看电影或戏剧时, 我们知道演员 大概是看剧本知道台词, 剧本基本上告诉演员 说什么
When we watch a film or a play, we know that the actors probably learned their lines from a script, which essentially tells them what to say and when to say it. A piece of written music operates on exactly the same principle. In a very basic sense, it tells a performer what to play and when to play it. Aesthetically speaking, there's a world of difference between, say, Beethoven and Justin Bieber, but both artists have used the same building blocks to create their music: notes. And although the end result can sound quite complicated, the logic behind musical notes is actually pretty straightforward. Let's take a look at the foundational elements to music notation and how they interact to create a work of art. Music is written on five parallel lines that go across the page. These five lines are called a staff, and a staff operates on two axes: up and down and left to right. The up-and-down axis tells the performer the pitch of the note or what note to play, and the left-to-right axis tells the performer the rhythm of the note or when to play it. Let's start with pitch. To help us out, we're going to use a piano, but this system works for pretty much any instrument you can think of. In the Western music tradition, pitches are named after the first seven letters of the alphabet, A, B, C, D, E, F, and G. After that, the cycle repeats itself: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, and so on. But how do these pitches get their names? Well, for example, if you played an F and then played another F higher or lower on the piano, you'd notice that they sound pretty similar compared to, say, a B. Going back to the staff, every line and every space between two lines represents a separate pitch. If we put a note on one of these lines or one of these spaces, we're telling a performer to play that pitch. The higher up on the staff a note is placed, the higher the pitch. But there are obviously many, many more pitches than the nine that these lines and spaces gives us. A grand piano, for example, can play 88 separate notes. So how do we condense 88 notes onto a single staff? We use something called a clef, a weird-looking figure placed at the beginning of the staff, which acts like a reference point, telling you that a particular line or space corresponds to a specific note on your instrument. If we want to play notes that aren't on the staff, we kind of cheat and draw extra little lines called ledger lines and place the notes on them. If we have to draw so many ledger lines that it gets confusing, then we need to change to a different clef. As for telling a performer when to play the notes, two main elements control this: the beat and the rhythm. The beat of a piece of music is, by itself, kind of boring. It sounds like this. (Ticking) Notice that it doesn't change, it just plugs along quite happily. It can go slow or fast or whatever you like, really. The point is that just like the second hand on a clock divides one minute into sixty seconds, with each second just as long as every other second, the beat divides a piece of music into little fragments of time that are all the same length: beats. With a steady beat as a foundation, we can add rhythm to our pitches, and that's when music really starts to happen. This is a quarter note. It's the most basic unit of rhythm, and it's worth one beat. This is a half note, and it's worth two beats. This whole note here is worth four beats, and these little guys are eighth notes, worth half a beat each. "Great," you say, "what does that mean?" You might have noticed that across the length of a staff, there are little lines dividing it into small sections. These are bar lines and we refer to each section as a bar. At the beginning of a piece of music, just after the clef, is something called the time signature, which tells a performer how many beats are in each bar. This says there are two beats in each bar, this says there are three, this one four, and so on. The bottom number tells us what kind of note is to be used as the basic unit for the beat. One corresponds to a whole note, two to a half note, four to a quarter note, and eight to an eighth note, and so on. So this time signature here tells us that there are four quarter notes in each bar, one, two, three, four; one, two, three, four, and so on. But like I said before, if we just stick to the beat, it gets kind of boring, so we'll replace some quarter notes with different rhythms. Notice that even though the number of notes in each bar has changed, the total number of beats in each bar hasn't. So, what does our musical creation sound like? (Music) Eh, sounds okay, but maybe a bit thin, right? Let's add another instrument with its own pitch and rhythm. Now it's sounding like music. Sure, it takes some practice to get used to reading it quickly and playing what we see on our instrument, but, with a bit of time and patience, you could be the next Beethoven or Justin Bieber.
和何时说。 一段乐谱和剧本的作用 完全相同。 很基本地讲, 乐谱告诉演奏者演奏什么 和什么时候演奏。 从美学的角度来讲, 比方说,贝多芬和 Justin Bieber 完全不同, 但两位创作者都用了 同样的基本构架来创作音乐: 音符。 尽管结果 会听起来相当复杂, 但音符背后的逻辑 实际上是非常简单的。 我们来看一下 音乐符号的基本元素 和它们是如何互动 来创作音乐作品的。 音符写在五条平行线上 横贯整页。 这五条线叫谱线, 谱线在两个轴之间: 上下 和左右。 上下轴告诉演奏者 音高 或弹哪那个音符, 左右轴告诉演奏者 音符的节奏 或何时弹。 让我们从音高开始。 为帮我们搞清楚, 我们打算用钢琴来说明, 但这个系统用差不多 你能想到的任何乐器都适用。 根据西方的音乐传统, 音高是按前七个 字母来命名的。 A, B, C, D, E, F, 和G。 此后,就循环: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, 等等。 但这些音高是怎样取名的呢? 例如,如果弹 F, 接着再弹一个 F, 这个 F 用钢琴弹得高点儿或低点儿, 你会注意到他们听上去比较相似, 比方说 B。 再看五线谱, 每条线和两条线之间的空间 代表一个音高。 如果我们在其中的一条线上 或空间里放上一个音符, 我们在告诉演奏者弹哪个音高。 五线谱上音符放的位置越高, 这个音就越高。 但显然有很多很多的音, 远不止这几条线 和空间带给我们的几个音。 例如,三角钢琴可以弹 88 个不同的音。 因此我们怎么样把这 88 个音符 压缩到五线谱上呢? 我们用叫谱号的东西。 谱号的样子看起来怪怪的, 放在五线谱的开始, 作用类似于一个参考点, 告诉你某条线或空间 对应你乐器上的某个音符。 如果我们想弹不在五线谱上的音符, 有点像作弊,额外多划了点儿线, 叫加线 加的音符写在加线上。 如果我们非得画这么多加线, 导致线混乱了, 我们需要换成不同的谱号。 至于让演奏者何时弹这些音符, 两个要素控制这一点: 节拍 和节奏。 音乐的节拍 单独有点乏味。 听起来像这样: 注意节拍不变, 只是相当快乐地前进着。 可以慢点儿, 或快点儿, 或你想弹成什么样,真的。 关键是就像钟表上的秒针 把一分钟分成六十秒, 每秒之间的时间长短是一样的, 节拍把音乐分成 小的时间间隔 都是等长的 节拍。 以一个稳定的节拍为基础, 我们可以开始把节奏加到音高上, 那才是音乐真正开始。 这是个四分音符。 它是最基本的节奏单位, 值一拍。 这是个半分音符,值两拍。 这个全音符值四拍, 这些小家伙是八分音符, 每一个值半拍。 “好极了” 你说,“那是什么意思?” 你可能注意到了 横贯五线谱长度的东西, 有些短线把它分成小部分。 这些是小节线, 我们把每一部分作为一个小节。 音乐之初, 就在谱号之后, 是叫做拍号的东西, 告诉演奏者每一小节有几拍。 这个说的是每小节两拍, 这个说的是有三拍, 这个四拍, 等等。 底部的数字告诉我们什么音符 将被用作这个节拍的基本单位。 1 对应一个全音符, 2 对应一个半音符, 4 对应一个四分音符, 8 对应一个 1/8 音符, 等等。 因此这里这个拍号 告诉我们每小节有四个四分音符, 1, 2, 3, 4; 1, 2, 3, 4, 等等。 但像我前面说的那样, 如果我们只按这个节拍, 有点儿令人乏味, 所以我们用一些不同节奏的 四分音符来代替。 注意尽管每小结的 音符数量已改变, 但每小节的节拍总数没变。 因此我们的音乐创作听上去怎么样? 听上去还可以,但可能有点简单,是吧? 让我们加上另一种乐器 有它自己的音高和节奏。 现在它听上去像音乐了。 当然,这需要一些练习 来习惯快速读它 在乐器上演奏我们看到的东西, 但是,花点时间和耐心, 你会是下一个贝多芬 或 Justin Bieber。