“Understanding” or “appreciating” music involves knowing something about the historical and cultural context in which the music was created (who made it? for whom was it made? how was it made? for what purpose was it used? etc.) and also requires having a methodology for analyzing sound, musical structure, and the experience of making and listening to music. Although some people may feel intuitively that everyone should  be able to appreciate music naturally, without requiring special training, appreciation of music is actually both a visceral (emotional, gut-level) and an intellectual (rational, brainy) activity. Insofar as music appreciation is intellectual, it’s reasonable to believe that we can improve our appreciation through training and discussion.

One part of understanding music is having a framework of terminology to help us categorize and discuss musical phenomena. To that end let’s take a look at some terms that are used in the discussion and analysis of music, both instrumental and electronic. We can consider the meaning of these terms and can point to examples where the terms may apply.

Rhythm

Each sound is an event that marks a moment in time. We are capable of mentally measuring the amount of time between two events, such as between the onset of two sounds, thus we can mentally compare the time intervals between multiple events. This measurement and comparison process is usually subconscious, but we can choose to pay attention to it, and we can even heighten our capability with a little effort.

If sounds occur with approximately equal time intervals, we notice that as a type of repetition. (We notice that the same time interval occurred repeatedly.) That repetition is a type of pattern that gives us a sense of regularity, like the regularity of our heart beat and our pulse. When sounds exhibit a fairly constant beat or pulse (at a rate that’s not too fast for us to keep up with and not too slow for us to measure accurately in our mind), we are able to think of that as a unit of time, and we can compare future time durations to that unit. When something recurs at a fairly regular rate, we may say that it is periodic, and we refer to the period of time between repeating events. (The period is the reciprocal of the frequency of occurrence.) We’re able to use this period to predict when the next event in the series of repetitions is likely to occur.

We’re also capable of mentally imagining simple arithmetic divisions and groupings of a time period. For example, we can quite easily mentally divide a time interval in half, or multiply it by two, to calculate a new time interval, and we can notice when a time interval is half or twice the beat period.

With this mental measurement process, which allows us to detect arithmetically related time intervals, we can recognize and memorize patterns of time intervals. When we perceive that there is an organization or pattern in a sequence of events, we call that rhythm. We can find relationships between similar rhythms, and we can notice that rhythms are similar even when they are presented to us at a different speed. (A change of speed is also an arithmetic variation, in the sense that all the time intervals are multiplied by some constant value other than 1.) Musicians often refer to the beat speed as the tempo (the Italian word for time).

Pitch

We are able to discern different frequencies of sound pressure vibrations, and can compare those frequencies in various ways. When a sound contains energy at multiple frequencies, as is usually the case, if the frequencies are predominantly harmonically related (are whole number multiples of the same fundamental frequency) we perceive the sound as a unified timbre based on the fundamental frequency. We say that such sounds have a pitch, which refers to our subjective judgement of the sound’s fundamental frequency.

Most people are able to compare pitches, to determine which is “higher” or “lower”; that evaluation is directly related to whether a sound’s fundamental frequency is greater or lesser than that of another sound. With some practice, one can develop a fairly refined sense of relative pitch, which is the ability to identify the exact pitch difference between two pitched sounds; that evaluation is related to the ratio of the sounds’ fundamental frequencies. Thus, whereas we are mentally evaluating the ratio of two fundamental frequencies, we tend to think about it as a difference between two pitches. A geometric (multiplicative) series of frequencies is perceived as an arithmetic (additive) series of pitches.

Even when the sound is inharmonic, we’re sensitive to which frequency region(s) contain the strongest energy. So, with sounds of indefinite pitch, or even with sounds that are fairly noisy (contain many unrelated frequencies), we can still compare them as having a higher or lower pitch, in which case we’re really referring to the general pitch region in which they have the most sound energy. For example a small cymbal that produces mostly high frequency noise will sound higher in pitch than a larger cymbal that has more energy at lower frequencies.

So, even when we’re hearing unpitched sounds, we still can make pitch-based comparisons. A traditional musical melody is a sequence of pitched sounds, but a percussionist can construct a similar sort of melody made up of unpitched sounds, using instruments that produce noises in different pitch regions. Likewise, a musique concrète composer might use non-instrumental sounds of different pitch height to compose a “melody” of concrete sounds.

Motive

In various design fields, the term motif is used to designate the repeated use of a particular distinctive pattern, shape, or color to establish a predominant visual theme. In music composition the term motive (or motif) is used to describe a short phrase that has a distinctive pitch contour and a distinctive rhythm, which is then used repeatedly (with some variation) to create a sense of thematic unity over time. The distinctive aspects of the pitch contour and the rhythm make it easily recognizable to the listener, even when it has been modified in certain ways (such as using the original rhythm with a different pitch contour or vice versa). As the motive reappears in the music, the aspects  that remain the same provide a sense of predictability and familiarity for the listener, and the motive’s distinctive traits provide a basis for variation that makes it useful for generating new-but-related ideas.

Counterpoint

Dynamics

Form

Gesture

Dialogue

Technological terms of editing and mixing recorded sound also become compositional ideas and techniques in music that is meant for recording (that is, music that was conceived to exist only as a recording, as opposed to the recording being simply a document of a live performance of the music).

Editing

Looping

Reversal

Fragmentation

Mixing

Panning

Echo