Lesson One: Major Scale

Ok, this may seem a bit weird to reg­u­lar read­ers of my blog, but I’m going to be archiv­ing my course­work in my Berklee/Coursera pro­grams on this blog.

Per­haps someone else will get some value out of it, or offer hints or sug­ges­tions for improve­ments. Either way, it’ll make it a very easy ref­er­ence to me and my growth through this course

Cours­era — Devel­op­ing your musi­cian­ship — Peer Assign­ment 1 — Les­son One: Major Scale

Write in your own words the defin­i­tions of har­mony, ear train­ing, and interval.

Har­mony — the rela­tion­ship between notes played at the same time, or chords. Notes played togeth­er that cre­ate a gen­er­ally pleas­ing sound is often called har­mo­ni­ous, and notes that don’t sound good togeth­er are often described as dis­har­mo­ni­ous. Har­mo­ni­ous notes are used to build a chord or chord progression.

Ear Train­ing — The activ­ity that teaches you to con­sist­ently, cor­rectly identi­fy a par­tic­u­lar sound and asso­ci­ate it to a music­al tone or equi­val­ent sound from an instru­ment. Ear train­ing will enable you to identi­fy when a sing­er is singing off key, or on key.

Inter­val — The dif­fer­ence in pitch or tone between two notes. Using the 12 note scale, the inter­val can be expressed as either a WHOLE inter­val or HALF inter­val depend­ing on which notes are used to make up the scale.

There is a spe­cif­ic pat­tern to the inter­val between notes in the 12 note scale: W‑W-H-W-W-W‑H.

In the key of C, a half inter­val exists between C and C#, and a whole inter­val exists between C and D. Wheras in the key of E, a half inter­val exists between E and F, and a whole inter­val exists between E and F#.

Find three record­ings of songs in the key of C and post links to per­form­ances of them that you find on You­Tube, Vimeo, Daily­mo­tion, or a sim­il­ar pub­lic video site.

• Cole­optera — Ostraka (John Keston) — https://soundcloud.com/ostraka/coleoptera
• Also Sprach Zarathus­tra — DeoD­ato / Strauss — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDutVaWRzZk
• True Col­ors — Cyndi Lauper — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPn0KFlbqX8

Some resources I found help­ful to determ­ine song key:

• Find the Key of a Song by Ear https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bQouq9a_CA&feature=youtu.be
• http://chordify.net/

Write the C major scale on the staff by hand.