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Musical notation, visual record of heard or imagined musi-

cal sound, or a set of visual instructions for performance

of music. It usually takes written or printed form and is

a conscious, comparatively laborious process. Its use is

occasioned by one of two motives: as an aid to memory or

as communication. By extension of the former, it helps the

shaping of a composition to a level of sophistication that

is impossible in a purely oral tradition. By extension of the

latter, it serves as a means of preserving music (although

incompletely and imperfectly) over long periods of time,

facilitates performance by others, and presents music in a

form suitable for study and analysis.

The primary elements of musical sound are pitch, or the

location of musical sound on the scale (hence interval, or

distance, between notes); duration (hence rhythm, metre,

tempo); timbre or tone color; and volume (hence stress,

attack). In practice, no notation can handle all of these

elements with precision. Most cope with a selection of

them in varying degrees of refinement. Some handle only

a single pattern—e.g., a melody, a rhythm; others handle

several simultaneous patterns.

General Principles Of Western Staff Notation

The position of staff notation as the first notational system

to be described in this article acknowledges its internation-

al acceptance in the 20th century. As an indirect result of

colonization, of missionary activity, and of ethnomusico-

logical research—not because of any innate superiority—

it has become a common language

among many musical cultures.

Pitch and duration

Staff notation, as it has developed,

is essentially a graph. Its vertical

axis is pitch, and its horizontal axis

is time, and note heads are dots

plotting the graph’s curve. The five

horizontal lines of a musical staff

function like horizontal rulings of

graph paper, bar lines like vertical

rulings. In practice, the system is

far more complex and sophisticat-

ed than this. The vertical axis of

pitch operates to represent melod-

ic contour in music for a single

instrument or voice, but, when

several staves are combined to form

a score, the principle breaks down,

each staff being a self-contained

vertical system. Representation of

time (duration) by horizontal spac-

ing is used only in a very limited

way. It is in reality made almost

redundant because the symbol for

a note gives the necessary informa-

tion itself: not its absolute duration