Music is the only universal language, flowing naturally from the human heart. And, like any language it has audible and written forms. Written music in western civilization has been, for the most part, standardized over time. It attempts to express not only pitch and rhythm but provides clues to its emotional expression.

There are seven pitches used in a scale, duplicated up and down as octaves. They are given the letters A though G and repeat after that. So after G comes another A. Moving to the right of a keyboard is ascending in pitch through the notes with those letters. Most commonly used is the "Major Scale," which can begin on any note. The starting note determines the key.

In the example below the key of C can be seen as the white keys on a piano. You will note that C begins just left of a pair of black keys and ends with B following a grouping of three black keys. These are the seven notes of a C Major scale. This grouping of keys is duplicated up and down the keyboard in the various octaves. As you might expect, playing a C in one octave sounds very similar to the C in an adjacent octave. For simplicity, strict technical details of math and physics will be ignored throughout this explanation. But to get a sense for the reason behind it we can say that the C of one octave is half the frequency of the C in the next octave up, which is why they sound so similar to our ears. They have coincidental sound waves.

Another thing you may notice is that some white keys have a black key between them while others don't. Actually, those black keys are notes too, but they are not used in the key of C. The distance between each key, whether white or black, is called a "half step" or, more properly, a semitone. This distance is called an interval and, as you might guess, it takes two half-steps to make a whole step, or tone. There are twelve semitones in an octave and there will always be a half-step between B & C and E & F.

Let's continue on and talk about scales.