On Friday 10 March 2006 01:11 am, D. Michael 'Silvan' McIntyre wrote: > (I think black keys are evil. They lead to things like our own Chris > Cannam telling me "there is no such note as E#." Musing on this the other > day, the only reason I can come up with for black keys to exist at all is > to make regular triad chords fall within the reach of average human hands.)
Putting on my music history hat (it's a little bit moldy): Think of the black keys like a gov't program -- starts small and morphs into a completely different monster over time. Originally, there wasn't any such thing as a black key. All you had were the 7 white keys. Then some monk came along who always sung his B's flat. (No, that part's not true, but it makes for a better story.) B-flat became a special case. Eventually, someone figured out that when you transpose stuff, you can end up with a lot of "B-flats" (flatted 7th's on the scale). These became the black keys, and they got inserted into the already existing organ in a reasonable way for keys that were only occasionally used. To put this somewhat back on-topic, not only is E# not the same as F, G-double-sharp isn't the same as A. It only works out to be so in an even-tempered tuning. Bach, who used mean-tone tuning, has double-sharps in his music for a reason. The keyboard player doesn't have any "extra black" keys and so can't play the distinction, but singers can and do. Even G# and A-flat are different unless you have even-tempered tuning. I don't know if RG deals with any of this, but if you want to "fully" support different tunings (which I'm not recommending), it will eventually have to. BTW, I don't know of any music program that does fully support tunings in a fundamental way. Even programs like Finale only support "keyboard-style" tunings, wherein E# sounds the same as F. This is always true for keyboard instruments (unless you tune them really wacky, in which case you change the meaning of the note that the key is supposed to represent.), but not so for voice. AFAIK, Finale doesn't do anything special to handle instruments capable of making this distinction. You can notate it, but the sequencer doesn't distinguish. ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by xPML, a groundbreaking scripting language that extends applications into web and mobile media. Attend the live webcast and join the prime developer group breaking into this new coding territory! http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=110944&bid=241720&dat=121642 _______________________________________________ Rosegarden-devel mailing list [email protected] - use the link below to unsubscribe https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/rosegarden-devel
