aka...science room
music
Sound is a form of energy. When anything vibrates, the air molecules surrounding it move as well. The energy from the original vibration gets passed through the air as successive molecules which are forced to start vibrating. Eventually, the energy reaches your eardrum, making it vibrate and you hear a sound.
The actual sound that you hear depends on the nature of the original motion. Faster vibrations mean a higher pitched sound. Bigger vibrations mean a louder sound.
Frequency and waveforms
A sound can be represented as a wave. The shape of the wave shows the frequency of the sound as well as how loud it is. When two or more sounds are produced at the same time, they combine to form a new and different sound. The combined sound wave has a shape that is the result of simply adding the individual waves together.
Musical Scale
The notes of the western music scale, A-G, are sounds of particular frequencies. For example, the frequency of concert A is 440Hz and will always be 440Hz no matter what instrument you play it on.
Notes can also be played together to form chords, producing a sound that is a combination of the individual notes.
Any melody that you hear is a carefully thought out series of notes and chords.
Tempo
Music is more than just a series of notes. It also has a beat or tempo that controls the speed at which the notes are played. Without a tempo a melody will have no structure and can sound different each time it is played.
Club DJs use variable speed record decks so that they can change the tempo of one record to match that of another. By synchronising the tempos of the records they can play them simultaneously, and mix them to create long seamless pieces of music.
Re-mixing and sampling
DJs make their name, and money, by sampling and re-mixing music. At its most basic this involves taking a backing track and overlaying new snippets of samples and sounds to create a different version of the original track.
The snippets can be sounds that the DJs have created themselves or from other people’s recordings.
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