In a contrapuntal situation, where chords are happening all the time, it's difficult to decide that a particular combination of parts is not playing a chord just because the notes happen to be in octaves. It might be weird to play a note but hear a chord, but that's what's happening. It may sound like a chord, but you're not playing a chord. If you only perform one action on your instrument, then you're only playing one note, regardless of how complex the sound is (unless the action is explicitly chordal, like if you push a chord button on an accordion). Chords are harmonic, and unisons/octaves are not harmonic. If you play two notes, you're playing two notes, but if they're in unison or octaves, they don't form a chord. The first sound is F# A the second is G G the third is A F#. One voice goes F# G A while the other, an octave up, goes A G F#. Is that a chord?Ĭhange of setting: you're now playing piano - a normal piano - and you're playing some 2-part counterpoint.
#PLAY OCTAVE NOTE C SOUND FULL#
Is that a chord? Is that a note? Of course, a single bowed G on a violin also contains a full G major triad in its overtones. You just have that resulting waveform that happens to contain a full G major triad. One more complication: your instrument is now a VST plugin, which lets you create whatever combination of pitches you want, and you're not actually pressing any keys on an instrument because you're on the computer. Again, it's still one black circle on the staff, but it's also just one key on the keyboard the key is simply causing many pipes to resonate.
You're just hitting one key, but you get pipes of different sizes, including some that actually sound up a fifth, so all the sounds you're making aren't even G's, out of the one G you're playing on the keyboard. Here's another complication: your instrument is now a pipe organ, where one note comes out of many pipes. Is that two notes or one? On paper, it's one, since it's just one black circle, but the instrument is making two sounds. You're playing both members of the pair at once. Two notes.īut let's throw in a complication: your instrument is a 12-string guitar, where the strings come in pairs. If you play two G's at the same time, you're making two sounds out of your instrument and you're playing two black circles on a staff. So we have two definitions of a note: one is a black circle on a staff, and the other is a sound made by an instrument. If you make a sound out of an instrument, that's a note. If you draw a little black circle on a staff, that's a note. Implicit here is the question of what exactly counts as a note, so let's think about that. If you personally play two sounds at the same time, even if they're both G's, even if they're both in the same octave (maybe you're playing two different instruments at once, or two different strings on the guitar), you're playing two notes. (By the way, that's the answer to pretty much every music theory question, though it depends on context.) This same effect can be achieved with other intervals and even full chords.Įveryone's saying two notes. On the other hand, if the octaves are played in parallel, the voices lose their individual character and the octave only serves as a reinforcement of the sound, acting as a single "note event". In two-voice counterpoint, octaves are treated as harmony, because each note is a member of an independent "line" or "voice". If you write it out in traditional notation, you would actually have to write multiple note heads.Įdit: There's a further ambiguity over whether an octave counts as a kind of harmony.
In the "specific" sense, you are playing multiple "note events". So, in the "generic" sense, you are playing one note in multiple octave transpositions.
In the former case, one uses note to refer to a specific musical event in the latter, one uses the term to refer to a class of events sharing the same pitch. The term note can be used in both generic and specific senses: one might say either "the piece 'Happy Birthday to You' begins with two notes having the same pitch", or "the piece begins with two repetitions of the same note". Most of the confusion here is coming from the ambiguous meaning of the term "note".
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