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Sacred Harp singers view their tradition as a participatory one, not a passive one. Those who gather for a singing sing for themselves and for each other, and not for an audience. This can be seen in several aspects of the tradition.

First, the seating arrangement (four parts in a square, facing each other) is clearly intended for the singers, not for external listeners. Non-singers are always welcome to attend a singing, but typically they sit among the singers in the back rows of the tenor section, rather than in a designated separate audience location.

The leader, being equidistant from all sections, in principle hears the best sound. The often intense sonic experience of standing in the center of the square is considered one of the benefits of leading, and sometimes a guest will be invited as a courtesy to stand next to the leader during a song.

Source: Sacred Harp – Wikipedia

The music of the Middle Ages and Renaissance was often annotated under the assumption of musica ficta, which were particular raisings and lowerings of notes by the interval of a semitone, not written in the music notation. Authentic performance of such music must rely on the best available musicological scholarship to interpret the difficult and obscure rules governing when musica ficta should be introduced.

Source: How Sacred Harp music is sung – Wikipedia

The reason why Sacred Harp includes practices not notated in the music (that is, in the various published editions of The Sacred Harp) is that the printed music is not the only way that the music is transmitted among singers and across time—there is an oral channel as well. Many Sacred Harp participants can be described as “traditional” singers. They learned Sacred Harp by being taken to singings as children, and usually are the children of traditional singers of the previous generation. The parents, in turn, also learned the tradition as children.[1] Thus there is often a chain of direct transmission dating back to (or even before) the original appearance (1844) of The Sacred Harp. This chain has evidently developed and transmitted a number of singing practices distinct from what is printed in the book. As Sacred Harp scholar Warren Steel states, “traditional singers use the printed book in learning songs, and refer to it while singing, but the notes in the book are not interpreted literally, but according to a performance practice and style that is learned through oral tradition and varies among different regions and families.”

Source: How Sacred Harp music is sung – Wikipedia

Strikingly, pitchers at singing conventions generally do not use any mechanical aid, such as a pitch pipe or tuning fork, to help them find the right pitch.[6] (Such aids may be more common at small local singings.)[7]

How Sacred Harp pitchers (who generally do not possess perfect pitch) achieve their ends without mechanical help is not a fully understood question. It probably helps that pitchers typically know the songs very well, and that they have the opportunity to test out how a particular key “feels” when they sing the first note aloud. Sometimes a pitcher will try one opening note, find it unsatisfactory, then execute a glissando to a neighboring pitch.

Cobb lists some ways in which pitchers make up for the lack of a pitch-giving device.[8] Some use their own voices as a kind of reference, for instance by knowing the lowest note they can comfortably sing. Others have a kind of “reference song”; a song so familiar that when they summon it to mind it is in the original key, which then can be used as a reference point.[9] For many singers, however, good pitching seems to be a purely intuitive activity, a skill they possess but cannot explain. One experienced pitcher told Cobb “it’s kind of like learning to fix an automobile–you just got to have a knack for it.”

Source: Pitching Sacred Harp music – Wikipedia

Dhwani (Sanskrit) means sound of any kind. Out of all the Dhwanis created in the world, sounds that are ‘musical’—give an experience or perception of a ‘musical’ sound—are called Nadas. The sound of a ‘clap’ is a dhwani, but that of a bell is a nada. […]

In this way, sounds (dhwanis) are progressively classified as:

– All sounds in the world are dhwanis.
– Selected dhwanis become nadas, (innumerable), which provide a musical experience.
– Selected nadas become shrutis, (22), which create a change in the perception of 12 swaraprakaras (universal chromatic pitch classes) as we play them from one end of the string. This change happens only at 22 points as placed by nature.
– Selected (12 or fewer) shrutis become swaras —used in a particular raga.[21]

Source: Shruti (music) – Wikipedia

The swara differs from the shruti concept in Indian music. A shruti is the smallest gradation of pitch that a human ear can detect and a singer or instrument can produce.[3] A swara is the selected pitches from which the musician constructs the scales, melodies and ragas. The ancient Sanskrit text Natya Shastra identifies and discusses twenty two shruti and seven swara.[3] The swara studies in ancient Sanskrit texts include the musical gamut and its tuning, categories of melodic models and the raga compositions.[4]

Source: Svara – Wikipedia

Isaac Newton[24] had associated the seven solfège syllables with the seven colors of the rainbow and surmised that each color vibrated accordingly (a concept possibly related to the modern view of chromesthesia). Thus, red has the least amount of vibration while violet vibrates the most.

Source: Solfège – Wikipedia

In traditional music theory, most countries in the world use the solfège naming convention Do–Re–Mi–Fa–Sol–La–Si, including for instance Italy, Portugal, Spain, France, Poland, Romania, most Latin American countries, Greece, Bulgaria, Turkey, Russia, and all the Arabic-speaking or Persian-speaking countries. However, in English- and Dutch-speaking regions, pitch classes are typically represented by the first seven letters of the Latin alphabet (A, B, C, D, E, F and G). A few European countries, including Germany, adopt an almost identical notation, in which H substitutes for B (see below for details). In Indian music the Sanskrit names Sa–Re–Ga–Ma–Pa–Dha–Ni (सा-रे-गा-मा-पा-धा-नि) are used, as in Telugu Sa–Ri–Ga–Ma–Pa–Da–Ni (స–రి–గ–మ–ప–ద–ని), and in Tamil (ச–ரி–க–ம–ப–த–நி). Byzantium used the names Pa–Vu–Ga–Di–Ke–Zo–Ni (πΑ—Βου—Γα—Δι—κΕ—Ζω—νΗ).

Source: Musical note – Wikipedia

In music, an accidental is a note of a pitch (or pitch class) that is not a member of the scale or mode indicated by the most recently applied key signature. In musical notation, the sharp (♯), flat (♭), and natural (♮) symbols, among others, mark such notes—and those symbols are also called accidentals.

In the measure (bar) where it appears, an accidental sign raises or lowers the immediately following note (and any repetition of it in the bar) from its normal pitch, overriding sharps or flats in the key signature.

Source: Accidental (music) – Wikipedia

A note is natural when it is neither flat (♭) nor sharp (♯) (nor double-flat nor double-sharp). Natural notes are the notes A, B, C, D, E, F, and G represented by the white keys on the keyboard of a piano or organ.

Source: Natural (music) – Wikipedia