Breaking Down the Barriers of Music Jargon

To many nonmusicians, the world of classical music criticism feels like a locked room. Terms like diatonic, cadence, or even seemingly simple ideas such as key and pitch can turn concert reviews into exercises in translation rather than reflection. Too often, music writing comes across as a veil of technical jargon that feels more exclusionary than enlightening.

You’ve likely read reviews that speak of “sustained appoggiaturas” or “unnecessary modulations to C-sharp minor” and wondered—did the audience even enjoy the performance? Did the singer move people emotionally? Did the music breathe life into the character being portrayed? At the end of the day, what most listeners want is not an anatomy of chords but a sense of whether the experience touched hearts.

If food critics wrote like some music reviewers, they would ramble about the exact temperature at which a chef whisked in lemon juice to a hollandaise. Film critics might bore us with lens aperture sizes instead of telling us whether the movie made us laugh, cry, or think. Why then should we settle for such over-technicality in music?

The Trouble with Definitions
Even among specialists, definitions are slippery. Take the term timbre, often described as the “color” or character of a sound—the very thing that makes a trumpet sound unlike a clarinet, even when playing the same note. Yet scientists disagree on a precise definition. In fact, the Acoustical Society of America resorts to defining timbre by what it isn’t: it is everything about a sound that is not pitch or loudness. Hardly satisfying, but it illustrates how much of music perception lies beyond cold definitions.

Pitch, Frequency, and the Brain
Despite the intimidating vocabulary, much of music perception is accessible to everyone. Even without training, most of us can recognize when a singer is off-key, just as easily as we distinguish the rising tone of a question from the steady tone of a statement in speech.

This ability stems from the physics of sound. Frequency—the number of vibrations per second—is measured in Hertz (Hz). A frequency of 60 Hz, for example, means that the source is vibrating 60 times per second. Pianos embody this principle: keys on the left trigger thick, slow-vibrating strings (low pitches), while keys on the right strike thinner, fast-vibrating strings (high pitches).

When strings vibrate, they push surrounding air molecules to vibrate at the same rate. These vibrations reach our eardrum, which wiggles accordingly, and our brains interpret that physical motion as pitch. But here’s the twist: pitch itself isn’t a property of the sound wave. Like color in vision, pitch exists only as a mental representation inside our brains. Sound waves have frequency, but pitch is our mind’s interpretation.

High and Low: Arbitrary Terms
Even the familiar notions of “high” and “low” pitch are cultural constructs rather than absolutes. In Western music, slow vibrations are called “low” and fast vibrations “high.” The Greeks, however, described this the other way around because their instruments were oriented vertically—shorter strings closer to the ground were “low,” and longer strings stretching upward became “high.”

Some argue our labels are intuitive: chirping birds, high up in trees, produce “high” sounds, while large animals and earthquakes give us “low” ones. But counterexamples abound—thunder (a low sound) comes from the sky, while crickets and crunching leaves (high sounds) happen near the ground. The truth is, our terms are conventions we memorize more than reflections of natural law.

The Invisible Dance of Sound
Consider what happens when you press a piano key. A hammer strikes the string, displacing it. The string oscillates—overshooting its resting position again and again until the vibration fades. Each swing of the string alters loudness: the more distance it travels, the louder it sounds. The rate of vibration determines pitch.

Interestingly, these two properties are independent. A string can vibrate very fast (creating a high pitch) while moving either a great distance (loud sound) or scarcely at all (soft sound). Striking a key harder makes the note sound louder, but not higher.

More Than Just Physics
It may seem tempting to reduce pitch to frequency alone, but this overlooks the essential truth: pitch is a psychological reality, not a physical one. Like Newton’s discovery that color is not a property of light but our brain’s interpretation of wavelengths, pitch too is a human construction. Frequency provides the raw data; our minds provide the meaning.

The Music Beyond the Words
So where does this leave us as listeners? It suggests that music is less about knowing the technical terms and more about experiencing the sound. Whether we can name an appoggiatura or not, most of us can feel when a voice or an instrument resonates with us. Jargon may help specialists analyze, but it can also distract from the essence of performance: the capacity to stir human emotion.

Perhaps the best kind of music writing, then, isn’t about proving how much theory the critic knows, but about showing how deeply the music reached into the shared human experience of everyone listening.

Source : This Is Your Brain on Music by Daniel J. Levitin

Goodreads : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/141565.This_Is_Your_Brain_on_Music

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