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#Harmonic series music series

#Harmonic series music series

Here’s what the harmonic series looks like for a C note played on any instrument:

This is great to know about: Mother Nature mathematically organized sub vibrations (harmonics) into a well-defined structured pattern, which is what comes out when you play any single note on any instrument. This wave is visibly more complex in shape because that string vibration consists of a whole series of sub vibrations, which is also called “the harmonic series”īasically, the harmonic series is the series of harmonics, in order, that occurs when an individual note is played on an instrument. The wave of an A 440Hz note played on a guitar string. The wave of a harmonic looks like this: a pure, simple, single vibration. Hence: the harmonic series!Ī great way to envision that complexity is by seeing the waves drawn out on a graph. So a “component frequency”: is one of the many vibrations of a whole series of vibrations that combined produce a more complex sound, than each individual vibration. In music, this refers to vibrations (of strings on stringed instruments, air columns in wind instruments, air molecules hitting your eardrum), which keep repeating in a regularly vibrating pattern, resulting in a produced sound that is perceived by our brain.

The definition of “frequency” is: “a number of occurrences of a repeating event per unit time”.

Your steering wheel for example is one of the many components that make up your car.

Well the word “component” means: “a connected part of a greater whole”, or “a connected subset of a set”.

What does that mean: “component frequency”? The word “harmonic” is defined as: “a component frequency of a wave”. Let’s explore some of these questions, perhaps learning a bit more about the harmonic series and the mathematical ratios that make intervals in western music sound the way they do.Īny discussion about the evolution of western harmony would be incomplete without a discussion of the harmonic series and its implications for tonal harmony.įirst off, what is a “harmonic”? It is the eerie, simple, pure sound you get when you pick a guitar string while very lightly touching that string on for example the 5 th, 7 th or 12 th fret. This leads us to several questions, among them, why do we use certain intervals more than others? What does the relationship between frequencies/vibrations teach us about our definition of consonance, dissonance, and harmony? Why since Medieval times did our chords evolve to chords primarily built stacking 3 rd intervals? How does this affect songwriting and composition? While the styles of music change, they all share these simple building blocks.

Through these hundreds of years of evolution, we have arrived at 12 tones in a tempered scale and 12 intervals that are used in every genre of western music. The basic building blocks of western music are the result of hundreds of years of experimentation and evolution.