The Cosmetic Music Scale as Created by Charles Atkins

The Cosmetic Music Scale is an awkward manipulation of tonality; keep in mind, however, that it is a game that forces you to think outside the box enhancing musical adroitness. It can provide many hours of wholesome recreation matching wits with friends, colleagues and the like. Your results could win for you treasures of friends and other valued acquaintances. Go ahead and apply a cosmetic scale to an entire language, word or group of words and hear it sing. Hear a repeated spelling of your name, as well as your brother’s and sister’s name or any other person’s name. You can also hear a repeated spelling of any name of a city, river, or star. Try it and see if it sounds like fun. Afterwards, expand it and grow musically so that the entire world is waiting to hear. This can become your own song!

Cosmetic music is a way to make music of the world more personal. You can work, dance, and sing music of yourself; you can also make music about your family and colleagues as well. Uniqueness is what we all have to offer the world, so why not make it more definitively.

1. Cosmetic Music allows one to create a melody by using the spelling of a word.
2. Each letter in any given word would represent a musical note in the chromatic twelve tone system.
3. In order to spell a word you must remain inside of one octave.

The English Alphabet:
1. There are 26 letters in the English alphabet.
2. With cosmetic music, you can only use twelve chromatic tones, and are restricted to just one octave.
3. This would mean that one tone would be used for more than one letter.
4. You can start the alphabet (with the letter A), on any of the twelve musical tones in a chromatic scale (for the cosmetic game, this is known as “level”).

Matching letters of the Alphabet with musical notes:
For purposes of familiarity and simplicity, we will start the chromatic scale with the music note middle C; keeping in mind that we could have started on any of the twelve tones.

Middle C = A
C sharp = B
D = C
D sharp = D
E = E
F = F
F sharp = G
G = H
G sharp = I
A = J
A sharp = K
B = L
Back to Middle C = M
C sharp = N
D = O
D sharp = P
E = Q
F = R
F sharp = S
G = T
G sharp = U
A = V
A sharp = W
B = X
Back to Middle C = Y
C sharp = Z

Listen to Explanation

Examples:
Using the above chart, spelling the word “CRAIG”, would result in the following notes:
The letter C corresponds to the music note D
The letter R corresponds to the music note F
The letter A corresponds to the music note middle C
The letter I corresponds to the music note G sharp
The letter G corresponds to the letter F sharp.

Application:
You can then take that melody (strange sounding as it may be), and create an accompaniment to it, harmonize the melody or in some way include that motif in a song or composition.

Notes:
When using the cosmetic music method to derive a melody, the resulting melody may at first sound unsettling to the ear. That is OK. How that melody actually gets applied to a composition would entirely depend on you the music creator. The duration you give each note in the melody, the chord structure/accompaniment you choose to give the melody, the tempo at which you play the melody along with other factors, would influence the final sound. It is up to the user of cosmetic music to make it work for the music being composed.

Listen to an Example