What is figured bass in music?
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Figured bass is a notation system. It’s taught in theory classes alongside Roman numeral analysis. It’s basically a shorthand for chord inversions. Widely used by organists, from what I understand. Lots of students think it’s totally arcane and obsolete, but I’m glad I learned it.
If I understand your question properly, frequencies under 100 hertz are usually considered to be in the bass range. Midbass is 100 to 300, midrange is 300 to 3k, and high frequencies would be 3 to 20k.
It’s a very old notation system for writing the chords for music, used about 400 years ago in the baroque period. It consists of the bass note to be played, with numbers and other symbols like sharps or flats to denote what other notes are to be played above the bass note.
Figured bass is shorthand way of showing the distance the notes in a chord are above the bass (lowest note) of that chord. For instance, if there’s an G in the bass, you might write a 6 over a 4 below that. This means that, in that chord, there’s a note a 6th above the G (G A B C D **E**), and a note a 4th above the G (G A B **C**). Depending on your knowledge of music theory, you may notice that this is a C major chord (C E G) with a G in the bass, which means that this is a chord in second inversion (we count “root position” for the root – C – being the bass, “first inversion” for the third – E – in the bass, “second inversion” for the G in the bass, etc.). In fact, all second inversion chords of triads have that 6 4 interval, which is great, because it means that we can just write 6 4 and know that we’re talking about a triad in second inversion. Sometimes, we’ll also leave out some numbers in the figured bass – a triad in first inversion, for instance, has a sixth and a third above the bass, but we often just write 6 instead.
Figured bass is useful because it allows us to track the motion of notes above the bass and notice larger patterns in a piece of music, especially when used with roman numeral analysis (where, for instance, in C major, a C chord would be I, a D chord II, etc.). It also means that you can get the gist of a piece of music using only the bass line and figured bass.
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