The Australian Curriculum v9 for Music identifies the following elements of music as the building blocks that students develop understanding of across the primary years: dynamics (volume variation), tempo (speed), pitch (highness and lowness of notes), rhythm (patterns of long and short sounds), timbre (the distinctive quality of different sounds), texture (the layers and density of musical sound), and form (the structure and organisation of a musical work). Students encounter these elements from Foundation Year and develop an increasingly sophisticated capacity to identify, describe, manipulate and combine them as they progress through the primary curriculum.