The History of Music

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The History of Music Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary the Eleventh Edition states that music is “The science or art of ordering tones or sounds in succession, in combination, and in temporal relationships to produce a composition having unity and continuity. It can created by vocals, instrumental, or mechanical sounds having rhythm, melody or harmony.” With all of the different types of music, it would be hard to navigate and it would take a lot of time to discuss all of the aspects of music. We can agree and or we can disagree about how universal music is and how it relates to everything we do on a daily basis. What one person enjoys as music, another person may have an entirely different opinion. After researching the history of music, it turns out that there are several theories concerning music and it is hard to determine at just what point when it originated. A lot of people say music was created before the existence of man. Historians say that there are six time frames of music and each different time frame has a certain type of music that has contributed to the music that we know today. The first period of time for music is the time of the Middle Ages or known as the medieval period. Symbols which were written on paper are used to represent the music by identifying a certain symbol to a certain tone which is called notions. At the same time they discovered how to combine more than two independent melodies which is called polyphony. http://musiced.about.com/od/timelines/a/medieval.htm The second period of time for music is the Renaissance period. During this time frame music was reborn and it went through a lot of changes and the way music was written and understood. In this period of time, the composers were expe... ... middle of paper ... ...obvious areas like rain on a tin roof, the croaking of frogs, the trees whistling in the wind, birds chirping in the early morning, hands clapping together, somebody humming or whistling and tapping on something with a deep tone. As the years have gone by people have made a lot of progress getting the sounds to come together to make music as we know it today. As we look at music from the beginning, music has a lot that goes into creating the sounds and tones that make us happy, changes our mood, and sets a tone for how we act. It all starts with creating the words or series of sounds, we write down the lyrics and then over and over we talk and sing till it makes sense and sounds good, once we are happy with the words we add the instruments and over and over again we play and play the song until the instruments actually sing the song and is in harmony with the words.

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