4 ms·

What names? Aren’t musical notes called A, B, C etc?

by cal85 4y ago

messe 4y ago
Maybe they're referring to crotchets, (semi) quavers, minims, (semi)breves?
- foobarbecue 4y ago
  Apparently those names were indeed worth the effort to change, since we did that here in the USA.
sseagull 4y ago
Maybe they meant scale degrees: Tonic, supertonic, mediant, subdominant, dominant, submediant, leading tone. Or modes: ionian, dorian, phyrgian, lydian, mixolydian, aeolian, locrian.
hyperhopper 4y ago
Do re mi fa so la ti do?
- pygy_ 4y ago
  "Ti"? Nonsense. Everyone knows it’s "si"! Edit, also B is also sometimes notated as H. In that case B means what is usually Bb. Edit 2: also, I just discovered that Eb was sometimes called S. What a mess :-)
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
pygy_ 4y ago
Adding to the other replies, there's an off by one error in the interval names. The unison is an interval of zero notes, the second an interval of one note, etc...
- Stratoscope 4y ago
  And all the way up to the octave which is an interval of seven notes. What I find interesting is that we double-count the end notes in a diatonic scale, but we don't double-count them in a chromatic scale. No one says there are 13 notes per octave in a chromatic scale, it's 12.
  - pygy_ 4y ago
    > up to the octave ... well, up to the thirteenth, at least... I suppose one could continue to name diatonic intervals above that for really convoluted chords. Without the off-by one error, one could do interval arithmetics in a way that intuitively makes sense... It's really weird such a bad convention caught on to begin with. Edit: going down the rabbit hole... It looks like the off-by-one error for diatonic intervals goes back to the greek antiquity. The Romans named the fourth and fifth diatessaon and diapente, which have greek roots, but their chromatic intervals start a zero (tonus, ditonus, tritonus which gave the (semi-)tone and the tritone). The "semi" prefix means "subtract half a tone", not divide by two... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interval_(music)#Latin_nomenclature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interval_(music)#Latin_nomencl... Neither the Greeks nor the Romans had a concept of zero, so it starts to make sense as to why we started with a crooked convention. Inertia and habbit made it stick around. There's another rabbit hole for microtonal interval names... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pitch_intervals#List https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pitch_intervals#List
anyfoo 4y ago
But doesn't the major scale confusingly start with C, D, E... and in some countries B is H? (Definitely how I learned it in Germany.)

What names? Aren’t musical notes called A, B, C etc?

by cal85 4y ago

What names? Aren’t musical notes called A, B, C etc?

messe 4y ago

Maybe they're referring to crotchets, (semi) quavers, minims, (semi)breves?

foobarbecue 4y ago
Apparently those names were indeed worth the effort to change, since we did that here in the USA.

sseagull 4y ago

Maybe they meant scale degrees: Tonic, supertonic, mediant, subdominant, dominant, submediant, leading tone. Or modes: ionian, dorian, phyrgian, lydian, mixolydian, aeolian, locrian.

hyperhopper 4y ago

Do re mi fa so la ti do?

pygy_ 4y ago
"Ti"? Nonsense. Everyone knows it’s "si"! Edit, also B is also sometimes notated as H. In that case B means what is usually Bb. Edit 2: also, I just discovered that Eb was sometimes called S. What a mess :-)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

pygy_ 4y ago

Adding to the other replies, there's an off by one error in the interval names. The unison is an interval of zero notes, the second an interval of one note, etc...

Stratoscope 4y ago
And all the way up to the octave which is an interval of seven notes. What I find interesting is that we double-count the end notes in a diatonic scale, but we don't double-count them in a chromatic scale. No one says there are 13 notes per octave in a chromatic scale, it's 12.
- pygy_ 4y ago
  > up to the octave ... well, up to the thirteenth, at least... I suppose one could continue to name diatonic intervals above that for really convoluted chords. Without the off-by one error, one could do interval arithmetics in a way that intuitively makes sense... It's really weird such a bad convention caught on to begin with. Edit: going down the rabbit hole... It looks like the off-by-one error for diatonic intervals goes back to the greek antiquity. The Romans named the fourth and fifth diatessaon and diapente, which have greek roots, but their chromatic intervals start a zero (tonus, ditonus, tritonus which gave the (semi-)tone and the tritone). The "semi" prefix means "subtract half a tone", not divide by two... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interval_(music)#Latin_nomenclature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interval_(music)#Latin_nomencl... Neither the Greeks nor the Romans had a concept of zero, so it starts to make sense as to why we started with a crooked convention. Inertia and habbit made it stick around. There's another rabbit hole for microtonal interval names... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pitch_intervals#List https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pitch_intervals#List

anyfoo 4y ago

But doesn't the major scale confusingly start with C, D, E... and in some countries B is H? (Definitely how I learned it in Germany.)