Sound Theories

No, I'm not referring to Steve Vai's album title, though I do wish I had all that musical knowledge/super ears/technical perfection on the guitar.

This post is music-theory inclined, even if the author knows nuts about music theory.

I had trouble sleeping last night because I kept thinking about music theory and scales after playing a while on my guitar, with a playing a style involving mainly, major scales. Because I'm self-taught and never had much background on theory, I know the sounds of a major scale, but I don't really know what note that is I'm playing on the guitar when I play the scale, unless I count it out, though I always know the root/tonic. So I thought last night, maybe I can write them all out and see for myself where all the sharps are for each of the major scales, this is what I derived/got, which I know most trained piano players/musicians would already recognize.

Yup, when I get such epiphanies I can be quite persistent. Notice the subscripted tiny numbers before the notes. They represent the note's position in the particular scale (left side before ':'), like how C is denoted with a 1 in a C major scale. Then, I noticed how the diagonal pattern of numbers occurs on the rows of sharps/naturals, which in the "white keys on a piano" box above show. Then there's the horizontal sequence of numbers that goes 7, 3, 6, 2, 5 which also runs upwards from the B, E, A, D, G on the left side. Like some sorta musical code going on here. Anyway, these are just things I found the hard way after hearing/learning snippets here and there before, putting them together myself felt good. Then I did it for the black keys, which gave similar results.

This led to more frustration questions.

This, my friends, is a diagram of a guitar fretboard and the notes each fret represents. Unlike the keyboard, there are no black/white keys and instead, each adjacent fret is one semitone apart, like E-F, B-C, C-C# etc. It takes 12 frets to make up an octave, which translates to 7 white keys + 5 black keys on a piano. Okay, this all makes sense for an octave, but what got me thinking was, why did they denote 5 particular notes from these 12 tones to have #/b (sharps of flats). For simplicity's sake, I shall stick to sharps and make no mention of flats.

If each of the 12 tones is a semitone apart, why did they choose those 5 (F#, C#, G#, D#, A#) tones to have sharps and not the others? and why the particular funny order which allowed E-F and B-C to have no sharps in between? Why not have 12 equal white keys on a piano each a semitone apart, naming the notes from A-L (A=1, B=2, C=3,...... L=12)? While it is more ergonomically efficient to have the black keys in a keyboard to make an octave within a normal person's reach, why choose those keys instead of others? Is there a particular significance in these 5 sharps? They make up a pentatonic scale, with C being the reference note all the time, why C when we have A first in the alphabets? Now, had we moved the keys theoretically, say..

From this, which is the standard keyboard...
..to a hypothetical keyboard, like this.

Hypothetical = made up, so don't come telling me "Hey the notes are wrong la"

What I'm getting at is, why have the notes CDFGA been given #s instead of ABDEF? or in fact, why not any other 5 notes? since all the 12 semitones are equally separated in terms of sound. I know on the current known keyboard, the white keys make up the C major scale and hence, C would make an appropriate reference note, but was the keyboard built first or the notes named first? I'd guess the latter, since a chat with Jaclyn allowed us to deduce that other instrument classes such as woodwind/strings were probably created first, meaning notes gotta have existed before the keyboard.

Anyway, to summarize my jumbled-up thoughts and questions, here we go:

1. Why were C, D, F, G, A given sharps instead of other 5 keys?

2. Why are there 5 sharps, leaving B-C and E-F as semitones on a keyboard/notation?

3. Why is C always the reference note when they have A first in the alphabets?

4. Why C, C#, D, Eb, E, F, F#, G, G#, A, Bb, B, and not a simple A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L for an octave with 12 equally spaced semitones? (I know it sounds stupid when you've learnt everything in the present day system, but how was this system established? Wipe it all away and it may make some sense why I ask)

If you can answer any of these for me, I thank you first =D

I've been reading up on stuff online ever since, with some of the things being incredibly physics related (some music thesis by some dude), and I realize that notes are tuned in increasing frequencies following an exponential pattern. Learnt and understood more things too, bout the Pythagorean Tuning, Modes (Ionian, Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Myxolydian, Aeolian and Locrian) etc etc. Now the biggest hindrance left is probably notation, all that staves and taugehs. Another time maybe.

Links and people I've referred to
Modes
The Creation of Musical Scales: from a mathematic and acoustic point of view, part I, by Thomas Váczy Hightower (Still reading, it's deep)
Pythagorean Tuning
Sister (verbal)
Jaclyn Chua - MSN
Rachel Chee - MSN