Scientific pitch notation in Western music is a method of naming the notes of the standard Western chromatic scale by combining a letter-name, accidentals, and an Hindu-Arabic numeral identifying the pitch's octave. Western music is a broad category of music that includes all musical genres that use a 12-note chromatic scale, including Western classical music, rock and roll, and many other forms of popular music. ... The chromatic scale is the scale that contains all twelve pitches of the Western tempered scale. ... An accidental is a musical notation symbol used to raise or lower the pitch of a note from that indicated by the key signature. ... Arabic numerals is the term usually applied to the Western variant of the Hindu-Arabic numeral system, commonly used in conjunction with the Latin alphabet since Early Modern times (0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9). ... In music, pitch is the perception of the frequency of a note. ... In music, an octave (sometimes abbreviated 8ve or 8va) is the interval between one musical note and another with half or double the frequency. ...

As an example, A4 refers to the A above middle C. Middle C is set as C4. In music, the term middle C refers to the note C located between the staves of the grand staff, quoted as C4 in note-octave form. ...

Scientific pitch notation is an example of a note-octave notation, see below.

Scientific pitch notation is often used to specify the range of an instrument. It provides an unambiguous means of identifying a note in terms of musical notation rather than frequency, while at the same time avoiding the transposition conventions that are used in writing the music for instruments such as the clarinet and guitar. A transposing instrument is a musical instrument whose music is written at a pitch different from the actual concert pitch. Concert pitch is the pitch as notated for piano (or any other non-transposing instrument) - e. ... Two soprano clarinets: a Bb clarinet (left) and an A clarinet (right, with no mouthpiece). ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ...

Two cautions should be observed:

• Several variant systems (perhaps originally in error) use the same symbols as scientific pitch notation, but differ from it in the numbering of the octaves. Some MIDI documentation uses C3 to represent middle C; Other writers have used C5. Notation that appears to be scientific pitch notation may be one of these variant systems. While they are still note-octave systems, when they are called scientific pitch notation (as does occur) this is certainly in error.

• There is some possible confusion as to assigning the correct octave to Cb. The convention is that the letter name is first combined with the Arabic numeral to determine a specific pitch, which is then altered by applying accidentals. For example, the symbol Cb4 means "the pitch one chromatic step below the pitch C4" and not "the pitch-class Cb in octave 4", so Cb4 is the same pitch as B3, not B4. This is not a great problem in practice, as in nearly all usages of scientific pitch notation neither Cb nor B# are used at all, rather these notes would simply be named B and C respectively.

Musical Instrument Digital Interface, or MIDI, is a system designed to transmit information between electronic musical instruments. ... Human pitch-perception is periodic: pitches separated by an integral number of octaves are perceived as having a similar quality or color. ...

See also

• MIDI
• Piano key frequencies

Musical Instrument Digital Interface, or MIDI, is a system designed to transmit information between electronic musical instruments. ... This is a virtual piano with 88 keys tuned to A440, showing the frequencies, in cycles per second (Hz), of each note. ...

External links

• http://www.dolmetsch.com/musictheory1.htm#uspitch