PrintableCharts

CURWEN HAND SIGNS

one hand for each degree of the scale, with the mental effect John Curwen gave it

Built as a memo rather than a table: the thing worth hanging it up for reads across the room, with the full reference in smaller type below it.

Three sizes in one archive — from a sheet on the fridge to a poster on the wall.

Free

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Formats
A4 · A3 · A2
What you get
Print-ready PDFs, one per size, with every letterform converted to outlines — nothing to install, nothing to shift.
Subject
music · school · reference · music room

Each hand is drawn in Curwen’s view: from the teacher’s left, cuff to the right. Height in the row is pitch; the two short steps between signs are the semitones.

ONLY TWO OF THE SEVEN SIGNS POINT

The sign for fa is a finger pointing down; the sign for ti is a forefinger pointing up. The other five are a fist or an open hand, and point nowhere.

Curwen gives the reason: te has “a strong tendency to cling or lead to doh”, while fah has “an equally strong desire to fall to me”. Each of the two fingers points at the tone a semitone away.

On the sheet

  • Each hand is drawn in Curwen’s view: from the teacher’s left, cuff to the right. Height in the row is pitch; the two short steps between signs are the semitones.
  • Colour carries meaning, but meaning never rests on colour alone — the sheet reads in black and white.
  • Nothing about how it was made: the sheet carries only what the reader needs.

Printing

  • Three sizes in the archive: A4 — 210×297 mm, A3 — 297×420 mm, A2 — 420×594 mm.
  • All text is converted to outlines. No fonts to install, and nothing shifts on another machine.
  • White background and sparing fills — it prints on a home printer without draining the cartridge.
  • Margins of at least 10 mm: a home printer cannot print to the edge.
  • No stroke thinner than 0.3 mm, so nothing disappears in print.

Why the numbers can be trusted. Every countable number here is computed from data rather than typed in, and the sheet must pass 10 independent checks before it is allowed to build — how many items there are, the order they come in, and the claim in the highlighted box itself. If one fails, there is no file.

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