Musical note

Notes may even distinguish the use of different extended techniques by using special symbols.

Or more generally, the term can refer to a class of identically sounding events, for instance when saying "the song begins with the same note repeated twice".

Music theory in most European countries and others[note 1] use the solfège naming convention.

Alternatively, particularly in English- and some Dutch-speaking regions, pitch classes are typically represented by the first seven letters of the Latin alphabet (A, B, C, D, E, F and G), corresponding to the A minor scale.

Several European countries, including Germany, use H instead of B (see § 12-tone chromatic scale for details).

These names are memorized by musicians and allow them to know at a glance the proper pitch to play on their instruments.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.

Accidental symbols visually communicate a modification of a note's pitch from its tonal context.

This half step interval is also known as a semitone (which has an equal temperament frequency ratio of 12√2 ≅ 1.0595).

Systematic alterations to any of the 7 lettered pitch classes are communicated using a key signature.

Additional explicitly-noted accidentals can be drawn next to noteheads to override the key signature for all subsequent notes with the same lettered pitch class in that bar.

The following chart lists names used in different countries for the 12 pitch classes of a chromatic scale built on C. Their corresponding symbols are in parentheses.

Differences between German and English notation are highlighted in bold typeface.

Although the English and Dutch names are different, the corresponding symbols are identical.

Two pitches that are any number of octaves apart (i.e. their fundamental frequencies are in a ratio equal to a power of two) are perceived as very similar.

Meanwhile, the electronic musical instrument standard called MIDI doesn't specifically designate pitch classes, but instead names pitches by counting from its lowest note: number 0 (C−1 ≈ 8.1758 Hz); up chromatically to its highest: number 127 (G9 ≈ 12,544 Hz).

Notes played in tune with the 12 equal temperament system will be an integer number

Thus the above formula reduces to yield a power of 2 multiplied by 440 Hz: The base-2 logarithm of the above frequency–pitch relation conveniently results in a linear relationship with

For use with the MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) standard, a frequency mapping is defined by: where

The 6th century philosopher Boethius is known to have used the first fourteen letters of the classical Latin alphabet (the letter J did not exist until the 16th century), to signify the notes of the two-octave range that was in use at the time[10] and in modern scientific pitch notation are represented as Though it is not known whether this was his devising or common usage at the time, this is nonetheless called Boethian notation.

A modified form of Boethius' notation later appeared in the Dialogus de musica (ca.

[citation needed]) The remaining five notes of the chromatic scale (the black keys on a piano keyboard) were added gradually; the first being B♭, since B was flattened in certain modes to avoid the dissonant tritone interval.

The sharp symbol arose from a ƀ (barred b), called the "cancelled b".

[citation needed] In parts of Europe, including Germany, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, Norway, Denmark, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Finland, and Iceland (and Sweden before the 1990s), the Gothic 𝔟 transformed into the letter h (possibly for hart, German for "harsh", as opposed to blatt, German for "planar", or just because the Gothic 𝔟 and 𝔥 resemble each other).

In Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Romanian, Greek, Albanian, Russian, Mongolian, Flemish, Persian, Arabic, Hebrew, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Turkish and Vietnamese the note names are do–re–mi–fa–sol–la–si rather than C–D–E–F–G–A–B.

These names follow the original names reputedly given by Guido d'Arezzo, who had taken them from the first syllables of the first six musical phrases of a Gregorian chant melody Ut queant laxis, whose successive lines began on the appropriate scale degrees.

It was the Italian musicologist and humanist Giovanni Battista Doni (1595–1647) who successfully promoted renaming the name of the note from ut to do.