Changing the duration of notes or intervals between notes is a common practice in music composition.
Musical augmentation may refer to the lengthening of the duration of musical notes or the lengthening of an interval between two notes. In certain specialist circles, the term "augmentation" may also be more general, referring to the use of mechanical devices by humans to produce music over and above that produced solely by the body.
Definition
At its most basic meaning, to augment is to increase something in size, number, extent or strength. In music, to augment is to either increase the duration of a musical note or "raise (the upper note of an interval or chord) by a half step."
Note Augmentation
In music, a theme is a phrase that serves as the subject or melody for a given musical work. Another way to think of a theme is as the conceptual idea that motivates a work. In symphonic music, the theme is repeated in various ways throughout the work. One way to vary the repetition is to augment the notes, prolonging them to, for example, emphasize the emotional or thematic strength. Prolonging the notes of a theme is one type of augmentation.
Interval Augmentation
An interval is the distance on the scale between two notes played simultaneously. This is done by widening the interval by a chromatic semitone. To understand chromatic, think of a piano keyboard: there are white and black keys lying next to each other, with some white keys separated by black keys while others are not. If you played each note consecutively between one C note and the next, you would produce a chromatic scale.
Augmented Chords
An augmented chord is any chord that contains an augmented interval. In music, chords are constructed by playing three or more notes simultaneously. The "distance" between these notes (the interval) can be lengthened, resulting in an augmented chord.
Mechanical Augmentation
Since augmentation also means to increase something in size or extent, some specialist definitions of "musical augmentation" may include the use of musical instruments to increase the size or extent of harmony and counterpoint available to humans. This can be done by the use of acoustic, mechanical tools; by power-assisted, non-electric tools (a pump-driven pipe organ, for example); by electric instruments; and by computer-aided composition.
Tags: between notes, augmentation also, augmented chord, black keys, duration musical, increase something, increase something size
