mrstuprigge wrote:most of the talk here has been about complex rhythms so i thought i would bring up something a little different. In western music our tonal system is based on half-steps, but other parts of the world use semitones that our ears aren't trained to pick out. this alone kind of makes our music very simplistic in comparison just because there aren't as many notes to work with. trying to comprehend an african piece of music would require you to basically retrain your ears, which i guess would make it extremely technical.
Yeah you're quite right. Nowadays, on most instruments a B-flat is played the same way as an A-sharp, while in the 16th century(ish, I'm not to good on musical hiltory) clavierstyle instruments had seperate ways to play a B-flat or an A-sharp. My teacher was always annoyed when I was talking about a C-sharp when a piece was noted in 4 moles. (I really don't know the proper music terms; in Dutch, a "cross" means a note is sharp and a "mole" means a note is flat)
