[MUSIC] In the last lecture I said that we will be looking at tonal music. Which is music that has a clear tonal center. In other words, there's a note that all the other notes seem to lead to or circle around. Listen to this simple folksong. [MUSIC] If I play just the ending of the song, but leave out the last note, you'll hear what I mean. [MUSIC] I bet you couldn't keep from singing, at least in your head, that last note. [MUSIC] The whole melody seems to be leading to this note, [SOUND] at the end. Even in the middle of the tune, we are aware of this centrally important note. If I stopped in the middle away from that note you could probably still sing it. [MUSIC] The note is here. [MUSIC] This note, the goal of all the other notes in the melody, is called the tonic. Music that has such a clear tonal center is called tonal music. This goal note is often the first note and usually the last note of a melody. As we'll see, it's the first note of the scale of notes used to create the melody. Here's an example of music in which no note is more important than the others. There is no sense of an inevitable destination note. [MUSIC] Such music is called atonal. We will only be talking about tonal music in this course, but as you listen to music, you might notice that much music seems to fall somewhere between tonal and atonal. There seemed to be tonal centers, but they may change so quickly or so often, that we can't identify a single tonic. As you listen to music try to hear the tonic. Is there there a note that the other notes seem to gravitate to? Remember that that the tonic pitch does not need to sound in order to be present. In this little tune fragment you never hear the tonic pitch, but you know it's there. [MUSIC] Can you sing the tonic? It's here [SOUND] even though it wasn't one of the notes I played. When we say that a song has a single tonal center or tonic, we also are saying that it is in a single key. That is, it is built from a set of notes that have the tonic pitch as their most important goal note. Usually, these notes can be arranged in stepwise order as a scale. With the tonic pitch as the first and last note. [MUSIC] You may also be familiar with scales using do, re, mi syllables. I'll talk more about these syllables in a future lesson. In future lectures, we'll talk about all the possibilities for scales and keys. But let's listen to a few more examples of tonal music to see if we can identify the tonic. [MUSIC] Here's the tonic. It was the first and last note. Here's another one. [MUSIC] Here's the tonic note, [SOUND], notice that this melody is very unusual because it ended on a note that is not the tonic. It ended on that note [SOUND] which makes it feel not quite finished. Here's another one. [MUSIC] Here's the tonic for this tune. [MUSIC] And one more. [MUSIC] And here's the tonic for this one. [MUSIC] All of these traditional tunes are built from a seven note scale centered around a single tonic. So for example, the first tune. [MUSIC] Is built from these notes. [MUSIC] And then there are two more notes in the scale [SOUND] that it doesn't [SOUND] actually use. And the tonic pitch is the starting note of the tune. That scale, in future lessons, we'll call a major scale. In this case, the tonic note is C [SOUND], so the scale used to build this melody is C Major. To put it another way, we say that this tune is in C Major. The tonic note, the starting note of the scale is C. And the mode is major. This tune also uses a seven note scale, which we'll call a minor scale. [MUSIC] This minor scale is also centered around C, so it's C Minor. I'll talk a lot more about scales, keys, and modes in future lessons [MUSIC]