Quick questions on The concepts of music: HSC Music core framework

Duration is everything to do with time in music. It covers beat and pulse, tempo (the speed, often marked with Italian terms such as Allegro or Adagio), metre (the grouping of beats into bars, for example simple duple, compound time, or irregular metres such as 7/8), rhythm (note values and patterns), and devices such as syncopation, dotted rhythms, triplets, augmentation, diminution, rubato and accelerando or rallentando. When you analyse duration, name the time signature, the tempo character, and any rhythmic device that defines the excerpt.

Pitch is highness and lowness, and everything organised around it. It covers register (high, middle, low), melody (its shape or contour, range, and whether it moves by step or leap), tonality (major, minor, modal, atonal, pentatonic, blues scale), harmony (chords, progressions, consonance and dissonance, cadences), and intervals (the distance between two notes). Pitch is where scales, chords and intervals live, so it carries the most technical theory in the course.

Tone colour (timbre) is the quality of a sound that lets you tell one instrument or voice from another playing the same pitch. It covers the instruments and voices used, how they are played (arco or pizzicato, muted brass, distorted guitar, breathy or belted vocals), and production techniques in recorded music (reverb, panning, effects). When you describe tone colour, name the specific source and the specific technique, not just "it sounds bright".

Texture is how many layers of sound there are and how they relate. The standard textures are monophonic (one line), homophonic (a melody with chordal accompaniment), polyphonic or contrapuntal (independent interweaving lines), and heterophonic (variations of one line at once). You should also describe density (thick or thin) and the roles of layers (melody, bass, harmony, riff, drum pattern).

Structure is how a piece is organised over time. It covers form (binary, ternary, rondo, theme and variations, sonata form, twelve-bar blues, verse-chorus, through-composed), the use of repetition and contrast, unity and variety, and devices such as ostinato, sequence, riff, motif and development. Structure is the large-scale frame inside which the other five concepts operate.