[MUSIC] Okay, let's talk about music. Not music theory, just music. Instead of starting from lofty, theoretical principles and finding examples that conveniently fit them, I think it's much better to begin by looking closely at a few real pieces of music and trying to figure out how they work. In fact, in this course, we're going to try to figure out what it means for a piece of music to work at all. After you begin to develop a set of terms from these pieces, we can then glance quickly at a wide variety of other pieces to see if the terms we've developed are in fact useful there as well. And before we start looking at real music, let's also admit something. When people teach music theory, they tend to select pieces of music as examples that are good illustrations of what they want to talk about. I mean, I do the same thing. But beware of the phenomenon of the drunk looking for his keys under the streetlight. You know that one? There's a drunk person who's dropped his car keys and he's desperately searching for them when someone asks him says, why are you looking here under the street lamp? Is this where you dropped them? And the drunk replies, no, but that's where the light is. In other words, when we are looking for musical understanding, let's be aware that we tend to look in places that are easy to look. And let's also be aware that if we only look in those places, we might leave some very important things unexamined. And this phenomenon is even more general when you look at music as a whole. Music, after all, is probably best defined as just sound framed by time. Now, within that time frame, there's probably four parameters. There is musical pitch, which is the frequency of the air of vibrations. Then there are issues of timbre which is the color of sound having to do with the harmonics of each pitch. Thirdly, there's probably issues of time and the relative rate of change. And finally, fourthly, there's an issue of loudness or amplitude. Each one of those four parameters are actually separable, but they are all a part of music. And guess what? When people talk about music theory, they almost always talk about only one of those four parameters. Pitch, notes. Do you know why? It's because they have names and that makes them very easy to talk about. Timbre and time are very complicated and they don't have as useful labels. That makes them much harder to talk about. Now, don't get me wrong, there's a lot to talk about when we examine the organization just of musical pitches, and boy it is fun to talk about that. But, as we proceed through this course, let's have some humility. Let's do remember that there's a lot of other things going on, and while some of the technicalities of what makes music so expressive in such a part of every known human culture, relate to pitch, some of those technicalities might just remain a mystery. So here, in this course, we will talk mostly about pitch, about notes, just like everybody else. We're going to start first with some very simple melodies. That will help us develop some basic terms on how we think pitches work one after the other. In the second week, we'll look at more complicated melodies and refine our vocabulary. Then, in the third week, we're going to start combining pitches one with the other and learn a whole new set of terms that can help us make those choices. And then in the fourth week we will put it all together and use that vocabulary to develop an understanding of what it means to have harmonic function. All of those things, yeah, we're talking about pitches, like everyone else. But let's at least let our awareness of the incompleteness, and frankly, the impossibility of our task, let's let that awareness prompt us to frame our examination of musical notes as questions. And let's let those questions help us build that vocabulary. And so that can help us begin to understand what's going on when we listen to music. What's going on when we perform music? What's going on when we write music? And what's going on when we love music? Let's begin.