The Greeks had several different kinds of scales, and
you heard all their funny names there in the class video.
And this held true for about 2,000 years.
But by the 17th century, Western musicians had reduced these down to just
two kinds of seven pitch patterns, a major pattern and a minor pattern.
The major pattern went this way.
[MUSIC]
And the minor this way.
[MUSIC]
Each follows a particular pattern of steps on the keyboard.
You can look all this up in your textbook to see what the two patterns are.
Whole and half steps.
The smallest distances on the keyboard.
But the important thing is to hear the keyboard.
And hear the major and minor when played on the keyboard.
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Major.
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Ever notice on a piano that we have two pitches that sound rather identical?
Almost,
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The same thing.
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If we start on this pitch.
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Go up and down the scale, we get that arrangement.
If we start here,
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A-B-C-D-E-F-G-H.
No we don't have Hs.
Why don't we have Hs?
[MUSIC] A-B-C-D-E-F-G.
Because this is duplicating, in essence, the one down below.
Octave duplication.
[MUSIC] The eighth note is the same as the first.
Therefore the eighth note's simply called the octave.
You know about octaves.
You've been hearing them all of your life.
I'm gonna sing a pitch.
And you're going to sing the octave above.
I'll do one first and then you do one.
I'll take this.
[SOUND] Okay, now you do one.
[MUSIC]
There we go.
[MUSIC]
That's right.
[SOUND] So we have the octave in our ear.
This is the two to one ratio that we discussed before, in our first session.
The upper pitch, the octave above is vibrating.
My vocal chords here are vibrating twice as fast.
[SOUND] As the lower octave.
[SOUND] The eighth pitch of the scale duplicates the first pitch.
Eight and one are the same and thereafter all of the intervals are the same.
[MUSIC]
The intervals In that higher octave that I just played are exactly the same as
the lower one.
For this reason we have only seven letter names in the scale.
A-B-C-D-E-F-G, no, H-I-J-K-L-M-N-O-P, because we start all over again.
This is the phenomenon of octave duplication.
And it is part of nature not nurture.
Octave duplication is at work in musical cultures around the globe.
Whether in Chinese music, Indian music, Indonesian music or African music.