Wikipedia:WikiProject Music terminology

There are a lot of different schools of thought about how to speak about music, from the symbolic nomenclature of classical Musicology, to the Lead Sheet Analysis methods used by East Coast jazz musicians (largely influenced by The Berklee College of Music[?]), to the stripped down practicality found in pop music abbreviations, common to West Coast studio musicians and certain editions of The Real Book[?].

These problems do not end there, however. Through the course of putting together the Wikipedia, it has become apparent to several contributors that quite often we do not mean the same things when we say the same words, or even worse, we will use different words for (and create different articles about) the same things.

This page has been created, therefore, as a way to standardize the terminology used in the Wikipedia with reference to music. It is understood that this is not an attempt to in any way elevate one usage or system over another, but rather to simply establish a set of standards for talking about these things so that we all know what we mean when we say a certain word, and so that all articles will use a consistent form of symbolic analysis.

Toward this end, this author would suggest the usage of Classical analytical notation for all such purposes within the Wikipedia. While the system does have its limitations, particularly with respect to jazz and modern classical music, it is the most widely understood by musicologists and it is something with which most serious musicians have at least a passing familiarity. To clarify, this is the notational system in which major chords are indicated with a capitalized Roman numeral, minor chords are indicated with a lower case Roman numeral, and inversions are indicated through the use of figured bass.

Hopefully, in time, this page will accumulate a glossary of terms which can serve as a standard for the authorship of articles relating to music and particularly music theory.

• chord
• equal temperament all notes equally spaced in pitch
• just intonation notes have simple rational frequency ratios
• scale selecting the notes and chords
• solfege Do, Re, Mi etc...
• tonic The first note of a scale