Posts Tagged temperament
Understanding Why Lettered Notation is Illogical
Music is not Science. There’s some interesting sciencey things about music, but music itself doesn’t have to perfect or logical. Classical notation using letters is a great example. It hasn’t changed for hundreds of years altho the values and assignments are largely arbitrary. Here’s the notes on a keyboard:
Most pianos and keyboards will be tuned to A440 in equal temperament. Some have an issue with this but my beef is the assignment of the black and white keys, or really the concept of flats and sharps as they are assigned to the letters A-G.
The argument against redesigning this system from scratch may be that music is more about intuition than logic and that the existing system has prevailed precisely because of this and anyway, it’s all pretty logical it you study it long enough. But this is the problem. It only seems right because you accept these arbitrary assignments as a kind of Truth that is unquestioned. Staring from this, a logical construct is formed around it that supports itself and eventually, seems intuitive. But really, the process involves rote memorization which is wholly unintuitive. For example, the notes A and B are a whole step apart, but B and C are a half step. Why? There is a historical reason, but also, the notes themselves must be considered as nonsense. The white keys on the piano may seem “brighter” sounding or more “natural” in some way but this is only through repetition, ear training, and relative placement of notes. An older standard of note values places the A above middle C at around 415 Hz, a full half-step below A440. If a keyboard is tuned to the values of the notes when those notes were invented, the keyboard looks like this:
(it actually will look the same if you don’t paint the note values on there)
Unless you have perfect pitch (trained to 440), you might not even notice a piano has been tuned this way. It might sound off at first, but you’d get used to it. Time has proven this. The system of equal temperament is another example, but regarding the intervals. We are accustomed to hearing notes and intervals slightly wrong from what they were first intended to the point were the “right” values now sound wrong. Eliminating the arbitrary system of letter values with sharps and flats would make learning notes and intervals easier for new students.
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Intro to Numerical Notation
You don’t need an introduction to the idea of numerical notation if you are not classically trained on a guitar or piano. There’s tablature and chord numbering systems that work well enough that there’s often no need for a player to learn to read notes on a staff, especially if they stick to standard tunings.
I first learned music in elementary school on the clarinet, which is in Bb. In high school I switched to Alto Sax, which is in Eb. Then I started learning guitar on my own and quit the school band. I messed around with the tunings a lot. I tried taking and advanced music theory class but failed it. I aced the basic test, but I could not name the notes on the piano by ear for my life. Some people in the class had only just started on the piano or guitar and seemed to have no problem. It’s probably a crushing defeat I would not keep going back to mentally if I had since succeeding at something else in life, but here we are.
In the dark and disturbing future we currently live in, “the kids” can get into music without ever learning any real physical instrument. A few years ago, I got into an argument about flats and sharps in different keys. The argument goes that that you don’t really need both flats and sharps; the names of different keys and scales contain the same notes with different names. (For example, you could always use sharps.) If the music only exists in the computer, the names of the notes don’t matter. I figured this could be taken a step farther to eliminate both flats and sharps:
Ｏ｜１｜２｜３｜４｜５｜６｜７｜８｜９｜１０｜１１｜Ｏ
This is what I came up with. That is an A chromatic. Each number is a half-step and now it’s perfectly clear what intervals you are dealing with for any scale you make. There’s a slight problem of ‘１０’ & ‘１１’ taking up two spaces instead of one I haven’t worked out yet, but I’ve also given the notes one syllable names that can be as read quickly as “do-re-mi”, etc. Not quite as nice sounding, but less relative:
- Ｏ – A —— (“oh”)
- １ – A#/Bb — (“wun”)
- ２ – B —— (“tu”)
- ３ – C —— (“tri”)
- ４ – C#/Db — (“for”)
- ５ – D —— (“fiv”)
- ６ – D#/Eb — (“sik”)
- ７ – E —— (“sev”)
- ８ – F —— (“eht”)
- ９ – F#/Gb — (“nin”)
- １０ – G —— (“ten”)
- １１ – G#/Ab — (“lev”)
It’s also less relative in that it’s strictly nailed to A440 and equal temperament. This is simply because it’s most widely used. But because it’s numbers, any variation can be expressed in decimals. A44x for example would be Ｏ.x, and A415—A3xx would be １１.x (you’d have to figure out the exact math). This is not practical at all for sight reading in most cases of course, but it gives the note a definite value that can be applied to any octave or transposition. It also accurately names microtones, with quartertones being named ‘x.５’, which could get confusing if you use a lot of them, like if you’ve got a piano tuned to quartertones, but you probably don’t.
These are all things I can explain more later.
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