The Complexities of Musical Keys and Note Naming

In this episode, I use “Don’t You Worry ‘Bout A Thing” by Stevie Wonder (1973) as a jumping off point to contemplate the headache of naming notes and chords in keys with a lot of flats and sharps in them. The confusion stems from the fact that Western European note naming conventions got established in a time before twelve-tone equal temperament, when E-flat and D-sharp were two very different notes. We pretend that they are the same for practical reasons, but that comes at the expense of a naming system that no longer makes sense.

Something that I forgot to mention is that in Western European convention, the rule is that you only use each letter name once per major or minor key. So we spell the notes in E-flat minor like so: E-flat, F, G-flat, A-flat, B-flat, C-flat, D-flat. That C-flat might offend your intuition. Wouldn’t it be simpler to just call it B? Yes, it would, and people often incorrectly do, but it’s not what you’re supposed to do. I always thought this rule was arcane and arbitrary until I found it out that when it was established, B and C-flat sounded different from each other, and B would have sounded horrendous in E-flat minor. I know all this tuning business seems remote from practicality, but for myself at least, understanding the history of tuning is simpler than taking the illogic of twelve-tone equal temperament at face value.

The other thing I neglected to mention is that I was able to do all that Pythagorean tuning using a plugin called MTS-ESP by Oddsound. Ableton Live has some cool tuning features built in as of version 12, but if you really want to get into the nitty-gritty of tuning systems, you need something more robust. MTS-ESP has a learning curve to it, but once I got the hang of it, I was able to fill some big holes in my understanding, both intellectually and intuitively. You will be hearing more about tuning in future episodes.

Read more about Pythagorean and the so-called “circle” of fifths here.