Your music's key is important.

[Larry Graham Alexander]

18 minutes ago, pwalpwal said:

That's an "interesting" chart.  I don't agree with all aspects of it.   

Thanks for posting it.

Larry Graham Alexander

 

[Chaps]

On 2/16/2020 at 11:05 AM, Larry Graham Alexander said:

Your music's key is important.

 

 

Another thing to consider regarding keys is that if one actually sets a project to the correct key then the Process/Transpose feature can be set to Diatonic Math, which can greatly facilitate creating harmonies or building chords.

[Larry Graham Alexander]

1 hour ago, Chappel said:

Another thing to consider regarding keys is that if one actually sets a project to the correct key then the Process/Transpose feature can be set to Diatonic Math, which can greatly facilitate creating harmonies or building chords.

Thanks for your contribution to my post, Chappel.

Larry Graham Alexander

 

[Starship Krupa]

An interesting exercise in key/mood is to sit on the sofa with your guitar or a small keyboard controller as you're watching TV and figure out what key the incidental music scorer is using under each scene.

I binged Game of Thrones a few months ago and most of it seemed to be in Dm.

[JohnG]

As David Baay as had, I don't buy this at all, at least not in equal temperament.

Note that in Charpentier's chart he doesn't list all the keys, just 17 of them. Why? Because at that time his keyboard instruments would have been tuned in quarter comma meantone. Keys outside those listed would have had so many "wolves", i.e. notes relatively out of tune, that they were unusable. Try retuning to 1/4 comma and THEN listen to the differences in the different keys.

As an example, Bach (Joh. Seb.) wrote 15 each of his 2 part inventions and 3 part sinfonias (also believed to have been written for meantone tuning) that's why not 24. It's relatively easy to find MIDI files of these on the Internet. They can be easily put into a MIDI file player that will render them in different temperaments. It's only by experimenting with something like this that you realise that Bach, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven were NOT using E.T.

Real key differences. E.T. means everything sounds the same just transposed. Non-E.T. gives true Key Colour.

Just my 0.02c!

JohnG.

[RobertWS]

Let's say we have a song in A major....440 Hz.

Now we transpose it to 444 Hz.   Is there really any significant difference?  

I believe that any perceived difference in the character of keys is in the physical instrument.  Saxophones, guitars, guitar amps, violins, the human voice, etc.  all seem to have 'sweet notes':  Notes that when played, sound better than other notes...on the same instrument.  If a song is transposed to a key that hits an instrument's sweet notes, it's going to sound much better.

[JohnG]

When I write about temperament, I'm not referring to the tuning of A, whether the modern A=440Hz or the baroque A=415Hz (roughly a semitone lower).

So in that sense you're quite correct.

I'm referring to the tuning of fifths that one does when tuning, e.g. a piano or harpsichord, etc.

A 'perfect' fifth (e.g. C to G) has a ration of 3:2, discovered allegedly by Pythagoras, but if we tune a series of perfect fifths (let's say starting on F) with the ratio 3:2, until we have gone all the way round the circle of fifths, and end up on Bb, we want to end up where we started, but much further up the keyboard. But we don't, we end up about half a semitone too high. The interval of Bb to F is way out of tune.

Here's the arithmetic. F to C to G to D to A to E to B to F# to C# to G# to Eb to Bb to F.

3/2 x 3/2 x 3/2 x 3/2 x 3/2 x 3/2 x 3/2 x 3/2 x 3/2 x 3/2 x 3/2 x 3/2 = 129.746

Going up the required number of octaves (a piano keyboard is useful here)

2/1   x   2/1   x   2/1   x   2/1   x   2/1   x   2/1   x   2/1 = 128.0

So, somehow we have to lose that overshoot of 1.746 (called a Pythagorean comma) by flattening some or all of the intervening fifths.

Equal temperament (ET) divides the comma equally across all the notes, but wasn't common until the first quarter of the 20th century (it was very difficult to tune).

ET gives good fifths but results in very poor thirds.

Other 'temperaments', common in the baroque era,'use different ways of dividing the comma. And it's one of these I was referring to, 1/4 comma meantone.