 7th, perfect octave), the next logical step is to move on to hearing the distinctions between the different interval qualities:
major/minor 2nd
major/minor 3rd
perfect/augmented 4th and perfect/diminished 5th
major/minor 6th
major/minor 7th
In the beginning of [...]

The Golden Mean in Harmony Part 2: Tritones: The Devil’s interval

Tritones: The Devil’s musical interval:
If you look at the relative stability of each scale degree in Western harmony you’ll see that the 4th and 7th are the most instable. In order of stability to instability it looks like this:
1, 5, 3, 6, 2, 4, 7
So 4 and 7 provide the most tension as 4 wants [...]

Free Online Relative Pitch Lesson

I just found a cool relative pitch lesson online. Songs to help you learn note intervals.