Being a viewer of American idol, I always hear judges Randy Jackson, Paula Abdul and Simon Cowell give comments to the contestants like, ‘It was too pitchy’ ‘There were a lot of flat parts in the middle’ or ‘There were a couple of sharps here and there’ besides the usual comments about their performance level, choice of song, or event the wardrobe. That made me wonder what do these flats and sharps mean, being a no-brainer in notes and pitches since I’m practically tone deaf.
As I’ve learned, these flats and sharps actually comprise the musical scale. When Randy says there were flats, these are the notes sung lower than the supposed pitch, whereas when Paula says there were sharps, these are the notes sung higher than the actual pitch.
A musical scale happens to be a set of notes arranged from the lowest pitch to the highest. A, B,C,D,E,F, and G are the notes in the scale of Western composers, and the distance between these notes (a note and the next highest note by the same name) is what they call an octave.
Here the flats and sharps come in—sharps are half tones above notes while flats are half tones below notes. A half step is the distance between a note and its sharp or a note and its flat. On a piano keyboard, the black keys play the sharp and flats while the white keys play the full steps in the scale. In the Western scale, there are 12 full steps—the letter notes and the half steps all together.
Speaking of musical scales, in the Eastern part of the world, their music sounds differently like in China, India and Saudi Arabia. As I continue my query about musical scales, I also learned that Asian music has more kinds of notes than Western music (that’s probably why the Chinese and Indian singers I see perform on cable TV sounds more complicated..). The Arabs has 17 steps, while the Indian scale has 22 steps, how about that!
And so, there ends my journey about flats, sharps and the musical scales of the globe. At least I know them by theory, if not by application.