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Hoots : Alternatives to the 12 notes system? First of all, I'm sorry I do not have top-notch knowledge to properly formulate the question, so I apologize if some of you do not get the point of my question. It seems in western music, - freshhoot.com

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alternatives to the 12 notes system?
First of all, I'm sorry I do not have top-notch knowledge to properly formulate the question, so I apologize if some of you do not get the point of my question.

It seems in western music, the de-facto standard for writing music is the staff, and the most fine division of note pitches is the 12-notes system.

Based on this system, we choose subsets of the 12 notes to create scales, and chords to create harmonic movement.

If I want to create an alternative formal system for writing music, would it make sense to just start at the scale level, so instead of referring to notes by their name (C, C#, D, ...) I refer to them by their grade in the scale (I, II, III, ...)? (so, in principle it is not possible to write notes that are not part of the scale, but we could introduce back the notion of accidentals, i.e. IIIb or II#)

What are the advantages and disadvantages of that?

I am aware that a musical piece does not use a fixed musical scale but rather modulates back and forth between different (perhaps similar) scales; this aspect could be as well part of the notation.

Is the standard system more complex than this? (in the sense that it allows more expressivity than this)


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Comparing your system to the system of note names, your system has some advantages:

you sometimes avoid the need to state a sharp or flat alongside the note name
you're including a basic level of analysis (of what scale degree you're playing) in the notation.

It also has some disadvantages:

Calling notes 'I, II, III' or '1,2,3' is that assumes that a piece of music stays in a single key. As you say, many pieces of music modulate to other keys, so (again, as you say in the question) you'd need to work out what you do in that situation - do you (for example) put in a marker to denote the key change, and make 'I, II, III' suddenly refer to different notes than they did before the marker?
If you habitually refer to notes by number (relative to a scale), what do you say if you want to refer to a particular note outside of the context of a key? You'd have to either still use note names (A, A#, B), or invent yet another notation.

It also seems to me that standard notation (dots on a stave) already gives us one of the advantages of your system, as the key signature already 'tidies away' the need to write accidentals next to any note that's diatonic to the key.

One advantage of your system that would remain would be to give us information about the scale degree - but that's probably something that most musicians find very easy to work out anyway when they know what key they're in.

One aspect that's harder to call as an advantage or disadvantage is the performer's mental model of how the notes they're shown relate to positions on the instrument. The performer (presented with your notation) would always have to mentally map those scale degrees to a particular key on their particular instrument, but then that that way of thinking could make transposing on the fly a lot easier. (Personally, this is actually closer to how I think about music - I hardly ever think in terms of note names).


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