Title
In: 263
Since you’re five and haven’t done fractions yet, lets start with the basics. The notes we usually use aren’t just made up by people out of thin air. They are based on math. Without jumping into fractions too deep, think of them as like pieces of a pie. Or here, like lengths of string.
For example, if you take a string, play it, and fold it and cut it in exactly half, the half string note will move air twice as fast. We call that an octave. The full string and the half string sound nice together because they vibrate in a simple pattern, one twice as fast as the other.
When you learn fractions in 2nd or 3rd grade, we can come back to how all the other notes we usually use are other simple mathematic divisions of a string. But again, they make more recognizable patterns our ears seem to like because they are vibrating 3 times, 4 times, 5 times, stuff like that of the full string base.
And this goes back interestingly way way back in human understanding. Your parent can read this too you, it explains how a flute made 40,000 years ago used similar math that we still use for those notes in music. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/feb/15/ice-age-flute
Latest Answers