You think a progression that goes from Gb major to Cb Major sounds different than one that goes from F# Major to B Major?
(Also when was the last time you wrote something in E# major? Why not?)
1 point for monochrome Adam.

captain astronaut got involved lol

Can a note really be flat if it’s got a bpm?

Oh Adam… I thought you knew this. It depends on the musical context and the key. Honestly, find a better subject to make a video about.

i love this episode. thank you and seasons greetings.

Normally a title like this would make me roll my eyes and move on, but because Adam Neely posted it, I had to watch

no its B#

Well yes but actually no

certainly there's better music theory subjects to think about….

I'm no musician, so I find reading music difficult, that's why I like alternative music notation. The idea I have in mind is a mixture of piano roll/DAW and classical notation. The main idea is to use 6 lines with rectangles above or below the lines. A whole octave fits from below the bottom line to below the top line. The longer the rectangle, the longer the note. You can still use time signatures, the different clefs, and other conveniences from classical notation. You could also still define sharps and flats too, but less often, as you can fit in the whole octave. As an alternative to clefs, you could define the start note at the start, below the bottom line. Eg. C3.

So is E the same as Fb?

Reminds me of when my guitar sounds out of tune with other instruments when it's (objectively) in tune with itself. If one tunes by ear, I guess it can be quite possible to end up with a B or C dominant voicing, maybe even depending on mood on a given day. It's like a quartertonal major vs partial minor mood.

What was interesting is I can't hear the difference in the emotion you cited… But I came to the same conclusion of which you'd want to sing because that's the one that sounds good and the other sounded awful.

And the idea that piano roll notation being efficient is utterly ludicrous. Even if you're just looking at them as data formats and ignoring the non-data contexts involved – It takes far more paper to transmit the same data to a pianist with it, and how the hell is a theremin player meant to use it?

(I'm still going to answer either 'yes, but also no' or 'no, but also yes' depending on my mood, though, because it feels like such a context-dependent question to me rather than one with any definitive answer)

Kinda sorta, but not exactly.

B# = C?

I like to think of C flat differently compared to other flats. I think of it as 'nearly c'

I'm a drummer with rudimentary knowledge of jazz harmony and lamentable piano chops. Interesting topic, not least of all the comments from players of non-fixed-pitch instruments. Thanks for posting. Merry Christmas all! Cheers.

This was very interesting! Well explained.

Brilliant depiction (at the start) of keyboard warrior types as angry chipmunks!

If Tim Sweeney perhaps were more familiar with Western musical notation, he would realize that the difference between Cb and B is much more close to the difference between, say, a float and a long variable. Both can represent the same information, but they are used for different contexts. Someone who is familiar with programming would likely not use a float when it would make more sense to use a long, and vice versa.

What I took out of it is that a note contains more parts to it than the pitch. Or, to put it another way, in the "language" of music, the smallest unit that carries meaning (the "morpheme") is a note, where the pitch of that note is but one building block of said morpheme.
"To bear" and "To bare" sound the same, but as Adam states in the video, these two phrases mean entirely different things, so to call them the same phrase would be false.

An interesting presentation but it is in my mind fatally flawed. The initial question was are B and Cflat the same note. That seems to me to be easily answered and in fact you did. They vibrate at the same rate and sound the same. But then you moved to a different question by saying they don't always sound the same. Another viewer noted that this is much like colors. When viewed alone it looks one way when shown with other colors they look different. It is a good comparison. Colors are at a certain wavelength. They may look different depending on the context in which they are viewed and sounds may vary however slightly depending on the context in which they are heard. That does not change the inherent nature of the light or the sound. They are still at the same wavelength or vibration rate. The 5/4 ratio is a arbitrary method in changing the definition of what a pitch is from a certain number of CPS to a relationship to another pitch. It is an interesting point that people believe they can hear the difference but there are at least two things that must be kept in mind. The first is we hear in the brain much like we see in the brain. We may think that we hear with our ears and see with our eyes but it really occurs in the brain. Second, if you are raised in a different culture than me, you will not hear or see things exactly the same as me. So if your culture says that a musical passage gives rise to melancholy while another may give rise to eagerness. That is true only for people who live in that same culture. What did you think/feel the first time you heard a didgeridoo? Is it the same thing as the members of that culture feel/think? There are other examples but you probably know them more than I do. There are also examples in written and spoken words too. A simple example; weigh and way. They sound they same but are spelled differently and do not mean anything close to the same. For people in general, context is so important. The word cool meant a relative temperature until about 1950. That was kind of replaced by "hot" a few decades later and now the equivalent is "sick" or "dope". They all have a very similar meeting in one context and have completely different meanings and impact in other contexts.

Love this video! One observation that really hammers this all home for me is how inconsistent "anti-C-flat"-ers have to be: no one would ever make the arguments they do about other pitches.

If you're in C-Major and use a secondary dominant of a-minor, then OF COURSE that chord is E-Major, and the altered pitch is a G#. No one who knows what they're talking about would argue about that. If there were a iv-I in the same key, then OF COURSE the altered pitch is an Ab.

If someone believes that there's a note on the piano that should only ever be called one thing, the only logical conclusion is that EVERY note should only be called one thing. After all, theres nothing special about the SOUND of B and C, or E and F, so they shouldn't get special treatment. If C-flat is a lie, then there isn't any reason to NOT say that all flats are lies, and that all black keys are always sharps. Yet not even fixed-do systems–which name pitches absolutely such that they would sing "re" as the tonic if the song is in D–abandon the differences in note names based on function.
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Yes, this part of the system is confusing for newcomers, and can take a thorough explanation like this video to communicate the reasoning. Maybe there exists an alternate history in which dodecaphonic music became popular enough that we scrapped the current system and just labeled pitches 1 through 12, and then no one would have to worry about perceived inconsistencies. But for functional harmony as most people understand it, what we have works. (Mostly).