20240831190951-Musical_Alphabet

Musical Alphabet

From “Black and White Keys¨ in Music Theory for Electronic Music Producers

In English, all the white notes are given letter names from A through G. After G, it starts over again. […] The black keys are named as relative to their nearest white note. A black key will always have a modifier that means “a semitone higher than” or “a semitone lower than”.

Interchangeability of “note¨ and “key¨

It seems that the author, Anthony Allen, uses “note” and “key¨ here interchangeably, if not by some yet unknown criteria. It would seem so, given they speak of “white notes¨ and “black keys¨ in the same context, namely that of the naming of those parts we see on a piano keyboard.

Hypothetical difference between “note¨ and “key¨

Is there a difference between a “note¨ and a “key¨? If so, what is it?

Notes as Keys

Provisionally, just as was done in 20240831183733-Semitones, we will take “notes¨–as used to discuss the main sound-toggling parts of a piano’s keyboard–to mean “keys,¨ as “keys¨ is conventionally what the main sound-toggling parts of a piano keyboard are called. Since this is building up to a notation system, however, I will continue to specify these keys to be properly-tuned, i.e. set to the correct relative auditory frequencies.

Musical Alphabet

In English, properly-tuned white keys are labeled with the starting letters of the alphabet until “H,” i.e. up to “G.” But the letter such a sequence starts with for the white keys is not the same as the letter the contemporary Latin alphabet sequence starts with. Rather, it starts at “C¨ and then wraps around, relative to the original sequence, to include “A¨ and “B¨. This relative “wrap-around¨ is in fact the complete set of Latin letters we wish to deal with: “C¨, “D¨, “E¨, “F¨, “G¨, “A¨, “B¨. For this new sequence, which has equivalent members to our original sequence, the wrap-around in fact starts after “B.¨ We call this new sequence the “musical alphabet.¨ The musical alphabet corresponds with the sequence of the Latin letters the properly-tuned white keys are labeled with.

Exemplary image:

Role of the musical alphabet

Does the musical alphabet label white keys on a standard, Western classical piano without regard to the frequency of the sound they produce? What role does the musical alphabet serve in the relationship between sound frequency and key?

Black key labels

How are the black keys on a standard, Western classical piano keyboard labeled?

musical_alphabet Latin_alphabet music music_theory white_keys black_keys Western classical

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bibliography

• “Black and White Keys.” In Music Theory for Electronic Music Producers: The Producer’s Guide to Harmony, Chord Progressions, and Song Structure in the MIDI Grid., 1st ed., 23. Minneapolis, MN: Slam Academy, 2018.