Part of our section on Musical Notation where we look at the elements of a music score.
This page follows on from our page on tempo and style
In music, dynamics means how loud or quiet to play a piece of music
Symbols are used to indicate the loudness/quietness e.g. f = loud and p = soft or quiet, as shown by the volume chart below:
We also use words like crescendo or cresc for short and diminuendo or dim for short.
Crescendo means get gradually louder and is also indicated by a stretched < symbol:
Diminuendo means get gradually softer or quieter and is also indicated by a stretched “>” symbol:
You can find a handout on dynamics on our google drive.
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