Helmholtz pitch notation is a system for naming
musical note
In music, a note is the representation of a musical sound.
Notes can represent the pitch and duration of a sound in musical notation. A note can also represent a pitch class.
Notes are the building blocks of much written music: discretizatio ...
s of the
Western chromatic scale. Fully described and normalized by the German scientist
Hermann von Helmholtz
Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz (31 August 1821 – 8 September 1894) was a German physicist and physician who made significant contributions in several scientific fields, particularly hydrodynamic stability. The Helmholtz Associatio ...
, it uses a combination of
upper
Upper may refer to:
* Shoe upper or ''vamp'', the part of a shoe on the top of the foot
* Stimulant, drugs which induce temporary improvements in either mental or physical function or both
* ''Upper'', the original film title for the 2013 found fo ...
and
lower case
Letter case is the distinction between the letters that are in larger uppercase or capitals (or more formally ''majuscule'') and smaller lowercase (or more formally ''minuscule'') in the written representation of certain languages. The writing ...
letters (A to G), and the sub- and super-
prime
A prime number (or a prime) is a natural number greater than 1 that is not a product of two smaller natural numbers. A natural number greater than 1 that is not prime is called a composite number. For example, 5 is prime because the only way ...
symbols ( ͵ ′ or ) to denote each individual note of the scale. It is one of two formal systems for naming notes in a particular octave, the other being
scientific pitch notation.
History
Helmholtz proposed this system in order to accurately define pitches in his classical work on acoustics ''Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen als physiologische Grundlage für die Theorie der Musik'' (1863) translated into English by
A.J. Ellis as ''On the Sensations of Tone'' (1875).
Helmholtz based his notation on the practice of German organ builders for labelling their pipes, itself derived from the old German
organ tablature in use from late medieval times unt