Articles: What Is Music? | What Are Notes? | Sharps And Flats | Half Steps And Whole Steps | What Is A Scale? | The Major Scale | What Is A Key?
What are Notes?
Sound is actually vibration. We hear sound when air vibrates against our eardrums. We perceive sounds as "high" or "low" as a result of the speed at which the air is vibrating - the faster the vibration, the "higher" the sound.
In order to make it easier to organize sound into music, names have been given to certain speeds of vibration, which are also known as "notes" or "pitches". In America and many other countries (but not all) we have used the letters of the alphabet as names for notes. Thus, if a vibration happens 440 times in one second we call that "A".
There are seven letters used in the musical alphabet: A, B, C, D, E, F, G