Musical Terms (updated 2/4/14)

"Follow the ball" - the "ball" is the most prevalent part at the time. Often times it is the melody, but could be a drum solo, guitar intro, or the voice, as in the Santana song. The "ball" can change many times during a piece of music.
Herz (Hz) a measurement of cycles per second.
Human hearing can extend from 20 Hz to 20 kHz (20,000 Hz)
The pitch A is at 440 cycles per second (440 Hz).
An Equalizer is a device that electronically boosts or cuts specific frequency ranges to tailor the TIMBRE of a musical selection.

Decibels - Amount of air (or water) pressure caused by a sound wave. See chart for decibel levels.

Compression: a technique of "squeezing" the dynamic range of audio by making the soft parts louder, and the loud parts softer, to arrive at a more consistent dynamic level.
Normalize: a digital technique of anayzing a waveform to identify the loudest sound, and calculating the ratio that may be modified to arrive at the point just below distortion (clipping). It then processes the entire selected audio sample that amount, making the file louder.
The Loudness Wars - a modern production technique to obtain more density from recorded audio. The selected audio is compressed and normalized several times to even out the dynamic range, but enable the entire sample to be louder. Each track is processed this way, and the resulting mix is very dense, and loud.
An uncompressed audio file (WAV file) is about 10 MB per minute, and when it is compressed (squeeze the pitches to only those frequencies that are within our usual range of hearing), it is about 1.5 to 2 MB per minute. It sound muffled and softer, with less detail.
MIDI: Musical Instrument Digital Interface. 1. a language that musical instruments use to communicate, 2. the hardware components of this communication (ports, cables, etc.), 3. actual computer files that are created and modified from this protocol. Cell phone ringtones are typically MIDI files ending in .mid.