Categorial Perception Experiment Phase 1

As of late, I have noticed more and more how my black and white thinking when it comes to music is very bad for my creativity. Being that I've now become so ingrained in years of thinking about chords and scales in a certain way, I want to free myself of this line of thinking. I'm not sure how well this will work but I'm going to preform an experiment on myself to see if I can change the way I perceive categories in music. So how will I do this exactly? By constructing a new synthetic system of theory and notes in which music can be written in. The idea here is to be as strict as possible in order to enforce new ways of thinking in the musical system. The result hopefully will be that in the end, this new system will become ingrained to some extent and allow me to learn how to shift categorial perception away from the same old thinking rut.

The new system will contain nothing of the old what so ever. The only constant will be that 12 Equal Temperament will still be used. This is merely to allow myself to be able to use this anywhere, not just at home where I have a keyboard which I can change the tuning of. This way, touch is involved at a consistent rate rather than setting up some odd scale on the keyboard. The new system will have new names for pitches which will be named after six fruits rather than letter names. The fruits will take the place of the notes: F# G# A# C D E as:

"Raspberry", "Lemon", "Pear", "Blueberry", "Orange", "Banana".

This system is so weird now that my brain couldn't possibly relate it to any sort of thinking of traditional western theory. In addition, you'll notice these are fruits, they are words not letters. These have meaning on their own which perhaps may influence my categorial perception even more.  I also purposely paired names to pitches that are contrary to what I felt paired together. I felt C would be Lemon but I made it blueberry, something that for whatever reason felt very wrong in my mind and that's exactly what we want, to go against our learned perception.  What's more these names have no inherent order. They are random fruits, they all are fruit but unlike letters, they do not fall in any specific order in my mind. Internalizing them will be tricky but it will add to the fun of brain crushing chaos haha.

The scale corresponds to the "Whole tone scale" which has little in common with the major scale making it even more taboo.  I could have went with other scales such as the diminished or augmented but I wanted to keep it simple as well as pick a scale which does not contain major and minor triads. I also fairly enjoy this scale but have found it confusing to work with, may'be now I can see it in a whole new light.

The other six pitches are known as "Scratch Tones", they have no actual basis as pitches but rather are considered in this new system as "spaces" between the notes. Essentially they are ambiguous and might be considered out of tune compared to the six fruits we used. They are for embellishments or something.  I'm not sure yet because this is a system we're building as we go along.

The piano layout:

PHASE 1

The first stage of this experiment is to memorize these notes by heart. I need to know what note corresponds to which fruit without any second guessing or doubt. I imagine this will take like a 4 days to a week to finish this step. I don't want to start defining any rules of play until I internalize this system as is.   

I encourage others to join in the experiment with me, it'll be a fun way to see how we can screw up our categorial perception. Dunno how long I will do this but I imagine around one month to get a good result point. 

Phase 2 which I will write next will consist of defining some initial properties and functions for this system.