Hello to all of you,
I now own some Steem coins. I am very pleased to have found this site. A big thank you to Greg Mannarino. I hope you will allow me and join in to develop the topic of applying the twelve semitones of the octave to the organization of music theory, starting with foundation theory. It is a big job that can only be accomplished by a group of eager people. The potential for music is enormous, in my opinion.
Twenty years ago, I purchased a 4-octave Roland midi keyboard in order to learn how to play music 'by ear'. I had studied music when in school and on my own in my early twenties, and each time disagreed with how music theory was organized in three basic areas.
First, I thought that all twelve notes should have a proper name. Since any chord or melody can be played starting from any of the twelve notes in an octave, this shows that all twelve notes are equal in potency. Yet the names of the notes derive from the seven white notes of the major scale, which is favored in the particular layout of the piano keyboard. These have a proper name, C D E F G A B. The five black piano notes do not have a proper name. Their names are relative to the two white notes above and below them. Ex. The note between C and D can be named either C sharp or D flat, depending on context. C# means C + 1 semitone. Db means D - 1 semitone. This requires adding and subtracting in order to name a black note, which adds difficulty, uncertainty and confusion.
I have since created several complete notations, both by extending existing notations, and by imagining entirely new notations. I will be showing how naming can be extended to all twelve notes in a separate post. You are invited to post how you would name all the notes of the octave in replies to this post. Your work will be included in my future post if possible.
Second, the grand staff did not show the twelve notes found on all instruments. Instead it showed the white notes as either a white space or a black line, depending on the octave they were in. The black notes, not shown, were either sharp or flat the white space or the black line. Now that introduces even more complexity, as rules must be remembered and implemented in real time, in scales with variable amounts of sharps or flats. I don't think things can be made more difficult than this.
I studied the grand staff and found that it was directly related to the layout of the lower white keys on the piano. This forced me to study the piano in detail, and I discovered that it has two very different layouts, the lower layout only containing the seven white notes of the major scale, and the upper layout containing all twelve notes of the octave, the chromatic scale.
There will be a separate post on a brand new staff which shows all the notes of the octave, such that they can be identified by sight alone, without the use of memory or following rules. Sight reading is much faster, less tiring, and less error prone. You can propose your own solutions in replies to this post. The coming post might be called "a new staff for reading and writing music by all".
Third, I disagreed with the use of the 'tone' because it was a variable unit, which covered either two tones or one tone. Variables are found in algebra, which is more complex than arithmetic. I knew that the 'semitone' should be the unit of measure, but could not find any justification for its use. I later found this justification in the patterns created by intervals 2 and 7 semitones. We will return to this subject later on. Using the semitone rather than the tone completely changes the way music is analysed. Most of this work remains to be done.
This first post will stop here. I'm already working on a post which describes the 'interval method' using semitones. I will show how playing non-musical series of repeating intervals directly stimulates musical creativity. Then how the note patterns created by some intervals suggest how music theory should be reorganized. This will take several more posts.