Who Decided How Music Notes Sound?

music notation

Who came up with the musical notation system?

Mystery Hour Question

Who came up with the musical notation system?

Mark, Walthamstow

Answer

Qualification: Musician and Conductor at Royal Academy of Music

Answer: J. S Bach standardised all notation and published a series of volumes called ‘The Well-Tempered Clavier”, i.e “The Evenly-Tuned Keyboard”.

If you go to an orchestral concert, every note has a different resonance and you’ll find the orchestra tunes up to what we call an ‘A’. This note in the middle of the stave and resonates at 440 beats per second – the standard by which all other notes are related by tone or semitone.

Before Bach did this, it would’ve been ‘hit and miss’, or composers would’ve written in ‘perfect pitch’.