The Essential Elements of Music
A short guide on the building blocks of songs
Music comes in all shapes and forms and enriches our lives in a variety of ways. It intensifies our emotions, helps us focus, accompanies us on road trips, and motivates us for workouts. But what exactly is it comprised of?
Definition
Due to its subjective nature, a multitude of definitions of music have been put forward. However, the composer Edgard Varèse most famously defined it as “organized sound”. In The Liberation of Sound, he writes:
… I decided to call my music “organized sound” and myself, not a musician, but “a worker in rhythms, frequencies, and intensities.”
The basic elements
The fundamental building blocks of music are loudness, pitch, duration (or rhythm), tempo, timbre, and reverberation. When combined carefully, they give rise to higher-level concepts such as meter, harmony, melody, and key. Thus, music differs from random sound in the combination of its basic elements and the relations that form between them. Let’s briefly define them.
Pitch is the frequency of a particular tone, related to its relative position in the musical scale. The…
