One possible interpretation of Undertaker’s locket melody….
I can’t explain how all the music stuff works, so here is the message that @georgemandom sent me. And here is that link https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=N9P0vP3HjH4
It’s very cool and I like the dissonance. It works for Undertaker :)
Attention, musically-inclined tumblrs! Feel free to play around with this:
Undertaker’s lockets give us a series of musical notes for his melody/leitmotif. It is: CABFGDE or possibly CABF#GDE. I arrived at his from:
Emile C Oliver A Alex B Cloudia/Claudia P(hantomhive), so F or F# Mally/Molly G Gilbert D Harry E
Let me know what you come up with! :D
I’d really like to hear that order of notes turned into a rondo or fugue….
I don’t know if this can be possible as well, but I noticed that two of the lockets had the initials or name starting with ‘a’ (Oliver. a and alex. B) and it’s not capitalized like the other names. When I looked it up, people who know music usually note small letters as minor notes and capital letters as major notes. So the ‘a’ in Oliver can actually be an ‘a’ minor?
Back to the leitmotif!
Interesting idea, and I guess you mean from this image?
The “A” for Oliver’s last initial does seem smaller than the “A” for Alex, making Oliver’s last initial seem like a lower-case letter “a”.
However, the A natural minor scale (which is in the same key as C major scale) doesn’t have any flats or sharps, so that would make that “P” become nonsense… unless we take the “Ph” of Phantomhive to be F (no flat or sharp). But I find that terribly weird. “P” really should be an F# (or an Fb, which is the same as E in the C major scale). Chances are, the “P” is F#, so we aren’t talking about a hint to playing all the notes with the A minor scale. Besides, if we were talking A minor scale, wouldn’t either the first note be A… or the notes would at least resolve on A?
Well, we only get 7 notes, so there’s not exactly resolving on any note.
What we could be seeing, though, is the lower case “a” could denote this is supposed to be a chord instead of a single note. An A minor triad consists of the notes A (root), C (minor third), and E (fifth).
I’m not a musician, and I’ve gathered my info very quickly from looking up stuff about the key of A minor and the A minor chord. I also looked up what scale has an F# and no other sharps or flats, and that’s G major. And this website has this to say about G major: “The key of G-Major is rustic and idyllic. It evokes feelings of tenderness and friendship.” Sounds kind of fitting in regards to mourning lockets, doesn’t it? “Feelings of tenderness and friendship”….
I also looked up C major, since this starts on C. If we accept the P(h) to be F (no sharp, no flat), then we could have the key of C major here. However, that same website says this about C major: “Since there are no sharps or flats in C-Major, it is considered to have a ‘pure’ character. It conveys a sense of innocence and simplicity.” And I have a harder time believing “innocence and simplicity” over “tenderness and friendship”.
Of course, it’s also possible that, English not being Yana-san’s first language (and the Roman alphabet being less familiar to her than kanji, etc.), she could have simply drawn Oliver’s last initial a bit smaller than intended. To us, it looks like “a”, but she might have intended it to be “A”. Hard to tell when the “A” in Alex has the same shape, only larger. Keep in mind that this style of “A” just being a larger version of “a” is common in cursive writing! So, I’m pretty sure that’s “Alex”, not “alex”.
Any musician want to weigh in on this, just in case the last initial “A” is intentionally lower-case “a”?
Then, in fairness, I looked to see if any other key also has F# but no other sharps or flats. That would be the key of E minor.
This website explains keys used to express certain emotions.
C major (natural F):
A minor (natural F):
G major (with F#):
E minor (with F#):
So… if I have to choose a key? G major or E minor. E minor might be best, considering the emotions of it. Also, if we read the lockets’ last initials from right to left, since Japanese is read right to left, then Yana-san could be telling us it’s really: E D G F# B A C… in the key of E minor!
Thank you for taking your time explaining this. Honestly, even I believe the Ph in Claudia's surname can actually be a F#, because knowing Undertaker probably being influenced by Claudia more than the other people in his lockets, he prefers to keep Claudia 'above all else' which is why, only Claudia's surname initial having a black key note makes sense. But it's just a theory and I'm open to F key as well. As for the 'a' minor, I agree it can be nonsensical to hear with the other notes, especially if you consider the other surname initials as major notes. I also looked up variations of cursive writing and it's actually common to write the small letter 'a' as capital but bigger. But I'm still not convinced at the part where Yana would make mistakes in writing english while leaving clues for the readers. I'm sure it's 100% intentional if she ever did consider messing with the locket designs a bit.