Talk:Key (music)

message: Removed the following:
:An analogy that would be easy for a non-musician to encompass is that a musical key is like the force of gravity: what goes up, must come down. The entire history of music can be summed up as composers learning to "jump" higher and higher. In keeping with this analogy, Bach and Mozart were playing hop-scotch, Beethoven invented the hot-air balloon, Berlioz was the first to pilot an airplane, Wagner was the first astronaut, Scriabin went to the moon and back, and Stravinsky, Schoenberg and Miles Davis blasted off and haven't been seen since.
Entertaining, but not particularly edifying. —Wahoofive | Talk 19:21, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Gravity 

message: So that's a key. What is a tonality then? Is it the same as key? There's no statement that show what a tonality is.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.203.36.71 (talk) 17:23, 26 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Keys and tonality 

message: what are criteria for "well-known", as against "notable", music in this or that key? (And I rely on editors who know something about music outside my expertise to apply those criteria thereto, I can only copyedit in most cases.) Schissel | Sound the Note! 09:36, 24 June 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  on the individual key pages... 

message: The best analogy I have ever heard for a key is a line dance.  In a line dance everyone dances the same steps, but starts in a different place (due to the physical impossibility of starting in the same place).  If you dance in the center of the room or you dance at the end of the line, you dance the same way, the only difference is where in the room you are starting (and finishing).  Similarly, in music whether someone plays a song in C major or F major, it sounds the same except it will be overall higher or lower in pitch.
In line dancing, there are some places in the room where you can't start (because you will end up dancing into a wall).  In the same way, a song might be moved into another key to accomodate a singer's vocal range so they don't hit the edge of their range.  Of course the analogy only goes so far, but hopefully that helps everyone who is confused about why keys are used anyway.  Unfortunately, I don't think an analogy is very encyclopedic
Disputulo (talk) 20:28, 20 October 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  A Good Analogy 

message: Any thoughts? Hyacinth (talk) 15:01, 2 June 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: I had no idea that such an article-let even existed. It does not seem to me to be justified as a separate article, so I wholeheartedly concur: by all means merge it here.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 16:07, 2 June 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Merge. If that section ever grows (which I doubt) to a suitable size, it can be split back out. __ Just plain Bill (talk) 16:11, 2 June 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: An entire book could be written on that topic. But for Wikipedia it would probably be better to just have a paragraph or two merged into this article. James470 (talk) 20:35, 2 June 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Merge: [[Key coloration]]

message: Why and where is this article too technical?  How should it be cleaned up? Hyacinth (talk) 07:25, 26 May 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree. The subject is by nature technical, and since the tag emphatically states that the technical material should be retained (only made more accessible to the non-expert reader) the burden is on the tagger to point out specific examples of impenetrable explanation.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 21:13, 27 May 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Agree. This is the English Wikipedia, not the ELI5 version. Unless specifics appear, and soon, the tag should go; midweek seems about right... __ Just plain Bill (talk) 14:33, 28 May 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: Technical

message: I have initiated a formal RM action to move Musical scale to Scale (music). Contributions and comments would be very welcome; decisions of this kind could affect the choice of title for many music theory articles.
NoeticaTea? 00:11, 21 June 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Requested move: "Musical scale" → "Scale (music)" 

message: I'm not sure of the best place to ask this, but I've started a discussion over at Template_talk:Infobox_song, which essentially asks whether  tempo and key should have their own parameters.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.175.220.114 (talk) 17:28, 9 March 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Musical parameters in infobox 

message: I have found that very many people use "key" to mean the same as "key signature".  I suppose this happens because in the most common mode (Ionian), the key and the key signature have the same name, so that many people believe they are the same thing.  It seems that that is harmful or even ruinous to many a musical discussion.  I think the article should state that this supposed incorrect usage is actually very common.CountMacula (talk) 05:34, 28 October 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: The third paragraph of the lede begins "The key signature is not a reliable guide to the key...". Do you think that's insufficient? —Wahoofive (talk) 16:31, 28 October 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: That paragraph does not address the equivocation of the term, the fact that the term is very commonly used in more than one meaning, the fact that it is very commonly used to mean key signature.CountMacula (talk) 16:29, 6 November 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm a little unclear in my mind about just how "people use 'key' to mean the same as 'key signature'". I cannot imagine, for example, anyone saying "Beethoven's Seventh Symphony is in the key of three sharps" or, on the other hand, "the key of F minor is identical to A major". Could you give some examples of phrases in which the word "key" alone is used to stand in for "key signature"? —Jerome Kohl (talk) 20:04, 6 November 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Key" as meaning "key signature" 

message: I think this section needs amendment. 
Pythagorean tuning is a bad example for a tuning with key coloring, meantone tunings would be equally bad examples. When we look at the interval structure of those keys, we notice that all keys used in the historical periods related to those tunings had exactly same interval structure in each of the keys. The drawback to this uniformity is the presence of wolf tones, which prevent one from modulating around the whole circle of fifths. Thus, the fact that renaissance keyboards had twelve keys to an octave does not imply that the chain of fifths was viewed as a circle.
The two ways to accommodate for these wolf tones were simply retuning the instrument, or far less commonly, instruments with split black keys, one producing the flat note, another the respective sharp note.
The 18th century solution to this, was using microtonal variations of the same interval in a way that eliminated wolf tones. The side effect of this microtonal variation was that each key sounded a bit different. That is my understanding of what key coloration usually means. Equal temperament is a later invention that allows modulation around the whole circle of fifths without any key coloration.
My position is that even though wolf tones are here cited as examples of key coloration, they are applicable to that purpose only from the viewpoint of modern music, in a somewhat rebellious spirit. They are however not examples of key coloration in the theoretically more conservative sense of the word.
Tritonist (talk) 15:55, 27 February 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: This is an interesting opinion. Do you have a reliable source to support it? My personal experience is almost entirely the opposite, but also concerns things like resonance patterns in physical instruments like the violin or the piano, where even in theoretically undifferentiated tunings like 12-equal temperament there are different "sounds" to different keys (a string orchestra playing in D major, for example, sounds entirely different from the same body of instruments playing in C major). But this is not directly relevant to the subject of this article.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 16:49, 27 February 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Key coloration 

message: I am a native Italian speaker and I notice there is not a link for the Italian page which would be the page at "tonalità" which I notice instead links to the English page for "Tonality". While the word is the direct translation of "tonality," in Italian it is used to indicate the key of a piece. If you read the Italian page (or scroll down for those who don't speak Italian) you will see a table that lists the names of each key and their corresponding sharps and flats. Not the same content written in the English tonality page. I was wondering if that could be fixed. I'm not certain how to go about doing that.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 135.23.149.92 (talk) 05:41, 14 July 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Italian translation 

message: Should this piece also mention the pentatonic scale that is used in eastern music?Vorbee (talk) 21:11, 4 December 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: As you correctly write in the section heading, it's the pentatonic , and that article explains its use. A  in music is a different concept. The article overleaf explains it thus: "People sometimes confuse key with scale. A scale is an ordered set of notes typically used in a key, while the key is the "center of gravity" established by particular chord progressions." -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 05:44, 5 December 2017 (UTC)
thread_title: Pentatonic scale

message: The lede's definition is completely wrong. A key is a harmonic hierarchy related to a tonic chord, major or minor. A lot of people confuse that with a scale because we talk both about the key of B minor as well as the B minor scale. Still, one can use pitches outside of the scale, even every chromatic pitch, without even challenging the key, because the important thing is the harmonic hierarchy. 2601:181:C381:8180:499C:495B:9E06:DA28 (talk) 15:20, 5 October 2021 (UTC)
thread_title: Definition

message: There is a move discussion in progress on Talk:Major Key (album) which affects this page. Please participate on that page and not in this talk page section. Thank you.  —RMCD bot 17:51, 29 June 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Move discussion in progress