Glossary of Music Terms

This neuroscience of music page is the product of my independent research project as a sophomore in high school.

The basic elements of any sound are loudness, pitch, contour, duration (or rhythm), tempo, timbre, spatial location, and reverberation. Our brains organize these fundamental perceptual attributes into higher- level concepts—just as a painter arranges lines into forms—and these include meter, harmony, and melody. When we listen to music, we are actually perceiving multiple attributes or “dimensions.” Here is a brief summary of them.

A discrete musical sound is usually called a tone. The word note is also used, but scientists reserve that word to refer to something that is notated on a page or score of music. The two terms, tone and note, refer to the same entity in the abstract, where the word tone refers to what you hear, and the word note refers to what you see written on a musical score.
Pitch is a purely psychological construct, related both to the actual frequency of a particular tone and to its relative position in the musical scale.
Rhythm refers to the durations of a series of notes, and to the way that they group together into units.
Tempo refers to the overall speed or pace of the piece.
Contour describes the overall shape of a melody, taking into account only the pattern of “up” and “down” (whether a note goes up or down, not the amount by which it goes up or down).
Timbre is that which distinguishes one instrument from another— say, trumpet from piano—when both are playing the same written note. It is a kind of tonal color that is produced in part by overtones from the instrument’s vibrations.
Loudness is a purely psychological construct that relates nonlinearly to the physical amplitude of a tone.
Spatial location is where the sound is coming from.
Reverberation refers to the perception of how distant the source is from us in combination with how large a room or hall the music is in; often referred to as “echo” by laypeople, it is the quality that distinguishes the spaciousness of singing in a large concert hall from the sound of singing in your shower.

These attributes are separable. Each can be varied without altering the others, allowing the scientific study of one at a time, which is why we can think of them as dimensions. The difference between music and a random or disordered set of sounds has to do with the way these fundamental attributes combine, and the relations that form between them. When these basic elements combine and form relationships with one another in a meaningful way, they give rise to higher-order concepts such as meter, key, melody, and harmony.

Meter is created by our brains by extracting information from rhythm and loudness cues, and refers to the way in which tones are grouped with one another across time.
Key has to do with a hierarchy of importance that exists between tones in a musical piece; this hierarchy does not exist in-the-world, it exists only in our minds, as a function of our experiences with a musical style and musical idioms, and mental schemas that all of us develop for understanding music.
Melody is the main theme of a musical piece, the succession of tones that are most salient in your mind. The notion of melody is different across genres. In rock music, there is typically a melody for the verses and a melody for the chorus, and verses are distinguished by a change in lyrics and sometimes by a change in instrumentation. In classical music, the melody is a starting point for the composer to create variations on that theme, which may be used throughout the entire piece in different forms.
Harmony has to do with relationships between the pitches of different tones, and with tonal contexts that these pitches set up that ultimately lead to expectations for what will come next in a musical piece—expectations that a skillful composer can either meet or violate for artistic and expressive purposes. Harmony can mean simply a parallel melody to the primary one (as when two singers harmonize) or it can refer to a chord progression—the clusters of notes that form a context and background on which the melody rests.