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For other uses, see Note (disambiguation).

In music, a note is either a unit of fixed pitch that has been given a name, or the graphic representation of that pitch in a notation system, and sometimes its duration, or a specific instance of either, so one can speak of "the second note of Happy Birthday" for example. The general and specific meanings are freely mixed by musicians, although they can be initially confusing: "the first two notes of Happy Birthday are the same note", meaning, "the first two sounds of Happy Birthday have the same pitch." A note is a discretization of musical or sound phenomena and thus facilitates musical analysis (Nattiez 1990, p.81n9).

Contents 1 Note name 1.1 Continental note names 1.2 Note value 1.3 Note name example 2 Note Frequency (Hertz) 3 History of note names 4 See also 5 Source 6 External links

Note name

See also letter notation.

Notes are given letter names using the first seven letters of the latin alphabet: A, B, C, D, E, F, and G (in order of rising pitch). These letter names repeat, so that the note above G is A (an octave higher than the first A) and the sequence continues indefinitely. Notes are used together as a musical scale or tone row. However, because there are actually 12 notes needed by diatonic music, the 7 letter names can also be given a modifier.

The two main modifiers are sharps and flats which respectively raise or lower the pitch of a note by a semitone. These are used to create the additional five notes necessary to complete the chromatic scale. The sharp symbol is ♯ (similar to the pound symbol, #), the flat symbol is ♭ (similar to a lower-case italic b). These accidentals are written after the note name; for example F♯ represents the note F sharp, B♭ is B flat.

In music notation the symbols are placed before the note symbol or at the beginning of the line as a key signature. The natural symbol (♮), can be inserted before a note to cancel a flat or sharp in the signature.

Sharps can also be applied to notes B and E creating notes that are equal to C and F respectively (in modern western musical practice). Similarly flats applied to C and F are other names for B and E. Pushing this further, double-sharps and double-flats are used to indicate raised sharps and lowered flats. For example B♭♭ is another name for A.

Numbers can be suffixed to the letter names to distiguish the octaves they fall in. Octaves are counted upward and run starting from C, where A4 is nowadays standardised to 440 Hz, lying in the octave containing notes from C4 to B4. The lowest note on most pianos is A0.

Continental note names

Another style of notation, rarely used in English, uses the suffix "is" to indicate a sharp and "es" (only "s" after A and E) for a flat, e.g. Fis for F♯, Bes for B♭, Es for E♭. In parts of Europe, the letter H is sometimes used instead of B, in which case B represents B♭.

Note value

A written note can also have a note value, a code which determines the note's relative duration. These note values include quarter notes (crotchets), eighth notes (quavers), and so on.

Note name example

When notes are written out in a score, each note is assigned a specific vertical position on a staff position (a line or a space) on the staff, as determined by the clef. Each line or space is assigned a note name, these names are memorized by the musician and allows him or her to know at a glance the proper pitch to play on his or her instrument for each note-head marked on the page.

The staff above shows the notes C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C and then in reverse order, with no key signature or accidentals.

Name	prime		second		third	fourth		fifth		sixth		seventh
Natural	C		D		E	F		G		A		B
Sharp (symbol)		C♯		D♯			F♯		G♯		A♯
Flat (symbol)		D♭		E♭			G♭		A♭		B♭
Sharp (text)		Cis		Dis			Fis		Gis		Ais
Flat (text)		Des		Es			Ges		As		Bes
Italian	Do		Re		Mi	Fa		Sol		La		Si
German	C		D		E	F		G		A	B	H
Frequency [Hz]	262	277	294	311	330	349	370	392	415	440	469	495

Note Frequency (Hertz)

In all technicality, music can be composed of notes at any arbitrary frequency. Since the physical causes of music are vibrations of mechanical systems, they are often measured in Hertz (Hz), with 1 Hz = 1 complete vibration per second. For historical and other reasons especially in Western music, only twelve-notes of fixed frequencies are used. These fixed frequencies are mathematically related to each other, and are defined around the central note, A4 = 440 Hz.

The note naming convention specifies a letter, any sharp/flat, and an octave number. Any note is exactly an integer number of half-steps away from central A (A4). Let this distance be denoted n. Then,

For example, let's find the frequency of Middle C, C4. There are +3 half-steps between A and C (1) A → A# (2) A# → B (3) B → C

(approximately)

It is important to keep the sign of n in mind. For example, the F below Middle A is F#3. There are -4 half-steps: (1) A → G# (2) G# → G (3) G → F# (4) F# → F ... each of these is descending the scale. Thus:

(approximately)

Finally, it can be seen from this formula that octaves automatically yield factors of two times the original frequency (in fact this is the means to derive the formula, combined with the notion of equally-spaced intervals).

History of note names

Music notation systems have used letters of the alphabet for centuries. The 6th century philosopher Boethius is known to have used the first fifteen letters of the alphabet to signify the notes of the two-octave range that was in use at the time. Though it is not known whether this was his devising or common usage at the time, this is nonetheless called Boethian notation.

Following this, the system of repeating letters A-G in each octave was introduced, these being written as minuscules for the second octave and double minuscules for the third. When the compass of used notes was extended down by one note, to a G, it was given the Greek G (Γ), gamma. (It is from this that the French word for scale, gamme is derived, and the English word gamut.)

The remaining five notes of the chromatic scale (the black keys on a piano keyboard) were added gradually; the first being B which was flattened in certain modes to avoid the dissonant augmented fourth interval. This change was not always shown in notation, but when written, B♭ (B flat) was written as a Latin, round "b", and B♮ (B natural) a Gothic b. These evolved into the modern flat and natural symbols respectively. The sharp symbol arose from a barred b, called the "cancelled b".

In parts of Europe, including Germany, the natural symbol transformed into the letter H: in German music notation, H is B♮ (B natural) and B is B♭ (B flat).

In Italian notation the notes of scales are given in terms of Do - Re - Mi - Fa - Sol - La - Si rather than C - D - E - F - G - A - B. These names follow the original names given by Guido d'Arezzo, who had taken them from the first syllables of the first seven verses of a Gregorian Chant called Ut queant laxis. "Do" replaced the originary "ut".

See also

• Pensato
• Solfege
• grace note
• ghost notes

Source

• Nattiez, Jean-Jacques (1990). Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music (Musicologie générale et sémiologue, 1987). Translated by Carolyn Abbate (1990). ISBN 0691027145.

External links

• Tonalsoft Encyclopaedia of Tuning

Musical notation	edit
Staff : Clef | Key signature | Time signature | Leger line | Barline
Notes : Note value | Dotted note | Accidental | Rest | Tie
Expression marks: Tempo | Dynamics | Articulation | Ornaments | Octaves

This article is based on the article "Notes" from Wikipedia - the free encyclopedia created and edited by online user community. This article is distributed under the terms of GNU Free Documentation License. Here you find the list of authors of this article. The article can only edited within Wikipedia. Edit this article in Wikipedia.

For the town in France, see Essay, Orne.

An essay is a short work that treats a topic from an author's personal point of view, often taking into account subjective experiences and personal reflections upon them.

Contents 1 Form and content 2 The essay as literary genre 3 The essay as a pedagogical tool 4 Non-literary essays 4.1 Music 4.2 Film 4.3 Photography 4.4 Philately 4.5 Numismatics 5 Related terms 6 References 7 External links

Form and content

Essays are usually brief works in prose, but works in verse are sometimes dubbed essays (e.g. Alexander Pope's An Essay on Criticism (1711) and An Essay on Man (1733-1734) and many voluminous works refer to themselves as essays (e.g. John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)).

Virtually anything may be the subject of an essay. Topics may include actual happenings, issues of human life, morality, ethics, religion and many others. An essay is, by definition, a work of non-fiction, and is often expository.

The essay as literary genre

The word essay derives from the French essai ('attempt'), from the verb essayer, 'to try' or 'to attempt'. The first author to describe his works as essays was, unsurprisingly, French: Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592). Inspired in particular by the works of Plutarch, a translation of whose Oeuvres morales [Moral works] into French had just been published by Jacques Amyot, Montaigne began to compose his essays in 1572; the first edition, entitled Essais, was published in two volumes in 1580. For the rest of his life he continued to revise previously published essays as well as composing new ones.

Francis Bacon's essays, published in book form in 1597, 1612, and 1625, were the first works in English that described themselves as essays. Ben Jonson first used the word essayist in English in 1609, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Notable essayists are legion. They include Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walter Bagehot, George Orwell, and E.B. White.

It is very difficult to define the genre of essay, but the following remarks by Aldous Huxley, regarded in his day as a leading practitioner of the genre, may be of interest:

"Like the novel, the essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything. By tradition, almost by definition, the essay is a short piece, and it is therefore impossible to give all things full play within the limits of a single essay. But a collection of essays can cover almost as much ground, and cover it almost as thoroughly, as can a long novel. Montaigne's Third Book is the equivalent, very nearly, of a good slice of the Comédie Humaine. Essays belong to a literary species whose extreme variability can be studied most effectively within a three-poled frame of reference. There is the pole of the personal and the autobiographical; there is the pole of the objective, the factual, the concrete-particular; and there is the pole of the abstract-universal. Most essayists are at home and at their best in the neighborhood of only one of the essay's three poles, or at the most only in the neighborhood of two of them. There are the predominantly personal essayists, who write fragments of reflective autobiography and who look at the world through the keyhole of anecdote and description. There are the predominantly objective essayists who do not speak directly of themselves, but turn their attention outward to some literary or scientific or political theme. … And how splendid, how truly oracular are the utterances of the great generalizers! … The most richly satisfying essays are those which make the best not of one, not of two, but of all the three worlds in which it is possible for the essay to exist" (Collected Essays, "Preface").

The essay as a pedagogical tool

In recent times, essays have become one of the chief tools by which colleges judge the mastery and comprehension of material, and they are sometimes used as a part of the criteria by which the student body is selected as well. Academic essays are usually more formal and present the writer's own views as well as the comprehensive analysis of what has previously been written on a topic.

Many students' first exposure to the genre is the "five-paragraph essay": a highly structured form requiring an introduction presenting the thesis statement); three body paragraphs, each of which presents an idea to support the thesis; and a conclusion, which restates the thesis and summarizes the supporting points. The form is controversial. It does allow the student writer to put some structure in place, at a stage when the main concern is mastering more "tactical level" issues such as unified paragraphs, transitions, thesis statements, and so forth, but its simplistic structure severely limits the author's range of expression.

Other most common types of essays used for academic purposes include argumentative essays, definition essays, compare/contrast essays, cause/effect essays, etc.

From the point of view of the subject area the most common academic essays would be historical essay, philosophical essay, literary essay, etc.

Non-literary essays

Music

In the realm of music, composer Samuel Barber wrote a set of "Essays for Orchestra," relying on the form and content of the music to guide the listener's ear, rather than any extra-musical plot or story.

Film

Film can also be used to produce the more subjective reflective attitude characteristic of essays. Important essay film makers include Chris Marker, Guy Debord, Raoul Peck and Harun Farocki. One working definition of the essay film is "documentary laced with self-portrait." Theoretical approaches to this genre can be found in the works of Michel Beaujour, Raymond Bellour and Roland Barthes. Other filmmakers who have been active in the essay film are Orson Welles, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Hartmut Bitomski, Alexander Kluge, Jem Cohen, Jean-Luc Godard and Robert Kramer. Perhaps the original essay filmmaker was Dziga Vertov.

Photography

A photographic essay is an attempt to cover a topic by a series of photographs.

Philately

In philately, an essay is a prototype for a proposed stamp. In contrast, a proof is the prototype of an accepted stamp. Both, essays and proofs are rare, as usually just a few are produced. They are not sold publicly, but handled by insiders or held in postal museums or collections. Possibly the first essay of a stamp not accepted is the Prince Consort Essay from 1850.

Numismatics

A numismatic essay is a coin prototype proposed for general sale or circulation.

Related terms

• abstract (summary)
• Introduction
• Body (writing)
• conclusion
• plagiarism

References

Theodor W. Adorno, The Essay as Form in: Theodor W. Adorno, The Adorno Reader, Blackwell Publishers 2000

Beaujour, Michel. Miroirs d'encre: Rhétorique de l'autoportrait. Paris: Seuil, 1980. [Poetics of the Literary Self-Portrait. Trans. Yara Milos. New York: NYU Press, 1991].

Bensmaïa, Reda. The Barthes Effect: The Essay as Reflective Text. Trans. Pat Fedkiew. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1987.

External links

• How to write an essay - A short guide for university students by David Gauntlett
• Sample Essays Various topics.
• The Age of the Essay by Paul Graham
• Guidance on Essay Writing
• Essay eTexts at Project Gutenberg
• Custom Essays and Papers
• SlashDOC Essays and Research Papers - a collection of free and public domain essays
• Reference Generator - generates references in the correct form
• Essay Writing Tips - guides for writing different types of essays
• English Tutoring and Writing Center - guide to different kinds of essays
• Educational Essays: Custom Writing Resources - general academic writing resources

This article is based on the article "Essays" from Wikipedia - the free encyclopedia created and edited by online user community. This article is distributed under the terms of GNU Free Documentation License. Here you find the list of authors of this article. The article can only edited within Wikipedia. Edit this article in Wikipedia.