Musical keys typically have 0 to 7 sharps or flats, but we can imagine adding any number of sharps or flats.

When you go up a fifth (seven half steps) you add a sharp. For example, the key of C has no sharps or flats, G has one sharp, D has two, etc. Starting from C and adding 30 sharps means going up 30*7 half-steps. Musical notes operate modulo 12 since there are 12 half-steps in an octave. 30*7 is congruent to 6 modulo 12, and six half-steps up from C is F#. So the key with 30 sharps would be the same pitches as F#.

But the key wouldn’t be called F#. It would be D quadruple sharp! I’ll explain below.

Sharps are added in the order F, C, G, D, A, E, B, and the name of key is a half step higher than the last sharp. For example, the key with three sharps is A, and the notes that are sharp are F#, C#, and G#.

In the key of C#, all seven notes are sharp. Now what happens if we add one more sharp? We start over and start adding more sharps in the same order. F was already sharp, and now it would be double sharp. So the key with eight sharps is G#. Everything is sharp except F, which is double sharp.

In a key with 28 sharps, we’ve cycled through F, C, G, D, A, E, and B four times. Everything is quadruple sharp. To add two more sharps, we sharpen F and C one more time, making them quintuple sharp. The note one half-step higher than C quintuple sharp is D quadruple sharp, which is enharmonic with F#.

You could repeat this exercise with flats. Going up a forth (five half-steps) adds a flat. Or you could think of a flat as a negative sharp.

More music posts

• Circle of fifths and number theory
• Circle of fifths and roots of 2
• How to convert frequency to pitch

I saw somewhere that James Earl Jones’ speaking voice is around 85 Hz. What musical pitch is that?

Let P be the frequency of some pitch you’re interested in and let C = 261.626 be the frequency of middle C. If h is the number of half steps from C to P then

P / C = 2^h/12.

Taking logs,

h = 12 log(P / C) / log 2.

If P = 85, then h = −19.46. That is, James Earl Jones’ voice is about 19 half-steps below middle C, around the F an octave and a half below middle C.

More details on the derivation above here.

There’s a page to do this calculation for you here. You can type in frequency or pitch and get the other back.

(The page also gives pitch on a Bark scale, something you may not care about that is important in psychoacoustics.)

Photo credit Wikipedia
Music image created using Lilypod.

Toward the end of his life, Beethoven added metronome markings to the scores of his symphonies to indicate exactly how fast they should be performed. The tempos indicated in the scores are consistently faster than how the symphonies are usually performed.

Source: Radiolab

James Kibbie has recorded Bach’s complete organ works and Kimiko Ishizaka has recorded his Goldberg Variations. Both artists have made their recordings free for download.

This evening I watched my daughter in Fiddler on the Roof. I thought I knew the play pretty well, but I learned something tonight.

Before the play started, someone told me that the phrase “bidi-bidi-bum” in “If I Were a Rich Man” is a Yiddish term for prayer. I thought “All day long I’d bidi-bidi-bum” was a way of saying “All day long I’d piddle around.” That completely changes the meaning of that part of the song.

When I got home I did a quick search to see whether what I’d heard was correct. According to Wikipedia,

A repeated phrase throughout the song, “all day long I’d bidi-bidi-bum,” is often misunderstood to refer to Tevye’s desire not to have to work. However, the phrase “bidi-bidi-bum” is a reference to the practice of Jewish prayer, in particular davening.

Unfortunately, Wikipedia adds a footnote saying “citation needed,” so I still have some doubt whether this explanation is correct. I searched a little more, but haven’t found anything more authoritative.

Now I wonder whether there’s any significance to other parts of the song that I thought were just a form of Klezmer scat singing, e.g. “yubba dibby dibby dibby dibby dibby dibby dum.” I assumed those were nonsense syllables, but is there some significance to them?

Update: At Jason Fruit’s suggestion in the comments, I asked about this on judaism.stackexchange.com. Isaac Moses replied that the answer is somewhere in between. The specific syllables are not meaningful, but they are intended to be reminiscent of the kind of improvisation a cantor might do in singing a prayer.

The post Music in 5/4 time continues to get a regular stream of traffic over two years after it was posted. Check out the interesting links in the comments.

See also March in 7/4 time and Blue Rondo à la Turk.

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