Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Entertainment/2024 February 20

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February 20

What's the most popular enharmonic equivalent of each note?

Like is C sharp played more often than D flat, presumably D is played more often than C double sharp or E double flat, is D sharp played more often than E flat and so on. Keys vary in popularity, the note with the same name as the key probably isn't exactly as common as the other 6 notes of the key, some keys aren't even used. Are any of the five black piano keys much more popular as the sharp or flat version? Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 03:37, 20 February 2024 (UTC)

The question is about where a note has two or more ways of notating it, which is most commonly used. (For example, G sharp and A flat aren't two different notes, they are the same note expressed in two different ways.) I'd suggest that from the way the scales are structured it is surely far more common to see B flat or E flat than A sharp or D sharp, similarly C sharp and F sharp far more commonly than D flat or G flat. My best guess is that G sharp and A flat are about equal! Even then, scales have a preference too: that is you'd surely compose a tune in B flat major rather than A sharp major even though they're actually the same thing, just because I've never been taught about (or even heard of) the A sharp major scale until I just wrote about it myself in this comment. AndyJones (talk) 13:27, 20 February 2024 (UTC)

They come out the same for an instrument tuned in 12 equal temperament, but in other tuning systems, including the "natural" just intonation of a capella singing, enharmonic notes may be realized at different pitches, depending on the scale. For some systems, such as 31 equal temperament, which requires a different type of keyboard (see Adriaan Fokker), the concept of enharmonics is completely different.  --Lambiam 14:00, 20 February 2024 (UTC)

The question only makes sense for Western tonal music, but also then depends on the genre; blues scales were not used by Haydn. Restricting the examination to the nine major and minor keys of classical music whose characteristics were sketched by Christian Schubart in his Ideen zu einer Aesthetik der Tonkunst,^[1] and considering merely their key signatures, ignoring the complexities of the different minor key scale patterns, I find – not surprisingly – that for all white keys on a standard keyboard the corresponding note of the C major scale is the most common. For the black keys, I find

• 3 × C♯, 3 × D♭
• 2 × D♯, 5 × E♭
• 1 × E, 2 × G♭, 3 × F♯
• 3 × G♯, 4 × A♭
• 1 × A♯, 5 × B♭

This does also not take the relative popularity of these nine keys into account.  --Lambiam 13:42, 20 February 2024 (UTC)