An alternate music note naming system

I once proposed here a system for naming notes using Lojban numbers, which can be used alongside the letter-system. Thus:


Advantages: The Lojban numbers provide an alternative solfege system. The common solfege system (do, re, mi, etc.) lacks a convenient way to represent accidentals. As you can read in the Wikipedia article, the original system ignored accidentals (this was personally harmful, as I ended up subvocalizing such a solfege; this caused me to have difficulty distinguishing between certain close notes). There is an alternate system, but it is not very well known, and tends to cause an unacceptable amount of rhyming note names in sharp-heavy keys. Also, by naming the notes after numbers, intervals can be easily calculated using mod-12 arithmetic. You can know that the interval between C (0) and F (5), is the same as the interval between F# (6) and B (11).

Thus the beginning of Beethoven's Fur Elise (E-D#-E-D#-E-B-D-C-A) could be sung to by the syllables "vo ci vo ci vo fei re no so".

The system can also easily be adapted to naming notes in systems other than the European 12-note system.

Disadvantages: It doesn't match with the diatonic (major) scale that is usually taught first, and which the traditional musical notation is based on.

The Beginning

For the first post, I'm going to give a little background story about my foray into Lojbanistan.

It was October. I got to the Lojban article in Wikipedia by following random links. I was pretty intrigued about the idea of a logical language. I had once lamented the fact that logic is often viewed as a complicated subject, despite it being the foundation of reasoning, and is often taught in detail only after graduation from secondary school. I thus wondered, why is that? Is it because we cannot expect a 2nd-grader to distinguish between "inclusive" and "exclusive" or, or to understand that "A if B" is equivalent to "(not A) or B"? Is it because that last English expression, without the clarifying brackets, sounds equivalent to "neither A nor B", adding to the confusion?

But are these concepts inherently complex? Humans possess an innate capability for language, unparalleled in the animal kingdom. We were designed for it. I thus wondered, if language made logical distinctions clear rather than obscuring them, if we didn't have to resort to jargon and unpronounceable symbols to talk about them, would these concepts become more accessible?

I was also intrigued by the "attitudinal" system, which are little words included in Lojban for the express purpose of expressing feelings (including .ui for happiness, .oi for complaint, .iu for love, and even words that "mark up" text for special usage, like pe'a for metaphor, zo'o for humor and je'unai for sarcasm). Immediately I saw the applications, as I converse a lot on the Internet. Actually using them and remaining understood, however, was an entirely different matter. zo'o

I thus decided to look more into the language, and began learning it. Thus here I am now.

ta'o .a'o ko gleki xisyjbesla joi ninyna'asla doi ro tcidu
(By the way, a merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all of you.)