Electronic music - musical terms

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These are generic musical terms (of which there are many more).

And roughly the subset seen implemented on synths.

Arpeggio

✎ This article/section is a stub — some half-sorted notes, not necessarily checked, not necessarily correct. Feel free to ignore, or tell me about it.

Arpeggio is the concept of breaking a chord into notes in quick succession, often specifically one ordered by increasing or decreasing tone.

You may associate (particularly slower) arpeggiation with seventies and eighties synth sounds, because arpeggiation was both a way to get chord-like things out of often-monophonic synths, as well as an easy way to something that functions like a bassline.

Wider than that, it can be an intentional technique in composition.

Vibrato

✎ This article/section is a stub — some half-sorted notes, not necessarily checked, not necessarily correct. Feel free to ignore, or tell me about it.

Vibrato is a regular variation in pitch.

Tends to be a small and fast change.

Used in singing, and in various instruments, often for a fuller sound, a more emotive sound, for a spacier sound, for more permissive pitch perception, etc.

From a synthesis perspective, it's frequency modulation with a small amplitude (typically less than a semitone) and fairly slow(-for-FM) carrier.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibrato

Tremolo

✎ This article/section is a stub — some half-sorted notes, not necessarily checked, not necessarily correct. Feel free to ignore, or tell me about it.

A trembling effect.

This can come either from

• very rapid repetition of a note

sometimes for the perception of it being played longer

sometimes for the texture that the variation in volume gives

• a (often fast) variation in volume.

Sometimes confused with vibrato, which makes sense in that on various instruments (and e.g. a Leslie speaker) the two come hand in hand, due to physics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tremolo

Sostenuto

✎ This article/section is a stub — some half-sorted notes, not necessarily checked, not necessarily correct. Feel free to ignore, or tell me about it.

A three-pedal piano will often (details actually vary [1]) have those pedals be

• soft
• sostenuto
• sustain

Where sustain disengages all the string's dampers allowing free resonance until the pedal is released, sostenuto is more selective: holds away the dampers of the notes that were held when the pedal is pressed, until that pedal is released.

With some well-timed foot movement this allows you to e.g. sustain the chords, while the melody is moving quickly without sustain. The faster the piece, the harder this is to do, because you should not be playing any melody the moment you play the chord to which the sostenuto should apply.

For context, the soft pedal is actually not about the dampeners.

If you've ever seen a piano open you'll have noticed that every note has multiple strings. The details vary per model, but it's often three, lowering to two or one for bass notes. There are multiple reasons for that, but the one we care about here is loudness - and this is relevant to why the piano's full name at the time was piano-forte.

The soft pedal shifts the entire keyboard so that the hammer hits fewer of these strings, which is also why it can apply to specific played notes without further mechanisms.

Dynamics

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamics_(music)

Ornament

Ornaments are notes, or other things playing with pitch, that are not necessary to the melody, harmony, or rhythm (in the analytical sense), but still add to the piece as a form of decoration.

May be improvised, may be marked, or marked with some interpretation on how to play)