Dynamics

All over music you'll see dynamics - these help us to know how loudly or softly to sing a part of music - you don't usually sing "Away in a Manger" at the top of your voice (even on your own in the bath). So we use the following symbols

pianissimo	piano	mezzo piano	mezzo forte	forte	fortissimo
very quietly	quietly	medium-soft	medium	loud	very loud

Incidentally a piano (full name: pianoforte) is so-called because it was the first keyboard instrument which could play softly and louldly, so they called it a "soft-loud".

Example

The dynamics usually appear above the staff of the the line you are singing. In this case, "Baa baa black sheep" is sung very quietly while, "have you any wool?" is a bit louder (but still quiet). "Yes sir! Yes sir! Three bags full" is sung medium-soft while, "one for the master and" is medium-loud. We step up again to loud for, "one for the dame, and" and, one for the little boy who lives down the lane" is sung very loudly ( and you've probably frightened the children by now).

This is all well and good but it is not subtle - we are getting louder and softer in steps rather than gradually. Do do things smoothly we need crescendo and diminuendo. there are two way of writing these - with words and symbols.

crescendo	diminuendo	crescendo	diminuendo decrescendo
get louder	get quieter	get louder	get quieter

Again these tend to appear above the staff of the line where you are singing - with the "hairpin" symbols you start getting louder/softer on the note above which the symbol starts and finish getting louder/softer on the last note underneath the end of the symbol. With the words you start getting louder/softer from roughly the notes under the word and carry on until you are told to do otherwise.

Example

From this we can see that we start off very quietly and start getting louder untile the word "Yes" which is very loud. We then start getting quieter until we reach "full" which is very quiet (the same loudness as when we started). The second line is the same but using the words - we get louder until "one" and then start getting softer gain to the end.