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Old 08-16-2019, 07:56 AM   #49
brainwreck
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Join Date: Jul 2006
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Quote:
Originally Posted by adXok View Post
♯ ♭ ♮ - these make sense if you only play the standard piano keyboard. hardly ever applicable to any let's say wood or brass instrument - if you know well enough your instrument you can name the holes in it any way you want! Same applies to fretted instruments (tabulature is best for those).
And for the love of humanity - Latin alphabet is only one of the 100+ other alphabets. A, B, C, D... was not much different than J, T, S, Q... to me (when I started to learn English) - but I get your point!

Now, please take a look at the name of the months! Now, pick a random one! You know which ones would come next and which one before.
Because you had to learn them and use them - every month of your life!

J, F, M, A, M, U, L, G, S, O, N, D can you guess the months!? No repeated symbols (I'm sure you will struggle for a minute). Difficult?!
Now start from anywhere on that sequence of month symbolic representations (letter-zodiac).
I'm looking at it again this morning. I do see what you mean. And I'm warming up to it.

The pitch symbols of standard music are an absolute system (A, B, C...) and a relative system (sharp, flat, natural). It gets pretty messy just spelling out keys and more so when applied to the staff system of dots, lines, spaces, where notes are further altered by accidentals.

A twelve symbol system shifts that complexity to more symbols while being a purely absolute system. In other words, there are no relative translations required. And I do think it is more universal than a diatonic based system. It's very interesting.

One thing that bothers me with any symbol system is lack of reasons for design pertaining to the symbols themselves. For example, the sequence 'A B C...' is logical in itself, but when applied to actual pitches, why is 'A' applied to the pitch that it is? Why not 'C' or 'F' or whatever? There is no apparent logic behind it. I'm sure there is historical reasoning behind it, but what is it? And does it make sense to keep it that way? Similarly, in your twelve tone system, what is the logic for pairing each given symbol with a given pitch? Also, why use new symbols at all? What is the logical reasoning behind it? Why not for example, use alpha or numeric characters, where at least you would be leveraging a system which people already know well?

I think that any new system should have accompanying reasoning for it's design so that it can be logically evaluated for it's strengths and weaknesses. In order for the system to be the least ambiguous, the logic of it's design should also be unambiguous.
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Last edited by brainwreck; 08-16-2019 at 08:23 AM.
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