I've been thinking about why we still use absolute pitch relationships so much when describing music. It seems to me it would be more productive to talk about intervals, so instead of, say, C - E - G, we could talk about, say, 1 - 3 - 5, or whatever convention used to talk about intervals on a regular music scale. Not that notations like these are not already used, for instance I love the approach used in hookpad, and I want to learn more about roman numeral analysis. I recently learn about the Nashville numeral system too. Both these systems make a lot of sense to me.... And yet, even modern scoring tools like extempore keep using absolute intervals to notate music. For instance, for that extempore "clip" I was expecting to find, say, something like:

(play `((5 _ 5) (3 _ 5) (_ _ 0) (3 _ 0)) `(#base 55))

as opposed to just:

(play `((60 _ 60) (58 _ 60) (_ _ 55) (58 _ 55)))

A lot of the ordeal of learning how music works is about dealing (often through sheer memorization and "force of will" 😛 ) the explosion of combinations having to deal with asymmetry when it comes to perform certain patterns of note on actual instruments (Major scale, Minor scale, etc). In this regard I find isomorphic instruments very interesting as a solution to this complexity. I also feel like a notation like Dodeka is a step in the right direction.

it’s funny you mentioned this: i was just looking at wicki hayden keyboards

MIDI is ubiquitous so we mostly end up using that system, there are usually abstractions on top of those numbers that are completely transposable. For example, here are a few helper functions to find the negative harmony counterparts for a chord progression:

(def the-notes
  (cycle [:c :db :d :eb :e :f :gb :g :ab :a :bb :b]))

(def key-offset
  (zipmap (take 12 the-notes) (range)))

(defn triads [the-key]
  (let [offset (key-offset the-key)
        scale (cycle [0 2 4 5 7 9 11])]
    (map
     (fn [note]
       (mapv #(nth the-notes (+ offset (nth scale (+ note %)))) [0 2 4]))
     (range 7))))

(defn negative-harmony [the-key]
  (let [offset (key-offset the-key)]
    (reduce
     (fn [m [a b]] (assoc m a b b a)) ; bi-directional
     {}
     (map vector
          (take 6 (drop (+ offset 10) the-notes))
          (reverse (take 6 (drop (+ offset 16) the-notes)))))))

Thx Jack, so you can convert between them both, but my point is that it could make sense to work with the simpler system, using just the distance between intervals

@Emmanuel Oga While I agree with you about the stickiness of the status quo in pretty much anything, what I was getting at is that you can just use relative pitch and then map it onto a base in most of these systems 🙂

After discovering the Tonnetz (and later discovering that it had it had this name https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonnetz) I haven't looked back. Here's a little interactive one https://guichaoua.gitlab.io/web-hexachord/.

In the original version of a system I work on, I let users define pitches using names (c5 etc.) or scale indices. In the new version, I only use scale indices. Western note names and midi numbers ignore most interesting tuning systems, and scale indices are generally easier to use when you want higher levels of abstraction surrounding harmony (chord changes etc.)

Also when speaking about it, often we do use intervals, not absolute names. “e.g. this chord has a root, fifth, flat 7th, and a ninth”

I have some experiments I've been doing along these lines : https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLuBDEereAQUz2iiEZb7yGLH0Bzi52egGp