A General Approach to Enharmonicism

Abstract

We propose a general approach to enharmonicism within syntactic music theory; that is, we formalize several abstract structures of enharmonicism without any acoustic considerations. The structures of concern to this paper are constructed from diatonics, chromatics, and enharmonics, and we seek to present a general enharmonic theory that builds upon Hook's enharmonic theory published in "Enharmonic Systems: A Theory of Key Signatures, Enharmonic Equivalence and Diatonicism" (2007). We also propose that the two criteria of reflection and maximal evenness can be used to determine whether an arbitrary enharmonic system is musically practical. Moreover, we argue that preferential treatment of the standard enharmonic system (SES) can be motivated from an abstract mathematical perspective divorced from pitch consideration and conventional acoustic constructions of SES.