Lets look at some imagesof musical notation forwe should say,at the outset that western music isthe only musical culture that usesmusical notation in a controlling way.Yes, there's Chinese musical notation andthere is Indian musical notation, butneither controls the creation andthe performance ofmusic to the extent that notation doesin the western classical tradition.So, how did westernmusical notation begin,how did we get from this complexscore here, how did we get to it?Well, let's look at some slides andsee how this unfolded.Western musical notation began whenmusicians in monasteries around the year900 Common Era began to createa graphic image of their music.They tried to capture andfreeze sound onto paper orin this case on to parchment.And, they did so in this fashion.Notice all the undulations here,the musical scribes are trying torepresent the high andlow flow of the music by graphic symbols.They look like worms squigglingacross the page, butthey're called these littleaggregates are called nouns.Nouns that representeda collection of pitches.If the voice produced a high pitchthey wrote a visually higher symbol.Eventually, these nouns wereseparated into individual discreetpitches called noti, hence our word note.A symbol for a pitch, butthese notes originally were onlyindicators of pitch, not duration.Eventually, as you can see by boththe left and right hand image here.Eventually, musicians introduced thepractice of assigning each particular notea shape to indicate its duration.The note could have a tail on it,or a flag, orit could be filled in,or it could be open.It could have a dot after it and so on.It took several hundred years,from roughly 1200 to 1600, forthis system of symbols representingduration to quite literally take shape.So now,we understand something of the origins ofthese notational symbols in the west,and they are just symbols of something.They represent something.Pitch and duration.Let's look at how we use them today.Originally, the beat in musicwas carried by this thing.The open circle, the whole note asyou see on the left of the screen.Then, as more and more text was addedto the music over the centuries,the beat fell down to the halfnote as the beat carrier.And today, most music is represented bythe symbol in the middle of the page,the quarter note as carrying the beat.The quarter note as beat carrying unit.Notice here that we have a didduple division in the music.Whole note is divided into two halves,half note into two quarters,quarter note into two As and so on.There's also a triple divisionwhich is affected by means ofa dot that adds 50% ofthe value to the note.This makes a half note equal to two,not three quarter notes,the dotted quarter equal to threeeighth notes, not just two, and so on.And, this is how we gettriple meter in music.We can see how this worksin a patriotic song,known in the US as My Country Tis of Thee.Elsewhere, as God Save the King,or God Save the Queen.On the top, you see the text beneath it,horizontal dashes to show duration.Then, duration appears ina different way in musical symbols.Then, the beat is shown byquarter notes below it.Again, the quarter notesrepresent the beat in most music.Finally, we see the position ofthe quarter note within each measure.But, we don't want to makethings too complex here.This should be a course about emotions andfeelings.We don't have to read musical notationto feel, and to have emotions.You don't have to read musical notationto get a great deal out of music,to get a great deal out of this course.Generally speaking, here's all you have toknow whenever you see a musical example.Musical notation signs placed highervertically representhigh sounding pitches.Lower signs mean lower sounding pitches.Notation that gets increasingly darker,more flags on it represents the,that music is moving faster up and down,left to right, darker means faster.I'll play it for you.[MUSIC]You can imagine how the reverse ofthat operates coming back down.Voila.That's all you need to knowabout musical notation.[MUSIC]