Scale, Degrees and Intervals
How 7 notes build an entire musical language.
Walking past a forge, Pythagoras noticed that certain hammers produce harmonious sounds together. By measuring their weight, he discovered that harmony is a mathematical proportion…
À retenir : The interval is the fundamental building block of music. A question of acoustics before being a question of aesthetics.
Where do these 7 notes come from?
The earliest Western music theories, notably those of the Greeks with Pythagoras, sought to build the scale on simple frequency ratios — sounds that naturally agree with the ear.
The starting point is the octave: a note and its double in frequency sound identical at different pitches. The second fundamental consonance is the perfect fifth (ratio 3/2). By chaining six fifths starting from F:
Bringing each note back within the same octave yields exactly 7 distinct pitches. Arranged in ascending pitch order, they form the natural diatonic scale.
The simplest scale: no accidentals, all the white keys of the piano.
The origin of note names
In the 11th century, Benedictine monk Guido d'Arezzo sought a more effective way to teach singing. He noticed that the first syllables of each verse of a hymn to Saint John the Baptist correspond to the successive notes of the scale:
Si / B was added later (initials of Sancte Ioannes). In the 16th century, Ut became Do — a more open and singable syllable.