| 
  • If you are citizen of an European Union member nation, you may not use this service unless you are at least 16 years old.

  • You already know Dokkio is an AI-powered assistant to organize & manage your digital files & messages. Very soon, Dokkio will support Outlook as well as One Drive. Check it out today!

View
 

modified Helmholtz notation

Page history last edited by Andrew Alder 11 years ago

Modified Helmholtz notation is a system of naming the notes of the musical scale based on Helmholtz pitch notation, the system developed by Professor Herman L. F. Helmholtz in the 19th century. It's modified only in that it uses the standard ASCII quote mark instead of the prime and sub-prime symbols. Properly, it should probably be called Modified Helmholtz Pitch Notation, but we just call it MHN. 

 

Prime and sub-prime are fine when you're writing it longhand, and sufferable when you're casting it in type and using a lot of other non-standard symbols and graphics anyway. But despite there being Unicode codes for prime, double-prime and triple-prime, as yet there's no standard subprime. In all, at a keyboard it sux, it gives some browsers problems too, and probably as a result there's no standard way of doing it.

 

So we just use the single quote character instead, wherever Helmie would use either prime or subprime. This works 'cause he only ever uses prime on a lower-case letter, and subprime on an upper-case. We thought at the time we were inventing something new, but we keep on running into others who've decided the same thing, see External links below. It makes sense. Considering the reasons he invented Helmholtz pitch notation, we even think that if Helmie had owned a laptop, he might have done it our way too.

 

But there are of course many other ways of naming the notes. We'll describe a few others below, paticularly with an eye to the possibility that you'll want to convert from one to the other.

 

As well as prime and subprime, and the single quote used in MHN, there are a couple of other ways of writing Helmholtz notation:

  • English notation uses repeated letters in place of subprime, so C' in MHN is CC in English notation.
  • German notatrion uses a horizontal bar above the letter in place of prime.

 

MHN works well for equal temperament based on 12 semitones per octave. For instruments that don't use this, see the particular article.

 

In MHN, middle C is c', and A-440 is a'. You could argue that technically that's another difference... strictly speaking, Helmholtz Pitch Notation came before the treaty that set A-440. Anyway, that's what we mean here.

 

The octave below middle C is represented by lower-case letters, c d e f g a b.

 

The octave below that is represented by upper case, C D E F G A B.

 

The next octave down is represented by upper case followed by a quote, C' D' E' F' G' A' B', the one below that by two quotes (not double quote please) C' ' then triple C' ' ' etc. etc.. We rarely need double quote here, and possibly never triple, simply because we're mainly interested in the pitches of open strings designed to produce audible notes either open and when stopped or fretted or both. Our main interest is in the range C' ' - b' ', and anytime you seem to get a pitch outside that range, check it because it's probably wrong!

 

The octave starting on middle C is c' d' e' f ' g' a' b' and note the blank between the f and the ', otherwise the quote tends to get lost. See detailed conventions for more on this. Next up c' ' d' ' e' ' f ' ' g' ' a' ' b' ' and so on.

 

Sharp and flat symbols precede the quote where you have both, so Bb' means the b-flat a little more than an octave below middle C.

 

One little problem we don't have... people spend hours and megabytes discussing which octave B# is in. We just call it C or c (depending which we mean). Um, so what's the problem? No problem. We mention it here just in case you'd read some of the discussion and wondered what it's about. It's not about anything, and in the opinion of this site they should know better. The distinction does sometimes matter, so in those rare cases just say which you mean and get on with it is our advice.

 

Actual frequencies

a = 220Hz

a#  = b flat = 233.08Hz

b = 246.94Hz

c'  (middle C) = 261.63Hz

c#  ' = d flat'  = 277.18Hz

d' = 293.66Hz

d# ' = e flat' = 311.13Hz

e' = 329.63Hz

f ' = 349.23Hz

f # ' = g flat' = 369.99Hz

g' = 392.00Hz

g# ' = a flat' = 415.30Hz

a' = 440Hz

 

Octaves and sub-octaves can be obtained by multiplying or dividing by powers of two.

 

Staff notation

Staff notation and modified Helmhltz notation

 

Scientific Pitch Notation

If you need to translate between MHN and Scientific Pitch Notation (commonly used by US-based musicologists), it goes like this (Scientific first, then MHN)::

 

C0 = C' '   D0 = D' '   E0 = E' '   F0 = F' '   G0 = G' '  A0 = A' '   B0 = B' '

C1 = C'   D1 = D'   E1 = E'   F1 = F'   G1 = G'   A1 = A'   B1 = B'

C2 = C   D2 = D ... B2 = B   

C3 = c   D3 = d ... B3 = b

C4 = c'   D4 = d' .... B4 = b'

C5 = c' '   D5 = d' ' ... B5 = b' '

C6 = c' ' '...

C7 = c' ' ' ' ...

C8 = c' ' ' ' ' ...

C9 = c' ' ' ' ' ' ... B9 = b' ' ' ' ' '

 

For the purist, Scientific Pitch Notation should really use subscript numbers, not ordinary ASCII as above. But again, we think it's plain enough as is.

 

MIDI

 

MIDI note numbers run from 0 to 127, and represent 128 successive semitones.

 

Note 0 is the C five octaves below middle C, C' ' ' in MHN, and about 8.2 Hz.

Note 60 is middle C, c' in MHN.

Note 69 is A-440, a' in MHN.

Note 127 is the G five and two-thirds octaves above middle C, g' ' ' ' ' ' in MHN, and about 12.5 kHz.

 

These note numbers are those used in the MIDI note on and note off messages, and are common to all versions of MIDI. Some later versions also implement the MIDI Tuning Standard, which allows for finer control of pitch.

 

A trap!

The semi-standardised MIDI note names used in much MIDI documentation look just like Scientific Pitch Notation, and many people will tell you they are. And they ain't. Well, they sometimes are! 

 

It depends on the manufacturer. Some use the standard note names. Others are out by an octave, in either direction. Most if not all Yamaha documentation, for example, refers to middle C as C3, while in Scientific Pitch Notation it would be C4.

 

But the MIDI note numbers should be reliable.

 

External links

 

Other users of MHN

 

An extremely worrying site

  • http://www.strothers.com/string_choice.htm Dulcimer string gauge calculator... Cool. But wait... c' (octave above middle c) it says... and the other notes are consitent. It looks like Helmholtz notation, but it's an octave out. How many other dulcimer players use this convention, I wonder... or players of other instruments... as Daisy Duck often says, EEEEK...

 

 

 

 

Comments (0)

You don't have permission to comment on this page.