2007/12/17
>>Tabula Rasa?

The more I explore music, the more I am finding that I have some strange inherent associations. Take the natural notes, play them one at a time, and I will tell you which ones are odd and even. I have some kind of weird attachment between oddness or evenness and tones. For example, F is a horribly odd note and it's not pleasant for me to hear it on its own. The higher the F, the more piquing it is. E is odd, but less so. Putting the two together is almost as bad as F on its own. They need context to sound better to me; I was playing around on a piano with a friend the other day and he was giving F the context of other notes. It took the edge that a single F note has for me. B and C are odd as well -- in fact, the only notes I have determined I feel as distinctly even are A, D and G.

The fact that E has its own string on my violin doesn't make sense feeling-wise to me since it's "odd", but I concede to the fifths aspect. Major keys feel even and minor keys feel odd in the same way. I get the concept of feeling a major key as happy and a minor key as sad, but those are more emotions and not sensations like I have when I feel the evenness or oddness of a key. Above all, the composition is still what makes any song what it is to me, despite the "oddness" or "evenness" of the key. (Though I want to compose something in B minor; I'm partial to that particular sensation.)

I'm pretty sure it's a strange form of synaesthesia, since they're merely feelings evoked directly from experiencing a certain note/key. On the upside, I can pick out some notes now because of this, and probably all of them with a little practice since the feeling is rather prominent and almost instant. Very helpful when trying to play the piano and having no idea what I'm doing.