Subject: Re: [lojban] le jbozgi be la'o <Lobster Quadrille>

From: Rob Speer <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 11 Jun 2001 17:23:29 -0400

On Mon, Jun 11, 2001 at 03:20:05PM -0400, Craig wrote:
> I tried playing the Lobster Quadrille on the trumpet this morning, and found
> one huge problem with it. Isn't the assumption that a note is the same as
> the note an octave above it and the one an octave below it a huge cultural
> bias? It is in all natural languages except that I don't believe gaelic
> music transcription has that problem. Chinese and Italian do, and the rest
> of the languages get it from them. But since to the best of my knowledge
> it's not everywhere, isn't it rather difficult to arbitrarily say two notes
> are the same note even if they're five octaves apart?

The vowels don't give you an exact transcription of the note. They don't tell
you how long it is, for one thing, and as you've pointed out, they don't tell
you which octave it's in. However, it is a basic property of sound that the A
at 220Hz and the A at 440Hz describe the same _tone_ but not the same _note_,
and so this fact is not rooted in any culture.

This is useful. Some tunes in Lojban may not work out as nicely as the Lobster
Quadrille did, and need to shift between octaves to sound good.
-- 
Rob Speer