Exceptional Excerpt: How Music Works Ch. 3 (John Powell)

Chapter 3: Notes and Noises

• “Everyday you will hear millions of sounds and only a few of them will be musical notes. Usually, musical notes are created deliberately from a musical instrument, but they can be produced in non-musical situations- when you “ping” a wineglass or ring a doorbell, for example.” (20)
• “Music plays upon our emotions and can enhance or change our mood. A good example of this is the way that film sound tracks give us clues as to how to respond emotionally to the scene we are watching-romance, humor and tension are all magnified by the accompanying music. This link between music and emotion might make us think that notes themselves have an emotional content and that they are in some way mysterious and magical sounds…” (21)
• “Musical notes are different from non-musical noises because every musical note is made up of a ripple pattern which repeats itself over and over again. To be a musical note, it doesn’t really matter how complicated the individual ripples are, as long as the pattern repeats itself…Musical notes don’t need to be made by musical instruments, in fact, anything which vibrates or disturbs the air in a regular way between twenty and 20,000 times a second will produce a note.” (23)
• “Our brains can rapidly identify a sound as being made up of either repeating or non-repeating pattern and that is how we distinguish between notes and noises.” (37)

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