Compare middle eastern music and western music


If you have only listened to Western music, the first time you hear o a middle eastern melody it may sound very different and odd. Melodies in middle eastern music are generally long, lack harmony, and have unfamiliar pitches.

Middle Eastern music typically sounds monophonic, meaning it's solely based on one or more instruments that play a single melody with a different variation. Western music typically sounds polyphonic, meaning more than one layer of melody is being played simultaneously.

Western music has twelve notes per octave including seven whole notes and five half-notes. However middle eastern music is based on different scale systems. It has quarter notes in addition and various regions have a different number of notes in their octave system.

Western music has harmony (ie. chords) while middle eastern music does not. In middle eastern music, there is only one melodic line with rise and fall. So the purity of the melodic line and the complexity of the rhythm is what make two different songs apart. In contrast, western music has a structure with a beginning, middle, and end.