​Music Intensity is how loud or soft each note is played. Like spoken language, music is a series of stressed and softened tones where one note in any two consecutive notes is always louder or softer than the other. Intensity is how the notes are stressed and softened that makes musical phrasing sound expressive. Intensity numbers are assigned to each note as a guide for the performer to know when to stress and soften the note (See picture below). Based on this principle, an innovative method called The Fine Indication of Relative Note Intensity (FIORNI) was developed to teach music students and teachers of all instruments a different perspective on learning how to play more expressively.