I've been reading up on musical notation; my family's new piano isn't set up at home for a little over a week, but I have spent some time reading music, visualizing my fingers on the keys and such
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Of course, not everyone picks seven notes, or uses the major/minor modes even if they do. One major school of music is the chinese, and they use a five note scale. Play a song using only the black keys, and it's all chinese sounding! In fact, for any conventional major/minor key, the five keys you're not playing will make a fine pentatonic scale suitable for use in Chinese music.
Indeed, the last several times I've had the opportunity to sit down at a keyboard, I've spent my time playing around with an 8 note scale, consisting entirely of alternating tones and semitones. I find it really neat, because this stacks the scale all full of tritones and minor 3rds (and skips a lot of opportunities for perfect 4ths and 5ths). Of course this means that it sounds creepy as all hell.
It kind of freaks me out that these two cultures independantly decided on a twelve pitch scale (why is that done? to maximise the potential for harmonious and not-harmonious notes? I notice a perfect fifth for instance can occur in a twelve pitch scale, and that's useful). The kicker is that after making this interesting twelve pitch decision, both cultures then made distinct, but completely complementary, decisions about which notes of the twelve they'll actually use in a song.
I rather suspect that the perfect fifth thing is pretty much entirely responsible for the predominance of twelve pitch scales. Although the circle of fifths doesn't seem to have been formalized in the West until the late 17th century, the historical use of the 5th as a fundamental consonant interval dates back at least several centuries earlier. As for the East, the Pythagorean comma is documented at least as far back as the second century BC.
What strikes me as more interesting is how both European and Chinese music seem to have settled on even temperament (though this can probably be taken as a fluke, since Indian music, which also uses a twelve tone scale, went for just intonation)
Indeed, the last several times I've had the opportunity to sit down at a keyboard, I've spent my time playing around with an 8 note scale, consisting entirely of alternating tones and semitones. I find it really neat, because this stacks the scale all full of tritones and minor 3rds (and skips a lot of opportunities for perfect 4ths and 5ths). Of course this means that it sounds creepy as all hell.
It kind of freaks me out that these two cultures independantly decided on a twelve pitch scale (why is that done? to maximise the potential for harmonious and not-harmonious notes? I notice a perfect fifth for instance can occur in a twelve pitch scale, and that's useful). The kicker is that after making this interesting twelve pitch decision, both cultures then made distinct, but completely complementary, decisions about which notes of the twelve they'll actually use in a song.
I rather suspect that the perfect fifth thing is pretty much entirely responsible for the predominance of twelve pitch scales. Although the circle of fifths doesn't seem to have been formalized in the West until the late 17th century, the historical use of the 5th as a fundamental consonant interval dates back at least several centuries earlier. As for the East, the Pythagorean comma is documented at least as far back as the second century BC.
What strikes me as more interesting is how both European and Chinese music seem to have settled on even temperament (though this can probably be taken as a fluke, since Indian music, which also uses a twelve tone scale, went for just intonation)
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