an instrument sound saying note names or saying do ray mi fa so la ti do
It would be cool to have an instrument choice that the sang note names...so if I was playing middle C, you'd hear someone singing "C" using the pitch of that note C. Or for the note A, you'd hear the letter "A" sung at a pitch of the music note A. Then, for chords, you would hear all the names of each note in that chord sung simultaneously...C major chord would be the voice of someone singing C, someone else singing E, and someone else singing G simultaneously or together at the correlating pitches...
So what to do for the flats and sharps? Well, one could have natural notes sung by one person, sharp notes could be sung by 2 people together, and flat notes could be sung by a group of people or chorus to be able to distinguish whether a note is sharp or flat.
Or else, one could simply use the "do ray mi fa so la ti do" notes in a scale...so if one was writing music in C major, the note C would be sung as do, D as ray, E as mi, etc....then if one wanted to switch the key signature and write music in D major, then the do ray mi scale would be assigned to whatever notes are in a scale for that key. So in D major, do would be note D, ray would be note E, mi would be note F#. In terms of accidentals, I guess the inbetweeny notes of "do ray mi fa so la ti do" could be sung by having flatted accidental notes sung by a group of people for each flatted accidental, and the sharped accidentals could be sung by 2 people or duet to sing each note that's a sharped accidental to distinguish notes... not sure about double accidentals though...for any note that the voice system can't cover, then piano would be played instead....
Another idea for the inbetweeny "do ray mi" notes for accidentals would be to say the notes "Day, May, Fee, Foe, Low, Lee, Dee" instead.
so the chromatic scale would have the notes : Do, Day, Ray, May, Mi, Fee, Fa, Foe, So ,Low ,La, Lee, Ti, Dee ,do.
There are 14 notes granted but, 2 of them would actually be the same as one of the regular notes used in the Do Ray Mi scale, depending on the scale... like for C major, the notes Mi (E) and Fa (F) are half a step apart, so Fa (F) flatted is the same as Mi (E) which could also be Fee (Fb). Then Mi (E) sharped is the same as Fa (F) which could be written as Fee (E#)...depending on whether the accidental is sharped or flatted... kinda confusing but I'm sure there's a way of saying the note names as they are played to hear the names of notes played...
this could help students who want to hear what the notes of chords sound like to familiarize themselves with what notes are used in different types of chords and familiarize themselves with what chords are used for chord progressions, so they could listen to a song played using this musechord instrument singing the note names to hear what notes are used without having to look or see the sheet music in case they want to practice ear training while driving or sleeping or another activity that requires one to use their vision in order to do that activity.... for ear training, learning or memorizing notes to a song, etc.
Comments
While that seems like a nice idea there is one major problem you'd need to solve: soundfonts map midi pitches to samples - so f# and gb share the same sample. Your A major chord might end up as 'a d-flat e' ...
In reply to While that seems like a nice… by rmattes
I wrote an open source semi-random note generator in sheet music format for sight reading and fretboard training. It's single line melodies with optional periodic random key modulation, for bass guitar, 5-string bass guitar, guitar, and a couple others. It's Java that writes a file in musicXML format.
https://github.com/dmcki23/MusicBuilder
The note name singing idea is brilliant, akin to the the Boss DB-90. I love my DB-90 but it could use an update like your idea.