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What Is Music? 31fourteen semitones is a major ninth, etc., but these names are typicallyused only in more advanced discussions. The intervals of the perfectfourth and perfect fifth are so called because they sound particularlypleasing to many people, and since the ancient Greeks, this particularfeature of the scale is at the heart of all music. (There is no “imperfectfifth,” this is just the name we give the interval.) Ignore the perfect fourthand fifth or use them in every phrase, they have been the backbone ofmusic for at least five thousand years.Although the areas of the brain that respond to individual pitcheshave been mapped, we have not yet been able to find the neurological basisfor the encoding of pitch relations; we know which part of the cortexis involved in listening to the notes C and E, for example, and for F andA, but we do not know how or why both intervals are perceived as a majorthird, or the neural circuits that create this perceptual equivalency.These relations must be extracted by computational processes in thebrain that remain poorly understood.If there are twelve named notes within an octave, why are there onlyseven letters (or do-re-mi syllables)? After centuries of being forced toeat in the servants’ quarters and to use the back entrance of the castle,this may just be an invention by musicians to make nonmusicians feel inadequate.The additional five notes have compound names, such as E♭pronounced “E-flat”) and F# (pronounced “F-sharp”). There is no reasonfor the system to be so complicated, but it is what we’re stuck with.The system is a bit clearer looking at the piano keyboard. A piano haswhite keys and black keys spaced out in an uneven arrangement—sometimestwo white keys are adjacent, sometimes they have a black keybetween them. Whether the keys are white or black, the perceptual distancefrom one adjacent key to the next always makes a semitone, and adistance of two keys is always a whole step. This applies to many Westerninstruments; the distance between one fret on a guitar and the nextis also a semitone, and pressing or lifting adjacent keys on woodwind instruments(such as the clarinet or oboe) typically changes the pitch by asemitone.