music Music is the arrangement of sound to create some combination of Musical form, form, harmony, melody, rhythm, or otherwise Musical expression, expressive content. Music is generally agreed to be a cultural universal that is present in all hum ...

, a monad is a single

note Note, notes, or NOTE may refer to: Music and entertainment * Musical note, a pitched sound (or a symbol for a sound) in music * ''Notes'' (album), a 1987 album by Paul Bley and Paul Motian * ''Notes'', a common (yet unofficial) shortened versi ...

or pitch.Castine, Peter (1994). ''Set Theory Objects: Abstractions for Computer-Aided Analysis and Composition of Serial and Atonal Music'', p.33. . The Western

chromatic scale The chromatic scale (or twelve-tone scale) is a set of twelve pitches (more completely, pitch classes) used in tonal music, with notes separated by the interval of a semitone. Chromatic instruments, such as the piano, are made to produce the ...

, for example, is composed of twelve monads. Monads are contrasted to dyads, groups of two notes, triads, groups of three, and so on.

References

Intervals (music) Simultaneities (music) {{Music-theory-stub