Re: Help? Asciification of musical language

----- Original Message -----
From: "Rachel Klippenstein" <estel_telcontar@...>



> Hello everyone
Hi!

> It's been a while since I've posted, but I haven't been away.
> I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions for how to represent a
> musical language online... I have such a project on a back burner, and
> I think I would have more incentive to work on it if I could post to
> the list.  I've sort of figured out an own writing system for it, but I
> haven't managed to figure out a successful ascii representation for it.
Wonderful!  I have long thought of having a musical language, so I'm glad
you're working on this.  I could never figure out how I'd do it, though; at
first I wanted chords to be part of it.  But the idea was so intriguing: it
could be used for code; someone could sing a verse of song, and have the
melody convey an entirely different message, issue a warning, or whatever.
How cool is that? :)

> A fairly full description of the phonology I'm trying to represent can
> be found in the archives here:
>
http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0309C&L=conlang&P=R20245&D=0&H=0&O=T&T=1

Yes, looked at it.  What I wonder is if you intend a certain or certain
mode(s)/scale(s), or if you want accidentals.  The do-re-mi essentially
gives you just the major scale (that is if you start with do--here she
breaks into a loud rendition of "Doe, a deer! A female deer!")

Ahem.

Would minor scale, or would any of the various modes (dorian, aolian, etc.)
be a consideration?  What if you wanted the Devil's Interval, say, to
express shock?  Or just the subjunctive?  or a nice sense of  fairy warning?
:)

Do re mi could do this depending on where you start the first note of the
scale.  But it doesn't handle accidentals very well.  That might not be a
consideration for you.

When I think of a tune and I'm away from my piano, I write it down with
small letters for the base and capitals for the treble (I use a two octave
scale usually), with sharps and flats in front of them; it could be asciized
thus:

low c (relative pitch) c sharp= #c, d, #d, e, e flat=/e, f, g, a, b, middle
C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C.   Here's the tune for "Stormy Weather" (without, of
course, the timing):

/b      b        D    /b         b  D   b   D  /D C    /b  b     D  d
Don't know why there's no sun up in the sky, stormy weather...

Of course d flat could be c sharp; I've been trained to adhere to key, but
here I offer it as a method of giving musical relationships that is a
shorter script than do-re-mi, and more encompassing than abc.

> 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
>
> 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
Nice and minor!  Do you intend modality to convey meaning?  I've always
thought that it would be part of my musical language.  There is so much to
all music that conveys emotion (in socially agreed upon ways, of course).
Since you're doing seven tones, this suggests to me that you can play around
with any of the western diatonic tones in an octave.  Would changing these
arrangements contribute semantically?

> (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.  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.
How would you indicate otherwise?  You could start with c: ce.  This puts
you squarely in the western system of major and minor scales.  Unless you do
as I showed and have a twelve-tone system of representation.  Another
suggestion:  use a through l for the twelve tones in the base and A through
L in the treble.  Might confuse people who know music and associate a and c
with a specific interval, though.

> 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
>
> That looks terribly illegible to me.
Me too.  It looks like the ISBN number for a book.

> 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
And that looks like a regular conlang.

Sally
scaves@frontiernet.net
http://www.frontiernet.net/~scaves/teoreal2.html
(I don't think any of my .ra files are openable anymore)

PS I love the devil's interval!  Bernstein leaned on it heavily in "West
Side Story":  Maria!  I just met a girl named Maria!  And then that song the
Jets whistle:  c #f C #f c #f C.  Did I get that right?  Working from memory
here.

Replies