Understanding Sound, Noise, and Silence: Key Qualities Explained

Sound, Noise & Silence

Essentially, music is sound and the way it orders tones or sounds in succession, in combination, and in temporal relationships to produce a composition having unity and continuity. Sound is produced when an object vibrates, and it is what can be perceived by a living organism through its sense of hearing. It travels through physical mediums by sound waves, and it is normally a pleasant feeling.

Noise is a disagreeable auditory experience, but this is a subjective definition (for instance, most percussion instruments produce noises when they are played). Anyway, the physical difference between sound and noise is the sort of waves: sound waves are regular, while in noise, the wave is irregular.

Finally, silence is the absence of sound or noise.

Qualities of Sound

Pitch: is the characteristic of sound that tells us the difference between a high sound and a low sound. To represent the pitch, we use the staff and the notes. The staff (plural staves) is written as five horizontal parallel lines. Most of the notes of the music are placed on one of these lines or in a space between lines. Extra ledger lines may be added to show a note that is too high or too low to be on the staff.

Duration: is the quality of sound that tells us the difference between a short sound and a long sound. The duration of a sound is indicated using several symbols. In standard notation, a single musical sound is written as a note.

Intensity: is the characteristic of sound that tells us the difference between a loud sound and a soft sound. Dynamics are the loudness or softness of a composition. The term piano (p) is used to indicate softness, and forte (f) to indicate loudness.

Timbre: One of the basic elements of music is called color, or timbre. Timbre describes all of the aspects of a musical sound that do not have anything to do with its pitch, loudness, or length. In other words, if a flute plays a note, and then an oboe plays the same note, for the same length of time, at the same loudness, you can tell that the only difference is this: a flute sounds different from an oboe. This difference is in the timbre of the sounds. Timbre is caused by the fact that each note from a musical instrument is a complex wave containing more than one frequency. For instruments that produce notes with a clear and specific pitch, the secondary frequencies that are involved in the sound are called harmonics. The human ear and brain are capable of hearing and appreciating very small variations in timbre.