:: The Musician's Guide to Theory and Analysis ::

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With the many changes in meaning the term "modulation" has undergone, it is a word to consider carefully in your reading! This word (and its equivalent in Greek, Latin, Italian, French, and German) has been used in reference to music since earliest times. In Greek sources, it meant a change in the sizes and pattern of intervals, a change of mode type, a change from one (Greek) mode to another, or a change of ethos (emotional content).

In writings by Boethius (c. 480-526)-the writer who provided a transition between the early Greek theorists and those of the Middle Ages by translating Greek treatises into Latin-the additional meaning of "measurement" (of intervals or time) was added to the term (in Latin, modulatio). In the Middle Ages, some writers retained the older meanings, but for others "modulation" referred to melody-especially its shape and motion as a melodic line moves from one note to another.

The prominent Renaissance music theorist Gioseffo Zarlino used the term (in Italian, modulatione) in several contexts: in the older sense of note-to-note motion through successive intervals in a melody, and as motion from one harmonic interval to the next in counterpoint. For Zarlino, modulation was a process that resulted in appropriate intervals and harmonies. By the eighteenth century, "modulation" conveyed the meaning it does now, but it also retained the older ideas of motion within a melody or harmonic progression, and a change of pattern or intervals. In any case, modulation was considered a process, not an object or a location in the music.

By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most of the older meanings had fallen out of use-modulation (in the context of harmony) now meant the process of changing from one key to another. Even so, the term continued to evolve: in the mid-twentieth century with the advent of electronic music composition, modulation was used for one type of electronic manipulation of timbre (as in "ring modulation," for example).