Talk:Music Terminology

First order of business, I think, should be to work out this tone/semitone/whole step/half step thing, establish a convention, and then fix all the existing articles to use that convention. My vote is for whole step and half step, even though it does imply tempered tuning, because it's less ambiguous than Tone.JFQ

I would prefer tone/semitone, because "step" implies one step on a scale (any scale), which may or may not be a tone in size. "Tone" can be ambiguous, but I think context usually solves that problem - where it doesn't, you can say "whole tone" instead. --Camembert

Uses of the word tone:

• quality of sound: I suggest we use tonal quality for clarity
• a noise, like the "dial tone": not really used in music articles.
• a particular pitch (AmEng, I think?) eg from an older version of piano: "each key on the piano keyboard produces one tone"
• the interval

I'm pretty sure the Oxford Companion to Music says somehting about this... I'm off to look it up. -- Tarquin