A 5 Minute History of Western Music

We’ll start at the beginning: If you take a string and pluck it, it makes a sound. If you hold your finger at the string’s halfway point and pluck it, then the sound is the same ‘note’ but it’s one octave higher. The same ‘note’ is played in different octaves by halving and doubling the length of the string making the sound. Changing the length in other ways plays other ‘notes’.

In the west, we split each octave into 12 individual ‘notes’. This was not always the case: The ancient Greeks split their octave into 24 notes, and while we have some written examples of…

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