Why are there both sharps and flats? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why are there both sharps and flats?

#11

Post by seertaak » Tue, Feb 20, 2018, 3:42 PM UTC

MattHood0 wrote: post #10

seertaak wrote: post #3

Wow -- it's amazing how bad the answers are on stackoverflow. The first reason why there are both sharps and flats is historical. Equal tempering produces the same pitch for, say, D# and Eb. The same was, however, not true for some of the historical tunings prevalent at the time the very notation became standard. For more information about this, you can read "How Equal Temperament Destroyed Harmony (and Why you shoul…

Music teacher with degree here, the Stack Overflow answers are correct as far as modern usage goes, with respect to common-practise tonal harmony at the very least. Your second reason is just an alternative way of phrasing all of the answers that cite F major as an example. Yes, in non-equal temperaments they can be different pitches, but I highly doubt that someone asking the difference between sharps and flats is c…

Thanks for your contribution -- I must admit I'm not a teacher, and my degree is in another subject. I also acknowledge that the second part of my answer is a weasel exit clause which uses the same reasoning as the stackoverflow answers ;)

> but I highly doubt that someone asking the difference between sharps and flats is concerned with niche subsets of early music and contemporary classical

Well, the OP's question has the sentence: "If we can get away with just having sharps (aka black notes on a piano) then why complicate things and add flats as well?"

To my mind, this means the OP understands the idea of enharmonic equivalents, and wants to know why it wasn't simply decreed that, e.g., "sharps it shall be". To give an analogy from mathematics, it doesn't matter whether we add 0.5 to 1 or subtract 0.5 from 2, we still call it 1.5, not "two minus point 5" or "one and point five". (Notwithstanding those crazy French and Germans!)

So I'm curious, given your background, what your response to this latter question would be. Or to phrase it differently: if music notation were invented in 2018, would it look substantially the same?

Re: Why are there both sharps and flats?

#12

Post by seertaak » Tue, Feb 20, 2018, 3:50 PM UTC

hammock wrote: post #8

Nnuie21 wrote: post #5

To everyone saying these answers are bad because they don't delve into the history, equal temperament, and how D# and Eb weren't always harmonically equivalent: You're answering the wrong question. Yes, the question was "why are there sharps and flats" but read the rest of the question and it becomes clear, he/she isn't looking for the origin of sharps and flats. They are asking why it's practical to have both sharps…

Yes. Equal temperament does not explain why there is Ab and G#. It merely explains why they have not always been harmonically equivalent. You, and the top SO answer, give the correct reason why. And it's not just for writing, but reading also. The diatonic scale, combined with the staff of lines and spaces, necessitates both flats and sharps.

> The diatonic scale, combined with the staff of lines and spaces, necessitates both flats and sharps.

Careful -- you're in danger begging the question. See my remark regarding mathematical summation. Intervals are nothing other than a pitch distance. Note names are the absolute value of a pitch. I'm not at all convinced that it's not possible to design a notational system that does away with the sharps/flats and yet retains the compactness optimality w.o. the ionic scale.

Re: Why are there both sharps and flats?

#13

Post by m00g00 » Tue, Feb 20, 2018, 3:58 PM UTC

tropo wrote: post #6

yesenadam wrote: post #2

Gee.. page full of very low quality/BS answers there! Hadn't seen Music StackExchange before.. super non-impressive. The 2 top-voted answers are absolute without-a-clue nonsense, people-who-don't-know rambling aimlessly, not explaining anything. I am also no music historian, don't know all the history, but: Not until the third-top-voted answer, the one beginning "Historically, keyboards didn't always work that way" i…

It seems that we could get our perfect ratios now that we have computers. As the computer plays, it uses a psychoacoustic model to determine which notes would have significant local tonal impact in the listener's mind. (the automated choices can be overridden as desired) Both past and future notes are considered. Exact ratios are used to determine every note frequency, using nearby significant notes as references. Yo…

Note that this is already kinda the case for fretless instruments, such as the violin. What you are suggesting to be done by a computer would be done by the player themselves. Obviously deciding exactly what tuning of each note to land on for any part of a song relies on musical intuition which computers are notoriously bad at. But when decided to be appropriate, on the violin perfect 5ths and 4th intervals would be actually (to the limits of the players ability and ear) perfect ratios. The major 3rd itself, which is decidedly enharmonic in equal temperament would sound cleaner and less "beaty".

I've always thought Bach would love the keyboard tools we have today. Simply the ability to switch tunings on the fly, rather than stopping to laboriously change gears on your harpsi/clavichord. I imagine the ability to switch to whatever temperament/tuning you want at the press of a button would have masterfully been taken advantage of by him (to say nothing of arbitrary sound/timbre for each voice/key-range etc. I think he would have loved Switched-On Bach).

Re: Why are there both sharps and flats?

#14

Post by hammock » Tue, Feb 20, 2018, 4:55 PM UTC

seertaak wrote: post #12

hammock wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Equal temperament does not explain why there is Ab and G#. It merely explains why they have not always been harmonically equivalent. You, and the top SO answer, give the correct reason why. And it's not just for writing, but reading also. The diatonic scale, combined with the staff of lines and spaces, necessitates both flats and sharps.

> The diatonic scale, combined with the staff of lines and spaces, necessitates both flats and sharps. Careful -- you're in danger begging the question. See my remark regarding mathematical summation. Intervals are nothing other than a pitch distance. Note names are the absolute value of a pitch. I'm not at all convinced that it's not possible to design a notational system that does away with the sharps/flats and yet…

The critical thing here is that the diatonic scale (of which ionian is one) is whole, whole, half, whole, whole, whole, half. There is no symmetry and the pitch distances are not consistent. How would your proposed novel notation system handle that?