How can we define music—that succession of sounds with different pitches, colors, and timbres, woven together in intricate rhythms—which delights and moves us? Surprisingly, music is all about fractions.
Musical notation consists of small dots placed at different heights on a set of five parallel lines called the staff. A symbolic unit is chosen: the whole note, represented by a small hollow circle without a stem, which is divided by successive powers of 2. The whole note splits into two half notes (ratio 1/2), then four quarter notes (ratio 1/4), eight eighth notes (ratio 1/8), 16 sixteenth notes (ratio 1/16), and so on.
Whole notes and powers of 2
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A pulse (or beat) associated with one of these ratios is also chosen, defining the score’s tempo (slow or fast). For example, the marking ♩= 80 means that eighty quarter notes are to be played per minute.
