Skip to content


 Select a Chapter |       RSS  Today in Music History |             Online Listening Lab


"Composing is like driving down a foggy road toward a house. Slowly you see more details of the house, the color and slates and bricks, the shape of the windows. The notes are the bricks and mortar of the house." —BENJAMIN BRITTEN

Key Points

  • An octave is the interval spanning eight notes of the scale.
  • In Western music, the octave is divided into twelve half steps, the smallest interval used; two half steps make a whole step.
  • The chromatic scale is made up of these twelve half steps, while a diatonic scale is built on patterns of seven whole and half steps that form major and minor scales.
  • A sharp (#) is a symbol that raises a pitch by a half step; a flat (b) lowers a tone by a half step.
  • Other scale types used around the world include tritonic (three-note patterns), pentatonic (five-note patterns), and heptatonic (seven-note patterns other than major or minor).
  • Some world cultures use microtones, which are intervals smaller than half steps; scales from other cultures—for example, Indian ragas—have extra-musical associations.

Section Menu

Norton Gradebook

Instructors now have an easy way to collect students’ online quizzes with the Norton Gradebook without flooding their inboxes with e-mails.

Students can track their online quiz scores by setting up their own Student Gradebook.