There can be little doubt that understanding how music works can help you to make better music; or, at the very least, make things easier when you’re at the composing stage of your project. Here, we ...

What are microtones, and why are they not an everyday part of classical music? We explore the history and mysteries of the ‘notes in between the notes’. Music is broadly defined as humanly-organised ...

For singers and their audiences, being 'in tune' might not be as important as we think. The fact that singers fail to consistently hit the right notes may have implications for the development of ...

Put basically, if you restrict all the notes you play to that specific selection of seven - that ‘scale’ - everything you play will be in key. It won’t automatically sound awesome, but it’s half the ...

Many musical cultures choose scales that establish simple frequency ratios (2:1, 3:2, 4:3) between notes. It is commonly believed that this choice is solely explained by the intention to maximize the ...