Here’s A Dumb Question For You (Enharmonics)

[Whousedtoplay]

I wonder why so many try to reinvent the wheel

Alchemists tried (failed?) to convert lead to gold. But they seriously tried.

 

[Whousedtoplay]

No need to learn music theory. It will all be composed and performed by AI within two decades.

But...
Most of our TB members play covers - Composed and Performed/recorded previously by someone else Music, but...
We have various questions about Harmony, Notes, Notation, "What is the Key", Where can I get TAB of that song, etc...
What is the difference if not Sting but AI composes a song, we will still have the same questions like, Is it possible to teach Groove?, or The purpose of Chord Inversions, or "Question about Hotel California", etc...

 

[Fredrik E. Nilsen]

Complexity doesn't necessarily slow down readers in Japan. Which is possibly the only language harder to learn to read than it is to speak due to the unusually complex way it's written. Same goes for traditional Chinese.

Well, comparing the far east with the west is not easy, but there dyslexia is very common there, and they spend a lot more time learning to read and write.

 

[40Hz]

Well, comparing the far east with the west is not easy, but there dyslexia is very common there, and they spend a lot more time learning to read and write.

Interesting. Never knew that.

 

[SactoBass]

And if we had spelled dog c-a-t from the beginning, that's what we humans would have gotten used to.

 

[TrevorR]

How would chords and intervals be easier to see with the elimination of a double name for the same note?

Well, for a start you'd simply have to learn the whole letter sequence for each scale. The ability to effectively say "This scale has all the notes from 'A-A' in order but the C, F and G notes are played as sharps", and to learn each key signature progressively via the cycle of 4ths is much simpler than in the 12 note system. You'd actually need to remember 12 discrete 8 letter sequences for the major and minor keys. Not sure how you'd systematize that.

 

[IamGroot]

Is it your car's tire after driving through the Kazakh steppe?

We had late model Toyota SUV's and huge russian trucks that you lived in for our remote work.. Keeping tires on the trucks was a safety issue. For some reason, the lug nuts would unscrew, so we had lug nut indicators put on the wheels for safety. There are lots of very remote areas of Kazkhstan with abandoned towns and radar installations

 

[IamGroot]

Complexity doesn't necessarily slow down readers in Japan. Which is possibly the only language harder to learn to read than it is to speak due to the unusually complex way it's written. Same goes for traditional Chinese.

Japanese - two years, It is very easy to pronounce. Horrendous grammar. Learned 2000 Kanji. Forgot everything.

 

[40Hz]

Japanese - two years, It is very easy to pronounce. Horrendous grammar. Learned 2000 Kanji. Forgot everything.

On and off for the last 20 years or so I've tried to get a grip on Kanji. No great joy so far except I gained a lot if respect for the people that can read it.

 

[Bryan R. Tyler]

I wonder why so many try to reinvent the wheel

A better question would be why so many are so resistant to change that they think others shouldn't even try to improve on it, ignoring that the only reason they have their current version is because some people were willing to try to improve on previous iterations that their contemporaries thought couldn't be improved upon either.

 

[Bryan R. Tyler]

From the school of dyslexic bassists, Amem Brother!!!

I'm not dyslexic but I have a variety have I issues that cause me to have to read slow and often have to re-read the same parts repeatedly. Similar shapes stacked vertically, which is unfortunately what standard notation is, also give my eyes a lot of trouble.

So maybe I'm dyslexic by proxy

 

[Bryan R. Tyler]

Alchemists tried (failed?) to convert lead to gold. But they seriously tried.

If they had particle accelerators they could have actually done it. Particle accelerators though were, as rumor has it, fairly uncommon amongst alchemists.

 

[Rip Van Dan]

There is no J flat- it would just be in I then

Man that guy never plays in any key but "I". He's a real egomaniac!

 

[Bryan R. Tyler]

Well, for a start you'd simply have to learn the whole letter sequence for each scale. The ability to effectively say "This scale has all the notes from 'A-A' in order but the C, F and G notes are played as sharps", and to learn each key signature progressively via the cycle of 4ths is much simpler than in the 12 note system. You'd actually need to remember 12 discrete 8 letter sequences for the major and minor keys. Not sure how you'd systematize that.

That's a good point. It would probably depend on what was used to replace the current symbolism. If all the enharmonics were replaced with numerals for example it would be just a simple (this scale has all the notes from A-A except we use 2, 4, and 5).

 

[Clef_de_fa]

A better question would be why so many are so resistant to change that they think others shouldn't even try to improve on it, ignoring that the only reason they have their current version is because some people were willing to try to improve on previous iterations that their contemporaries thought couldn't be improved upon either.

Its like the Nashville system. I feel like it was created by someone who can read for people who can't read.

I also feel like English speaker have more of a tendancy to put math in stuff like art than someone who speak French or Spanish or Italian and I guess it is because English is the language of business while the other languages in my exemple are more lyrical.

 

[dbsfgyd1]

I'm not dyslexic but I have a variety have I issues that cause me to have to read slow and often have to re-read the same parts repeatedly. Similar shapes stacked vertically, which is unfortunately what standard notation is, also give my eyes a lot of trouble.

So maybe I'm dyslexic by proxy

With me it's I can't see the trees because of the forest if that makes any sense. My brain just does not process it when I take in a lot of visual data, especially when under stress. Sorting through the "trash" is a major chore. If there are say 10 things on a table, including my car keys, and I need to go for a drive, I could look 6 different times at that table and not see the keys in plain sight. The crazy thing is I have 20-15 vision.

Well, nature has a way of provide compensatory sensory enhancements for people that have deficits. For me it's intuition, which when applied to music allows me to be able to read what a player is going to do before they play it. I had a drummer describe working with me as it was like I was in his head.

 

[IamGroot]

If they had particle accelerators they could have actually done it. Particle accelerators though were, as rumor has it, fairly uncommon amongst alchemists.

And then there is the story of how phosphorous was discovered in the search to create gold from base metals: :

The discovery of phosphorus, the first element to be discovered that was not known since ancient times,[40] is credited to the German alchemist Hennig Brand in 1669, although other chemists might have discovered phosphorus around the same time.[41] Brand experimented with Invalid Link Removed, which contains considerable quantities of dissolved phosphates from normal metabolism.[13] Working in Invalid Link Removed, Brand attempted to create the fabled philosopher's stone through the distillation of some salts by evaporating Invalid Link Removed, and in the process produced a white material that glowed in the dark and burned brilliantly. It was named phosphorus mirabilis ("miraculous bearer of light").[42]

Brand's process originally involved letting urine stand for days until it gave off a terrible smell. Then he boiled it down to a paste, heated this paste to a high temperature, and led the vapours through water, where he hoped they would condense to gold. Instead, he obtained a white, waxy substance that glowed in the dark. Brand had discovered phosphorus. We now know that Brand produced ammonium sodium hydrogen phosphate, (NH4)NaHPO 4.

(it took about 1,100 litres [290 US gal] of urine to make about 60 g of phosphorus), it was unnecessary to allow the urine to rot. Later scientists discovered that fresh urine yielded the same amount of phosphorus.[26]

 

[LowActionHero]

There's no "I" in MUSIC.............no, hang on..

In a solo piece, it's ALL I...

Or U, depending on if I'm playing or listening...

 

[Max Blasto]

How about 44 phonemes and 4 blends in English.



English is a fairly complicated and messed up language for many reasons. I taught ESL to russian speakers. In Kazakhstan, English is now the third official language (The language of economy). Russian is almost completely phonetic and very orderly too. Unfortunately, when it came to grammar, they wanted to emulate the beauty and precision of German, but could not stay sober when formulating the rules.

Ugh. I hope I never see that again. I don't suppose we could keep the discussion to scholarly works by actual linguists?

Really. /ks/ is a phoneme in English? Of a type called "blend?"

That's like trying to teach Music theory to a sax player using TAB.

And the Russian language is no more or less phonetic than English, all spoken languages are phonetic by definition.

Yes I know we're derailing, but inaccurate info regarding Music or languages won't help the OP.

 

[Max Blasto]

I'm going off this article.



You'll need to explain that to me since I looked at the definitions and I'm still not following your point. Regardless of how it's written there's still just one sound assigned each letter AFAIBT. (My SO speaks Hungarian.) Unless you're referring to that weird "vowel harmony" tjing Hungarian does.

I'm always interested in learning something.

Ah. I see the problem.

The 20 vowel count that you see listed in the article is for Received Pronunciation (RP). That is the dialect held as standard for _British_ English.
Note that the article cites 14-16 for General (or Greater) American (GA) the dialect held as the standard for _American_ English which is what you were describing. RP has more vowels than GA. Here in California, we're working with 13 usually (cot and caught rhyme).

Phonetic vs phonemic transcription: phonetic transcription gives you very precise information about how a sound is pronounced. Think of Music written in a way that tells you not only the note and duration, but whether to play flats or rounds, plectrum or fingers, forte or pianissimo, and possibly how many gain stages you need. Too much info to use every day, unless you're trying to describe exactly those things to another player.

Phonemic transcription describes a handful of actual sounds that are different in some way but are equivalent in the context of a given language. Like music notation that tells you to play C but you know that in this key it's C# and you can play it on the 9th fret of your E string because that's where you hand is.

Phonetically, American English has [t], [th], [t'], and [?]. But each of those sounds maps to a single phoneme /t/. Writing phonemically, you only need one symbol.

Note the different brackets. They tell you whether the symbol denotes phonetic or phonemic transcription.

Hungarian is the same. The conditions are different, but a phonetic orthography would be useless so Hungarian is written _phonemically_.

English is written _morphophonemically_ which is different.[/th]