Hacker News Reader

Comment by cliffbean | Hacker News Reader

My thought was that a relative-pitch notation might present a steeper learning curve. But I don't really know.

I've worked with intermediate-level musicians who are skilled at regular sight-reading, but who struggle to learn to transpose on the fly. A relative-pitch notation might be like requiring everyone to "transpose" all the time, forcing them to learn this skill before they can proceed.

On the other hand, maybe you'd teach it differently. Instead of learning transposition as carrying around an offset to add to each pitch, you'd learn it as carrying around a scale to which the relative pitches would be mapped. I wonder whether this would be easier or harder to learn.

View on HN

You're going to stay in one scale for a long time anyway (C for piano). For that duration, pitches in the notation correspond obviously to fingerings (keys, frets, whatever). This includes other instruments which have a different "natural" key (D for the viola, my other sort of instrument): their notation maps just as nicely.

When you get beyond that, "mapping relative pitches to a scale" is, IMO, the correct approach. The "offset to each pitch" thing obscures what's really going on, as if they were all weird derivatives of the key of C. I can see how it might be harder, among other reasons because you have to understand how a scale works more clearly, but I suspect it would be worth it.

Of course, it's hard to really know without getting people to switch for a couple generations.

This is just painful. Instruments do not have scales. Music is written in different keys, and often modulates to another key and back again during the piece. In order to cover the range of pitches, different clefs are used to make the notation easier to read. Piano music is written in two clefs, bass and treble, centered around "middle C". This is called the grand staff. Depending upon an instrument's range different clefs are used. Violoncellos use bass, tenor, and treble clef. Violas use alto clef.

Scales are a function that acts upon the set of pitches used in music. A C major scale has the pitches C, D, E, F, G, A, and B. A G major scale (function) has the pitches G, A, B, C, D, E, and F#.

"Mapping relative pitches to a scale" is nonsensical. A scale (function) is an absolute set of pitches, immutable.

There are two forms of solfège (do, re, mi, ...): fixed and moveable. In moveable the first pitch of the scale is always do. In fixed the pitch called C is always do. Watch "The Sounds of Music" to learn the solfège for a major scale, it's the do-re-mi song. There are other syllables used for the three minor scale forms. To my knowledge (admittedly not complete) Italy, France, and perhaps England used a fixed-do system, whereas the rest of the world uses a moveable-so system.

Instruments do not have scales.

Actually, most trumpets, harmonicas, and many classes of flute are restricted to diatonic scales. You'll have a hard time finding a chromatic trumpet outside of a museum.

There's more to music than western chromaticism or indeed harmonic theory.

You'll have a hard time finding a chromatic trumpet outside of a museum.

This is kind of a confusing statement to me. Most instruments called "trumpets" where I come from are valved instruments which are fully capable of producing chromatics. (Maybe this is technically incorrect and we should be properly calling them "cornets" or something, I don't know.)

My point is, you certainly don't have to go to a museum to find one, and I expect, in a museum (of history anyway), any trumpet you'd find would be more likely to to be valveless and non-chromatic.

You've just used a bunch of words that sounds smart, but provide deceptive value. The typical Bb valved trumpet that exists now does indeed play chromatically. And so will any other class of modern brass instrument with three valves or more.

The chromatic trumpet is an invention that allowed us to escape the trumpets natural harmonic series (Those being the notes a trumpet can play in a single valve position) before valves were invented by drilling holes along its tubes.

Wikipedia is not the best place to learn music theory, and knowing music theory is as useful as knowing a list of rules for programming best practice.

I was incorrect about trumpets, but not about other instruments. My point that many instruments are restricted to a particular scale is entirely correct.

Also, I was playing and recording music since before wikipedia even came into existence, so dial back those assumptions.

This wouldn't really work for anything not in a key. How would you notate Boulez?

You would pick an arbitrary base and do everything relative to that. This is pretty easy compared to the shoehorning already required to notate such music in existing notation schemes :-).

The musical world has already tried out relative scales. It was in fact the first thing tried in notation. Look at the notation device used for Gregorian Chants to see it yourself.

We already use relative notation for most instruments. Trumpets, Clarinets and Tenor Saxophones typically read notation where Bb is equivalent to C on the page. What you'll note we Don't do, is change our relative pitch between songs.

No. Relative pitch is Very Hard, because as a musician, my hands don't play relatively. When I see an Eb on a notation sheet, my body knows how to play the note without me thinking about it, and it has to, because sometimes you can have notes flying at you with a rate of 32 a bar. This does not leave time to translate between the relative abstraction on paper and the absolute pitch of my instrument. It's not just harder.

It's much, much harder to train your brain and body to be able to map the same object on the page to twelve different body positions, depending on some variable that changes at random between songs.

Also remember, that different pitches have different textures, otherwise we'd never play in a keys other than C.

Absolute pitches and are the concern of the performer, but relative pitches are the concern of the listener. Who's more important? ;-)

This is why I mainly worry that a relative-pitch notation may present a steeper learning curve. Advanced players typically need to be able to think at least somewhat in both relative pitches and absolute pitches at the same time anyway. Absolute pitches because that's what many instruments demand, and relative pitches, because that's where a lot of the meaning is, which informs other aspects of the performance. But it typically takes more practice to learn to think in both ways at once.

> Also remember, that different pitches have different textures, otherwise we'd never play in a keys other than C.

I did propose that pieces could indicate their intended key.

Absolute pitches are the concern of the performer. Correct. Also consider that the performer is the one who is looking at the sheet music, and not the listener.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com