I love mental play (singing the notes of a melody or a harmony in my head) know and use the traditional solfège (do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-si), but it only has seven notes. The black keys have no names and singing “flat” or “sharp” breaks the stride of the solfège. This, over time, made me way less confident when playing music that uses lots of black keys.

So I assigned five sounds to the black keys. The sounds are nonsensical, but they are chosen to start with different letters than the traditional seven sounds. The five sounds are:

• jo (for C sharp or D Flat)
• ka (for D sharp or E flat)
• pe (for F sharp or G flat)
• bu (for G sharp or A flat)
• te (for A sharp or B flat)

The entire dodecaphonic scale, in solfège, is then:

do jo re ka mi fa pe sol bu la te si

For the new five sounds sounds, I chose distinct consonants stemming from the major system. I also tried to vary vowels as much as possible to disambiguate them from the other sounds.

Most dodecaphonic solfege systems out there treat these five notes as modification of other notes, which is rooted in tonal history, but also a bit silly.