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What Is Music? 25people. Above 20,000 Hz most humans don’t hear a thing, and by the ageof sixty, most adults can’t hear much above 15,000 Hz or so due to a stiffeningof the hair cells in the inner ear. So when we talk about the rangeof musical notes, or that restricted part of the piano keyboard that conveysthe strongest sense of pitch, we are talking about roughly threequarters of the notes on the piano keyboard, between about 55 Hz and2000 Hz.Pitch is one of the primary means by which musical emotion is conveyed.Mood, excitement, calm, romance, and danger are signaled by anumber of factors, but pitch is among the most decisive. A single highnote can convey excitement, a single low note sadness. When notes arestrung together, we get more powerful and more nuanced musical statements.Melodies are defined by the pattern or relation of successivepitches across time; most people have no trouble recognizing a melodythat is played in a higher or lower key than they’ve heard it in before. Infact, many melodies do not have a “correct” starting pitch, they just floatfreely in space, starting anywhere. “Happy Birthday” is an example ofthis. One way to think about a melody, then, is as an abstract prototypethat is derived from specific combinations of key, tempo, instrumentation,and so on. A melody is an auditory object that maintains its identityin spite of transformations, just as a chair maintains its identity whenyou move it to the other side of the room, turn it upside down, or paint itred. So, for example, if you hear a song played louder than you are accustomedto, you still identify it as the same song. The same holds forchanges in the absolute pitch values of the song, which can be changedso long as the relative distances between them remain the same.The notion of relative pitch values is seen readily in the way that wespeak. When you ask someone a question, your voice naturally rises inintonation at the end of the sentence, signaling that you are asking. Butyou don’t try to make the rise in your voice match a specific pitch. It isenough that you end the sentence somewhat higher in pitch than you beganit. This is a convention in English (though not in all languages—wehave to learn it), and is known in linguistics as a prosodic cue. There aresimilar conventions for music written in the Western tradition. Certain