Quotes About Notation

Music theory, then, very simply, could be defined as a search for how and why music sounds right or wrong. In other words, the purpose of music theory is to explain why something sounded the way it did and how that sound can be made again.

Only in the eleventh century was the staff of parallel horizontal lines invented to indicate pitch. At the same time the notes were named ut, re, mi, fa, so, la, from the opening syllables of the successive lines of a familiar hymn: Ut queant laxis / Resonare fibris. . .

Because in our way of writing numbers the position of an integer determines the quantity it represents, the principle involved is called positional notation.

The basic principle of Western staff notation is that passing time is represented through a series of marks arranged from left to right on the page. Within the five lines of the staff (or stave), notes are arrayed from high to low. So a score is a kind of two-dimensional plot in which the horizontal axis is time and vertical one is pitch;

My being a teacher had a decisive influence on making language and systems as simple as possible so that in my teaching, I could concentrate on the essential issues of programming rather than on details of language and notation.