Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Entertainment/2011 August 12

= August 12 =

Name of a racquet game
Aaarrrgh. This is so frustrating. I found this on WP once, & now I can't track it down again. I'm looking for a name connected with a racquet or ball & racquet game. It's something like genissa (I'm pretty sure it ends "issa", anyhow; the rest, maybe not...). It was, as I recall, an old name or old term, where the game/sport uses another name now. I've searched every ball & racquet game I can find here, & no luck. Does anybody know? TREKphiler  any time you're ready, Uhura  06:25, 12 August 2011 (UTC)
 * I guess you've already looked at spharistike (lawn tennis) and pelota (jai alai)? --TammyMoet (talk) 07:56, 12 August 2011 (UTC)
 * Could you be thinking of Gossima, an early term used for table tennis? See the first paragraph of Table tennis. Deor (talk) 10:31, 12 August 2011 (UTC)
 * Got it! Thx so much! (Is this a great place, or what? :D ) (Now I have to figure out how I missed seeing the name this time, but not last time... :( :  TREKphiler   any time you're ready, Uhura  13:14, 12 August 2011 (UTC)

Top rated TV cartoon in U.S.
What are currently the most highest rated animated TV shows on Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon in the U.S.? JSH-alive talk • cont • mail 09:49, 12 August 2011 (UTC)
 * http://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com/ has all sorts of ways to research U.S. TV ratings. I did a little bit of searching and found that, on Adult Swim (which is Cartoon Network's nighttime block), the 11:30 Family Guy was the #3 rated show on all cable networks yesterday.  So that would be the answer for Cartoon Network.  The list I looked at only had the top 25, and no Nickelodeon shows were listed, though I didn't spend a lot of time exploring.  It looked like they had lots of TV ratings to comb through, however; you may be able to find shows ratings for each network.  -- Jayron  32  23:22, 12 August 2011 (UTC)

musical keys
Why are there 7 keys in an octave of a musical scale in place of 12 equally spaced keys? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 113.199.189.86 (talk) 11:36, 12 August 2011 (UTC)
 * Some articles you may want to read are Note and Musical scale and Key (music). You need to back up a step to understand where the seven notes (A-B-C-D-E-F-G) come from and how they are organized.  The "musical key"s are just the set of notes which make up the scale which starts on a certain note.  The seven "natural" notes are the seven notes of the key of C major or A minor.  These seven notes are chosen for the way they interact with each other harmonically.  Now, if you take the spacing between the notes of C major, and shift the starting note to a different note, like say E major, not all of the notes match anymore.  Some of the notes are out of place; in between notes of the C major scale.  Those four notes are named as "sharp" notes by shifting one of the notes of the C-major scale up.  Those four notes are now called F#, G#, C# and D#.  In the key of F major, one of the notes is flat compared to the notes of the C major scale, and we call that note B♭.  To simplify things a bit, modern instruments are tuned to equal temperament which simplifies the scales in order to allow easy Transposition between keys.  Basically, what equal temperament does is slightly tweak the "perfect" notes (see Comma (music)) so that you can transpose them into different keys easily.  That gives us the 12-note Chromatic scale of A-A#-B-C-C#-D-D#-E-F-F#-G-G#.  -- Jayron  32  12:26, 12 August 2011 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure what the rules on cross-posting are, but I know I would prefer if you would at least mention you posted the question elsewhere Rosilisk (talk) 16:22, 12 August 2011 (UTC)
 * Sorry; I don't even have that desk watchlisted. Given that I can barely do long division; I would be fairly useless answering nearly every question there.  -- Jayron  32  23:15, 12 August 2011 (UTC)

Another good way of thinking about this is to say, yes, there are twelve notes to the octave, each a semitone apart. And that the thing which we call a major scale is a combination of the following seven of those notes:
 * 1) the first,
 * 2) the third,
 * 3) the fifth,
 * 4) the sixth,
 * 5) the eighth,
 * 6) the tenth, and
 * 7) the twelfth,

and this is true, whatever note you start from.

But then what happened was that the inventor of the piano keyboard said to himself: the major key is so useful, wouldn't it be great if one of the major keys formed the front line of keys on the piano. Then all the other notes can be shoved in, in their appropriate order, in a second row behind them, maybe in a different color.

So they did that, and musicians liked it so the idea stuck. And then people realised it would be useful if the notes had names. So they gave them names based on the front row of the keyboard. And there were seven notes to an octave there, so they called them A, B, C, D, E, F and G. Then they needed names for the other five notes, so they named them after their position relative to the original seven: calling them "sharp" where they were a semitone higher and "flat" where they were a semitone lower.

And musicians liked it and could work with it, so that idea stuck too. And even musicians who played different instruments which aren't laid out like a piano found that they could work with it: in no small part because that's what they were trained to do.

The point of my story [which may not be literally true] is that the way we notate music is based on a series of specific decisions, and in particular someone somewhere-in-the-past's preference for C Major. But you can easily imagine that music could, instead, be notated on a twelve-note scale, with the notes called A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K and L. And if it were, it would sound the same. AndyJones (talk) 18:03, 13 August 2011 (UTC)


 * Heh, the piano story is definitely not true, if only because pianos were not the first keyboard instruments. Our page Musical keyboard says "The arrangement of longer keys for C major with intervening, shorter keys for the intermediate semitones dates to the 15th century." But it doesn't say why C major. I wonder if it had something to do with the emergence of key signatures in music notation. Pfly (talk) 04:16, 14 August 2011 (UTC)


 * As I noted above, C major is also the same notes as A minor; perhaps the notes were actually intended to notate A minor instead; given that it actually has the root on A. Just a WAG tho... -- Jayron  32  04:30, 14 August 2011 (UTC)
 * Jayron, it's more correct to say the key signature of A minor is the same as C major. The scales do not have identical notes.  If you played an A minor scale and included a G rather than G-sharp, it would be wrong.   Also, AndyJones, Germans have an H note.  It's what we call B.  What they call B, we call B-flat.  --   Jack of Oz   [your turn]  20:05, 14 August 2011 (UTC)
 * No, only if you were playing the harmonic minor scale; the natural minor scale in A has a G. The natural minor is used to build natural chords; the harmonic minor is used to build augmented and diminished chords, like "maj7".  -- Jayron  32  23:17, 14 August 2011 (UTC)
 * In my understanding of classical music the harmonic minor is not often used, but the so-called "ascending melodic minor" is, which has a sharped 7th—F# in G minor. The main reason, as I understand, is so that the dominant is a major chord—D major instead of D minor, in the key of G minor. From the era of Bach to Beethoven at least, minor keys almost always involve a major instead of a minor dominant, I think. Pfly (talk) 02:11, 15 August 2011 (UTC)