The Topography of Pitch

Introduction: The Map of Sound

If you play the guitar or the piano, you already know that music is physical. You can feel the distance between a low, resonant bass note and a piercing high note. To capture that physical space on paper, we use a map. In music theory, that map is the staff.

Pitch is the highness or lowness of a sound, and the staff shows it vertically: the higher a note sits on the page, the higher it sounds. Before we look at the staff, though, it helps to see the same map on an instrument almost everyone can picture: the piano keyboard.

Click any example in this chapter to hear it.

The Keyboard and the Musical Alphabet

Music uses only seven letter names: A B C D E F G. After G, the alphabet starts over at A. The white keys of the piano play these seven letters in order, over and over, from the bottom of the keyboard to the top.

The black keys come in groups of two and three, and those groups are your landmarks. C is always the white key just to the left of a group of two black keys. F is the white key just to the left of a group of three. Find C and F, and you can find everything else.

Half Steps and Whole Steps

The smallest distance between two notes in Western music is a half step (also called a semitone): from any key on the piano to the very next key, black or white, with nothing in between. Two half steps make a whole step (a whole tone).

• C to C♯ is a half step: there is no key between them.
• C to D is a whole step: the black key C♯/D♭ lies between them.
• E to F and B to C are half steps, even though both are white keys, because there is no black key between them. These are the two natural half steps, and they explain why the major scale (Chapter 3) has the shape it does.

Accidentals

To name the black keys, and to alter any note, we use accidentals. Each one is written to the left of the notehead, on the same line or space:

An accidental lasts until the end of the measure, and applies only to that one line or space (that exact octave). The bar line cancels it.

Because every black key sits between two letters, it has two names: the black key between C and D is both C♯ and D♭. Two names for the same sound are called enharmonic equivalents. White keys have enharmonic names too: E♯ is the same key as F, and C♭ is the same key as B.

The Clefs: Anchoring the Map

A single five-line staff can't show every pitch, so we place a symbol called a clef at the start of each staff. A clef locks one line to one specific pitch, and every other line and space follows from it. Lines and spaces are counted from the bottom up.

• Treble clef (G clef): its curl circles the second line, making that line G above middle C (G4). It covers most pitches above middle C: sopranos, altos, violins, flutes, trumpets, and the right hand of the piano.
• Bass clef (F clef): its two dots surround the fourth line, making that line F below middle C (F3). It covers most pitches below middle C: basses, cellos, tubas, and the piano's left hand.
• C clefs (alto and tenor): the center of the C clef points to middle C. On the middle line it is the alto clef (viola). On the fourth line it is the tenor clef (the upper ranges of cello, trombone, and bassoon).

The Master Mnemonic: GBDFACE

Many musicians memorize a separate rhyme for every clef: "Every Good Boy Does Fine" for the treble lines, "All Cows Eat Grass" for the bass spaces, and so on. There is a more powerful, universal tool: the continuous chain of thirds G–B–D–F–A–C–E.

Because the staff alternates lines and spaces, each line (or each space) is a third above the one below it. Reading every other letter of the alphabet, this one chain loops endlessly and unlocks every clef:

• Bass clef lines: G–B–D–F–A
• Bass clef spaces: A–C–E–G
• Treble clef lines: E–G–B–D–F
• Treble clef spaces: F–A–C–E
• Alto clef lines: F–A–C–E–G

Memorize GBDFACE once and you don't just read the staff faster: you also already know how to spell triads and seventh chords, which are built from exactly these chains of thirds (Chapter 5).

Octave Designation: Naming the Exact Note

There are seven C's on a piano. To say which C we mean, we add an octave number after the letter: this course uses scientific pitch notation, where middle C is C4.

• The number goes up by one at every C. The B just below middle C is B3; the D just above it is D4.
• The lowest C on a standard piano is C1, and the highest key is C8.
• When this book writes a letter without a number ("an E"), it means any E, in any octave.

The Grand Staff and Ledger Lines

Joining a treble staff and a bass staff with a line (and, for piano, a brace) creates the grand staff. Middle C sits exactly between them, on a short line of its own.

When notes go above or below the staff, we extend it with ledger lines: short lines drawn just for that note. You can always count lines and spaces with GBDFACE, but real fluency comes from memorizing a few landmarks, so you never have to count more than a step or two:

Vocal Ranges and Tessitura

Because our goal in this course is to write beautiful, functional four-part harmony, we need to know the human voice. Choirs are organized into four main voice types, from highest to lowest: soprano, alto, tenor, and bass (SATB). These are the comfortable working ranges we'll use in every assignment:

Staying inside the range isn't enough. We also have to respect the tessitura: the part of the range where a voice is comfortable and sounds its best. A soprano may be able to sing G5, but a melody that sits up there for thirty measures will exhaust her. Good four-part writing keeps each voice mostly in the middle of its range and saves the extremes for special moments.

Try It: Note Flash

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