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MUSIC METAPHORS: height, depth, and length of sound
Sonic Height
So, if the sound equivalent of the visual perception of height is pitch, what’s the sound equivalent of depth? And what’s the sound equivalent of length?
Sonic Depth
The sound equivalent of the visual perception of depth is harmony, the subject of Chapter 6. A group of related tones played simultaneously—a chord, in other words—gives sound a 3- D depth-like quality. As you’ll see in Chapter 6, tones more related to each other provide a clearer sense of sonic depth than tones less related to each other. Completely unrelated tones blur off into noise, the sound of the wind in the poplars or Niagara Falls.
Sonic Length
The sound equivalent of the visual perception of length (or width, if you prefer) is beat or rhythm, the subject of Chapter 7. Beat measures time, the duration or length of a piece of music. Metaphorically, when you listen to a song, you go on a train trip. You go up and down hills (melody) and travel though a threedimensional landscape (harmony). The “length” of the train trip depends on the total number of beats (the clickity-clack of the rails) and the speed of the train (tempo).
Everybody talks about the time dimension of music in terms of how “short” or “long” it is. Music notation visually captures the train trip as a one-way, left-to-right, measure-by-measure, everchanging series of symbols embedded in five-rail train tracks called the staff.