The 4 Dimensions Of Music

There are probably as many ways to classify and categorise different parts of music as there are musical genres * And, as we’ll be exploring in this chapter, genres are a highly debatable construct! . A songwriter might think in terms of “lyrics, melody and harmony”. A classical composer may think in terms of the different orchestra sections, and classical forms such as sonata, rondo, theme and variations, and so on. An electronic music producer may think in terms of their Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) interface with its layers of tracks and piano roll representations.

Ultimately, no formal system of describing music can ever be perfect or complete, since music is by nature an ever-evolving art constrained only by the limits of human imagination.

The framework you’re about to learn is therefore not intended to be a “correct” or even canonical way of describing music. However we have found it to be highly versatile and extremely useful, especially when it comes to Active Listening.

This is a framework you can have in mind for any musical activity, not just listening. Musical U members have found it highly useful in creative activities such as improvising and writing music too. You’ll find that it makes an excellent companion for the “Constraints and Dimensions” of Expansive Creativity presented in Chapter 15: Improvisation and learning the musical “language of emotion” in Chapter 17: Expression.

So this is very much a framework for thinking about, describing and exploring any music, and going as far and as deep as you like with your thoughts, descriptions and explorations.

Let’s start simple though, and begin with the smallest musical element: one single note.

As rich and complex as music can be, it all starts with a note, which simply means “a sound used to make music”.

A note has four dimensions:

• Pitch
• Rhythm
• Timbre
• Dynamics

Pitch is the perceived highness or lowness of a sound. That’s one thing we’re going to be asking ourselves a lot: “Where on the whole continuum of high sounds to low sounds does this particular pitch in the music fall?”. Not all notes have a single well-defined pitch, but almost all musical sounds can be described in terms of where they exist on this dimension of pitch.

Musical notes also exist for a certain length of time. The musical term “Rhythm” describes the pattern of the longness and shortness of notes and the silences in between.

Timbre is a word borrowed from the French and pronounced like the first part of the word “tambourine”. An English term with similar meaning is “tone colour”. It refers to the properties of a sound that can make one note sound different than another, even if they’re playing the same pitch.

For example if you listen to a flute playing the pitch we call “A440” (the A above middle C in standard tuning) and you listen to a piano playing that same “A440” pitch, you can immediately tell the difference between the piano and the flute by their timbres.

Sounds carry varying degrees of energy. When it’s a small amount of energy, the sound is what we call a “soft” or “quiet” sound. Sounds with a large amount of energy are called “loud”. We refer to this as softness, loudness, or “volume”. Changes in volume over time in music are called Dynamics.

These are the four dimensions of a single musical note: Pitch, Rhythm, Timbre and Dynamics. These dimensions then combine in infinite variations to create more structures in the music for us to listen to.

Right now, even with nothing but your new awareness of these dimensions, you could start listening to music and asking yourself:

• “What different timbres can I hear? Can I figure out what instruments there are?”
• “How is the pitch of the different notes, the highness and lowness of sounds, used in this piece?”
• “What’s going on with the rhythms here—overall and for a particular instrument?”
• “What are the dynamics? Is the music loud or soft overall? Do the dynamics change at any time?”

Next we will look more deeply into each of these dimensions, the structure of music, and how you can employ these understandings to more deeply appreciate and understand all the music in your life.

A Quick Word About Genre

In what follows, we’ll be making various references to musical genres. The idea of a “genre” in music can be highly contentious, and often the genre of a given track can be debatable. At last count Spotify recognised over 6,000 “genres”! And that’s up from about 1,500 in 2016 * You’ll find a link to a fascinating analysis of this in the Additional Resources. .

Musical “genre” labels are a human construct, and admittedly a highly imperfect one. However the concept is still extremely useful, by providing us with shorthands for a whole collection of musical traits—which you can then describe more specifically and in more detail with your newfound Active Listening skills.

So when we make statements below about musical genres or styles, keep in mind the “descriptive” approach to music theory we discussed in Chapter 1: Musicality. Any “rule” in music should only be seen as a guideline or a musical tendency. So being aware of the norms for a given genre isn’t about making sure you get it “right”—but rather about giving you the conscious choice of whether to match the conventions, or defy them in your own creative way.