Whether you listen to classical, jazz, pop, rock, hip-hop, electronic or any other style, music consists of two fundamental elements: rhythm and pitch
. Pitch is the relative frequency of notes. It’s what determines how low or high musical notes are in relation to each other. Rhythm is anything concerned with the duration and timing of notes. It’s how we know when a note should be played and for how long precisely.
We will begin our study of music with rhythm because it is the most fundamental element. In fact, rhythm can exist without pitch but pitch cannot exist without rhythm. There are tunes that most people can recognize just by their rhythm. Try clapping the rhythm to the Happy Birthday
tune or Jingle Bells
to a friend. These rhythms are characteristic enough that your friends would probably recognize them even without the pitches–that is, without the melody.
At the same time, it’s impossible to have pitch without rhythm because whenever we hear any pitch, we hear it for some amount of time (or in more musical terms: duration
). And duration is an important topic in our exploration of rhythm.