I'm working on defining musical notes in other ways than their wavelength. There are two reasons for this.
1. I want to apply my musical intuition to writing and art.
2. I want to unravel music to see the ideas and colors implied in melody and chord.
I've always thought that various musical keys have personalities. To test this, I sat down with my older brother Paul ( a violist and pianist) and David Hegstead ( musician and composer) in Gimbie, Ethiopia. We chose hymns that we knew the words of, and then thought silently about what key would be appropriate for that hymn. After individually determining which key was a "fit", we conferred upon our results. Of about 20 hymns we worked through, 16 selections were unanimous. In only 1 case did all of us disagree. (I checked to see if we were simply selecting the key of the hymn as written from harmonic recall... but this was not the case. Our results frequently differed from that of the hymn.)
That is great, but it's another thing to actually express or characterize those personalities. I decided to try and characterize individual notes first. I used two words and a color for each of 7 notes. I decided that flats (or sharps) would be a mixture of the two notes which they fall between. So:
C : Solid Comfort
D: Sharp Definition
E: Fluid Movement
F: Viscous Thought
G: Optimistic Fluff
A: Tragic Sardonic
B: Sweet Sad
Hence, Twinkle Twinkle in C major.
Soft flannel pajamas will sooth sore hearts. I wonder if perilous deeds might also?
That isn't very satisfying. Maybe about as good as a beginner playing twinkle twinkle on the violin.
Now a chord. Starting from the bottom: G F B D F B-flat. (sorry, don't know the name)
Optimistic fluff + Viscous thought + Sweet Sad + Sharp Definition + Viscous Thought + Sad Comfort
aaaaaa Jazz Chord.
