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A dodecal naming system

🔗Danny Wier <dawiertx@sbcglobal.net>

5/5/2005 2:22:24 AM

I'm finding myself wanting a notation using twelve basic note names instead of seven. An obvious method would be to use letters of the Latin alphabet sequentially for the twelve chromatics. I prefer to leave out J, so the letters A through M would be used in that system.

I also thought about using Greek letters; I used Greek letters LONG ago to notate 24-tone. What I didn't know then that the original Greek alphabet had 27 letters, not 24, adding three archaic letters that were only used as numerals.

The twelve letters I use now are the letters from alpha to lambda, with digamma (or waw) inserted between epsilon and zeta. When converted to Latin, the letters become: A B G D E F Z H Q I K L. (The use of Q for theta is a common practice in "Greeklish".)

I have a special application for this in 53-tone. The note A (alpha) is equivalent to the note G in common notation. The pitches of the 12 nominals in 53-tone:

A - 0 (G)
B - 4 (G#/Ab)
G - 9 (A)
D - 13 (A#/Bb)
E - 17 (B)
F - 22 (C)
Z - 26 (C#/Db)
H - 31 (D)
Q - 35 (D#/Eb)
I - 39 (E)
K - 44 (F)
L - 48 (F#/Gb)

Note the equivalents of common B and E are a comma flat, so that they're closer to JI.

To raise a note a comma, use the Greek numeral marker, which resembles an apostrophe after the letter: E = 17, E' = 18. For lowering a note, the lower numeral symbol is placed before the letter, or an ASCII comma before the letter: ,E = 16.

This is useful for 41-tone and 72-tone as well, but I haven't worked out this notation for meantones yet. I'd also like to come up with a staff notation for this. Because I'd like music in this notation to be easily read by people who speak and read languages written both from left to right (anything using Latin or Cyrillic; also Greek, Armenian, Thai, Georgian, the languages of India, and modern Chinese, Japanese and Korean) and from right to left (anything using Arabic; also Hebrew and Syriac), I have a vertical staff in mind. Like guitar chord tablature.

~Danny~