staff line
- noun
- /stæf laɪn/
- Specialized
:
línea del pentagrama
- To compose a melody, musicians must place notes accurately on the staff lines.
Examples
-
Each staff line represents a different pitch in sheet music.
-
Leave several empty staff lines.
Academic text (2001) -
Figure 5 shows a printout of music notated with both staff lines and horizontal proportional spaces.
Academic text (1997) -
The staff lines that form the vertical axis of traditional notation are universally known, easily readable, and not instrument specific.
Academic text (1997) -
The monitor bleeped as a moving line scribbled clefs and peaks across the staff lines.
Fiction book (2001) -
Software developers have already begun to meld the best of both the old and new worlds with a hybrid display of staff lines (old world) and horizontal proportional spaces (new world).
Academic text (1997) -
She would write on beige scented stationery; he on spiral notebook paper that had thin staff lines and was intended for composers.
Fiction book (1990) -
The notes on the staff are written on five horizontal staff lines.
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning 'one of the horizontal lines on a musical staff' is directly and literally built from 'staff' (the musical stave) + 'line' (a long narrow mark), so a learner who knows both words can compose the meaning. This noun–noun composition is a straightforward, compositional pattern found across languages and would be immediately understandable to a B1 learner familiar with the musical sense of 'staff'.
Etymology
The term staff line comes from old music writing, where a staff is five horizontal lines and notes sit on the lines or in the spaces like steps on a ladder. Each staff line marks a particular 'pitch', the 'highness' or 'lowness' of a sound, so the term now means the exact line that shows which note to play.
