# Music and Math Project

## Numbered Notes in the Land of Twelve

How do you say how high or low a sound is? Using numbers is a good idea, and we could count $1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14,...$ but here's the thing. Ever wondered why '10' is the first number for which you need two symbols? It is probably because we have ten fingers. Imagine that there was a country where people had twelve fingers. In that country, people may have counted like this instead: $1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, \mathrm{X}, \mathrm{Y}, 10, 11, 12, ...$ So someone in the Land of Twelve would be counting sheep, she would say 'X' sheep instead of '10'. And if she would count '10', it would mean twelve for us!

If you want to use numbers to say how high a sound is, it is actually a great idea to count like the people in the Land of Twelve. In music, twelve is a very important number, much more important than ten. So here's what we're going to do. From now on, we count like we live in the Land of Twelve.