The Development and Usage of Musical Development

The Development and usage of Musical Notation

Musical notation is a system of writing for music; there are several different types of notation depending on your culture.

Present day music notation uses a 5 line staff with a numerous amount of symbols that represent beat, pitch, who plays what, when, etc

Ð'... The earliest musical notation was encoded in cuneiform scripts thought to originate in ancient Mesopotamia. Several other forms of musical notation were developed in Asia and Egypt around 3000BC Plenty of musical scholars helped the development of music, but the founder of music is an Indian scholar musical theorist named Pingala. Pingala devised the first scientific form of musical notation using a binary numeral system. This binary numeral system code was later used in the same way for the invention of Morse cod over 2000 years later. The ancient Indian mathematician Pingala presented the first known description of a binary numeral system in the 3rd century BC.

Other than the Binary numerical code that was used in the Ancient ages, Ancient Greece (600BC - 400AD) used a musical notation that consisted of test syllables with symbols above them. The only complete surviving notation using symbols known as neumes starts to develop in monasteries in Europe. Earliest surviving notation of this is the Musica Disciplina of Aurelion of Reome.

In 995 AD the standard music stave was founded by Guido D'Arezzo an Italian Benedictine Monk. Guido combined a 4 line staff with notes known as neumes. The founding of the 4 line staff helped to define the creation of the 5 line staff that is used today. (Introduced in the 14th century)

I tried learning Musical notation on my own around the 5th grade when I was forced to play violin by my mother. I thought it was the hardest thing in the world to learn and when I went to concerts I had to fake everything I played. In the end I quit playing violin and have never gone back to music.

Now today, we have all sorts of different lined staves with tons of different notation depending on the instrument you play. Notation can tell you volume, pitch, frequency, tone, pattern. Here are a few basic notes used in musical notation today.