I’m actually writing from experience there! That’s how my memory still mainly encodes the few main home telephone numbers from when I was growing up (that is, I remember the imputed melodies before the digits in any other form), but it’s possible they were unusually harmonious. I don’t think it was suggested by family, just something I did spontaneously, and I am not at all sure how well this would carry more generally… it may also be relevant that I had a bunch of exposure to Chinese numeric musical notation.
I think with this system you will end up with too many large difficult and uncatchy jumps. Plus similar phone numbers will sound similar which is not what you want.
That’s what I did, though with do on 1 and mi′ on 0 (treating it as 10). I’m not sure what similarity metric is most relevant here, but in case of near-collisions, small additions of supporting rhythm or harmony could help nudge some sequences apart; swing time would give added contrast to even vs odd positions, for instance. Anyway, it sounds like this might not generalize well across people…
Aside: this is a time when I’m really appreciating two-axis voting. The vote-signal of “that’s mildly interesting but really doesn’t seem like it’d work” is very useful to see in a compact form, even though the written responses contain similar information in more detail.
Assigning digits to scale degrees feels like an interesting alternative here, especially for the musically-inclined.
You could do that, but I don’t think it would sound very good? And I don’t think it would make it easier for a kid to memorize?
I’m actually writing from experience there! That’s how my memory still mainly encodes the few main home telephone numbers from when I was growing up (that is, I remember the imputed melodies before the digits in any other form), but it’s possible they were unusually harmonious. I don’t think it was suggested by family, just something I did spontaneously, and I am not at all sure how well this would carry more generally… it may also be relevant that I had a bunch of exposure to Chinese numeric musical notation.
How does that work with 10 available digits and only 7 scale notes? Do three digits become accidentals or something?
Maybe use more than one octave of range? So if we wanted to do it in Am we’d turn 123-456-7890 into A3 B3 C4 - D4 E4 F4 - G4 A4 B4 G3
I think with this system you will end up with too many large difficult and uncatchy jumps. Plus similar phone numbers will sound similar which is not what you want.
That’s what I did, though with do on 1 and mi′ on 0 (treating it as 10). I’m not sure what similarity metric is most relevant here, but in case of near-collisions, small additions of supporting rhythm or harmony could help nudge some sequences apart; swing time would give added contrast to even vs odd positions, for instance. Anyway, it sounds like this might not generalize well across people…
Aside: this is a time when I’m really appreciating two-axis voting. The vote-signal of “that’s mildly interesting but really doesn’t seem like it’d work” is very useful to see in a compact form, even though the written responses contain similar information in more detail.