| Term | Description |
|---|
| Half note | In music, a half note (American or German terminology) or minim (British or classical terminology) is a note played for half the duration of a whole note (or semibreve) and twice the duration of a quarter note (or crotchet). In time signatures with a denominator of 4, such as 4/4 or 3/4 time, the half note is two beats long. |
| Harmony | In Western music, harmony is the use of different pitches simultaneously, and chords, actual or implied, in music. |
| Head voice | Head voice is a term used within vocal music. The use of this term varies widely within vocal pedagogical circles and there is currently no one consistent opinion among vocal music professionals in regards to this term. |
| Helmholtz pitch notation | Helmholtz pitch notation is a musical system for naming notes of the Western chromatic scale. Developed by the German scientist Hermann von Helmholtz, it uses a combination of upper and lower case letters (A to G), and the sub- and super-prime symbols to describe each individual note of the scale. |
| Heterophony | In music, heterophony is a type of texture created through the simultaneous variation of a melodic line. This can refer to a kind of complex monophony in which there is only one basic melody, but realized at the same time in multiple voices, each of which play the melody differently, either in a different rhythm or tempo, or with various embellishments and elaborations. |
| Homophony | In music, homophony is a texture in which two or more parts move together in harmony, the relationship between them creating chords. |
| Hook | A hook is a musical idea, a passage or phrase, that is believed to be appealing and make the song stand out; it is "meant to catch the ear of the listener". |
| Horn section | In a symphony orchestra the horn section is the group of musicians who play the horn (sometimes referred to as the French horn), a brass instrument descended from the natural horn that consists of about 12 feet of tubing (for a single horn in the key of F), wrapped into a compact, coiled form with a flared bell. |
| Hornbostel-Sachs | Hornbostel-Sachs (or Sachs-Hornbostel) is a system of musical instrument classification devised by Erich Moritz von Hornbostel and Curt Sachs, and first published in the Zeitschrift für Ethnologie in 1914. |
| Hornpipe | The term hornpipe refers to any of several dance forms played and danced in Britain and elsewhere from the late 17th century until the present day. |
| Hundred twenty-eighth note | In music, a hundred twenty-eighth note (American or "German" terminology) or semihemidemisemiquaver or quasihemidemisemiquaver (British or "classical" terminology) is a note played for 1/128 of the duration of a whole note (or semibreve). |
| Hymn | A hymn is a type of song, usually religious, specifically written for the purpose of praise, adoration or prayer, and typically addressed to a god or other religiously significant figure. |
| Hypodorian mode | The hypodorian mode, literally meaning 'below dorian', is a musical mode or diatonic scale of ancient Greece that was based upon the dorian tetrachord: a series of rising intervals of a semitone followed by two whole tones. The rising scale for the octave is a single tone followed by two conjoint dorian tetrachords. This is the same as playing all the white notes of a piano from A to A: A | B C D E | (E) F G A. |
