Re: Help? Asciification of musical language

On Thursday, June 10, 2004, at 09:53 , Rachel Klippenstein wrote:

[snip]
> Or, here's a briefer description:
> -It's based on relative pitch, not absolute pitch
> -There are 7 different notes (the equivalent of segments)
> -Beats (the equivalent of syllables) contain 1 to 4 notes
> -The relative lengths of the notes within the beat is not phonemic
This is remarkably similar to the phonology of Jean François Sudre's
auxlang SolreSol, which was published IIRC in 1817 and had some following
till the early years of the 20th cent.

Boleslas Gajewski published a grammar of the language in 1902 and notes:
"La Langue Universelle de SUDRE possède:
    7 mots d'une syllabe;
   49 mots de deaux syllabes;
  336 mots de trois syllabes;
2268 mots de quatre syllabes;
TOTAL 2660 mots qui ont suffi pour former une langue assez complète,
facilement acceptable par tous les peuples, pour leur relations
internationales les plus nécessaires."

> So the system needs to be able to represent the 7 notes and their
> grouping into beats; I think that's all.
> I could just represent the notes with note-names, with |a| (or possibly
> |c|) representing the first note of the scale, and putting a symbol
> like a hyphen between the notes, so that you would end up with
> something like
>
> a adg abde-dg deg-fc a
>
> (Not representing real words, since I don't have any yet; just trying
> to convey a visual impression)  My issue with this is that using
> letters looks like they're intended to be pronounced as consonants and
> vowels; also, it gives the false impression that it represents the
> actual intervals between the notes - that |ac| represents an interval
> of a minor 3rd, like going from A natural to C natural.
Sudre simply used the names, thus:
solla = always
mifala = to wish, desire
refasi = to answer

But it was normal not to write the note name in full, but to abbreviate
thus:
d, r, mi, f, so, l, si.
So the above words were normally written:
sol
mfl
rfsi

In the anglophone world, 'sol' has become so(h) and we say 'ti' instead of
French 'si', so we could use:
d, r, m, f, s, l, t.
Thus: sl, mfl, rft.

Using this system, your string above would be written:
d dft drfs-ft fst-lm d

> This isn't the
> case, since it merely indicates the first and third notes of the scale,
> which could be either a major or minor scale, or neither.
>
> Or I could use the numbers to represent the notes, with 1 being the
> first note of the scale, and 7 being the 7th.  Then the above sequence
> of notes would be written
>
> 1 147 1245-47 457-63 1
This was an alternative way of writing SolReSol (i.e 525  :)

> That looks terribly illegible to me.
>
> What do youguys think?  Letters, numbers or something else?  I guess
> you could write it in solfege...  That might be better.  Hmm, that
> would give something like
>
> do dofati dorefaso-fati fasoti-lami do
Yep - this was the "full method" of SolReSol, except Sudre used the French
names 'sol' and 'si' instead of our 'so' and 'ti'.

SolReSol could also be 'written' with a series of taps, pointing to
different fingers, using colors etc.
The colors BTW were:
red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet.

In fact, Gajewski's grammar listed 13 different ways in which SolReSol
could be written or signalled.

my favorite method is the stenography invented by Vincent Gajewski which I
can't show in an ASCIIfied email. Take a look at:
http://wwww.ptialaska.net/~srice/solresol/solresol.htm

Ray
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