Music Fundamentals: A Guide to Musical Understanding (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Music Fundamentals: A Guide to Musical Understanding

I. What is Tone? Music is an art perceived through the ear. The scientific bases of music are the laws of sound collectively known as acoustics. Sound is a sensation received through the ear. It is caused by the vibrations of elastic or tremulous bodies such as strings, col umns of air, membranes, vocal chords, or metal bars. The vibrations of these bodies are transmitted to the ear through the air.

A tone may be defined as a sound produced by a regular and comparatively simple number of vibrations per second. All other sounds are noises, though tone and noise are actually relative terms. The three characteristics of tones are: pitch, intensity, and quality. Duration, or the length of time a tone continues to sound, is some times included as a fourth characteristic. However, duration refers to the length, not to the structure of a tone.

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