At a glance, this is a neat concept, but doesn't seem to come at the problem from the perspective of the most common users of music notation (experienced musicians); rather, it appears to have been written by somebody who was frustrated by trying to learn to read music. For experienced musicians, the priorities are a) legibility for sight-reading and transcription (which this system, with indistinguishable sitting/hanging notes and pervasive ledger lines fails) and b) musical context for expressive decisions, such as information about key, mode, modulation and harmonic content as hinted at by the key signatures and accidentals (which this system downplays as unnecessary).
I’ve gained that impression from every single alternative notation system that’s come up here (a new one comes up every year or two). They have a habit of solving problems that just aren’t problems for experienced readers, while causing problems for experienced readers. (They may also solve some real problems, but when they do, they always involve compromises. Inconsistent octave positioning on the staff is a problem, even if it becomes comparatively minor for fairly experienced readers, but the solution offered for that particular issue here looks lousy to me, the compromises made being considerably worse than the original problem.)
In this instance, I look at the subtle vertical placements alone and first guessed rendering imprecision, because I’ve seen that bad and worse from some digital scores, to say nothing of older scores especially with inconsistent ledger line spacing, especially when they’ve been scanned or reprinted or are otherwise aged. I also see something that my dad would struggle to distinguish visually except under fairly strong lighting. This notation looks terribly unsuitable if you don’t have (a) a high-precision, high-resolution display, (b) good lighting, and (c) good eyesight. And it certainly won’t scale down as well, nor is it in any way suitable for hand notation.
> They have a habit of solving problems that just aren’t problems for experienced readers, while causing problems for experienced readers.
If I had a dollar for every "new way of doing XYZ" made by someone inexperienced who just doesn't want to learn the way we're all doing XYZ just fine...
It so hard for an outsider to tell the difference between:
1. It is this way for logical but obscure reasons that will become clearer later when you have deeper understanding.
2. It is this way only because of path dependence and historical baggage and it's arbitrarily annoying for a new person to learn but we don't switch because we all learned it the old hard way.
It's valuable for inexperienced people to question designs that appear bad from the outside because there are a lot of examples of 2 and experienced users of a system aren't incentivized to fix them because they've already climbed up the learning curve and don't personally benefit. But that baggage is a worthless drain for every new user.
The tax for having new users point out and sometimes fix #2 is having to deal with them sometimes erroneously "fixing" cases that are #1.
Well, it's even harder for insiders. What makes you think the would-be be reformers are outsiders anyway?
Further down this thread, someone brought up their sight reading tutor program. That's a very classic "solution" to the problem.
Also very classic is that when the well meaning "insider" who approves of classical notation finds out that his tutor program didn't really help matters, he'll come up with a reform proposal of his own...
We know that reformed notation systems can increase musical literacy, because they have. Examples are the Scandinavian siffer notation, the Chinese system (which is almost identical to the Scandinavian one, even though developed independently) and the American shape note systems.
But we also know that once they do, there is inevitably a push from educators to "graduate to real notation", and the gains are typically lost within a generation...
Insiders can reform things too, but they tend to do so less often from a combination of:
1. Since they have already learned the old way, they are less personally incentivized to improve the path. It's in their past anyway, so it's a sunk cost. Also, they may have some (conscious or not) incentive to keep things the way they are in order to leverage their existing expertise in the current system.
2. Once you've internalized a system, it's much harder to even see it's flaws. Like navigating your living room, you just walk around the furniture completely on auto-pilot without even thinking, "Maybe I should move this chair out of the way." If you've ever done any UX research, it leaves a striking impression about how users often know and do things without consciously knowing they are doing them. Outsiders and new users to a system still see it for what it is.
The peak time to improve a system is when you understand it just well enough to see its flaws and how to fix them but not so well that you've forgotten the pain points. Any given user is in that liminal state for only a small amount of time, so it's precious and it's good to make the most of it.
You bring up interesting examples. The only one I know anything about is shape note singing. I guess your point is that shape note singing can be taught much more easily to beginners, and get them to a point of being able to enjoy making music (usually with others) more quickly?
If so, point taken!
And I guess that those shape note singers who feel the pull to perform/compose more complex music can then simply learn traditional notation. Self-selection, with a satisfying "intro" notation for those who are happy at that level.
Following that path, I'm still not sure that the original article here provides anything useful. It's simply an alternative to traditional notation. It doesn't seem easier to learn to me. I could be wrong, but I doubt that I'm an order of magnitude wrong. In fact, if this new notation were proposed as an alternative to shape note singers, it would seem to undo the very reason for shape note singing in the first place: easy entry point to music making.
Music isn't for everyone and reading sheet music is not for all musicians. I know plenty of guitarists who only can read tabs. I know a few serious musicians that can't read sheet music (they have to take it home to study).
Anyone that has had proper music instruction though was taught how to read sheet music in their clef. Pianists learn both.
We must also understand our own limitations and accept that there are some things in this world that we, in our current state, can't understand without either further experience or further instruction or unlearning a prejudice we have.
As a very experienced "tech guy" and a very experienced musician, I notice this happens a lot on HN. Maybe because there's a very math-y, notation-rich aspect to music that appeals to technology types. I am absolutely all for everybody getting to music whichever way works for them, but there has been a lot of effort spent by technologists trying to "fix" music or make it better, when a little humble learning would have paid big rewards.
There's a gradient between "there's a reason we do things this way and you should understand it before you try to change it" and "don't roll your own notation."
It rhymes with it, sure. The key difference is that the phenomenon I'm talking about comes from people who haven't taken the time to understand the problem, or they come up with "solutions" that have already been tried and found not to work. The reactionary, conversely, is simply afraid: of change, that they won't be able to learn the new thing, of not being important because they aren't the one who came up with it, of losing status gained from being an expert in the old thing, etc.
There are solutions that have been tried and found to work very well. The American shape note system made 3 and 4 part harmony singing something the whole congregation could take part in, rather than just an elite choir. Lars Roverud's digit notation system (and the system to teach it) did a similar thing for singing in Scandinavia. They fell out of favour not because they didn't work, but because professional musicians and teachers saw it as a crutch instead of a system in its own right, and kept pushing for graduating to "real" notation.
> The key difference is that the phenomenon I'm talking about comes from people who haven't taken the time to understand the problem, or they come up with "solutions" that have already been tried and found not to work.
IME, that is a common 'reactionary' response. Often the problem has changed.
There are some grognards out there who hate even this, and they're way too influential in traditional music education, but notation hasn't been static and unchanging all these centuries. A lot of that resistance is from people who believe their idealized notion of their culture is superior and resist any exposure to new ideas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kr3quGh7pJA
I have been learning to play the keyboard for about a year and I find the layout of the keys to make a lot of sense for figuring out things like scales and chords. When I was in high school I never really learned to sight-read a staff, it was always a struggle for me and probably what turned me off to playing an instrument for so long.
If simplified notations are essentially a crutch for newbies, how does one “git gud”?
I'm working on a webapp to help learn sight reading; the v1 is almost ready; I will do a show hn soon (hopefully next week).
People often associate sight reading with keyboard playing, but they're different things. Reading the staff, as it is traditionally taught in conservatories, means associating the position of a note on the staff with the name of the note (in a given clef). And that's it.
This means, for instance, that the octave is a different problem (I was going to say that it doesn't matter, which isn't exactly true, but close). A C3 is a C4 is a C5 is a C. Same with accidentals. A sharp G is a flat G is a G.
There are many problems associated with learning to read staff on sight. The main and obvious one is that it's tedious and offers no immediate reward. But another is that we are trying to learn too many things at once.
My app is trying to make learning to read notes engaging, competitive and (maybe?) addictive. I don't know if it'll have any success, but during the weeks I've been working on it, it was very effective at improving my own performance.
For all of its strengths as an instrument, piano has some drawbacks for learning to read traditional staff, as there isn't an (obvious-to-the-uninitiated) differentiation between notes or across octaves (you just sit in front of a wide line of keys). I think I learned to read first on a recorder, where you can develop a more intuitive link between fingerings and notes (especially as the first note you learn is the B dead in the center of the treble staff).
I'd suggest a few paths to learning the note positioning:
- If you're already comfortable with note locations on the keyboard, don't be afraid of the line/space mnemonics. If they get you to where you're making ID's faster in the parts of the staff where your hands normally live, it can make life much easier, and you can easily extend from there. There are really only ~26 note/staff associations to learn that will cover the majority of the music you'll see day to day (with octave shifts) and knowing a few will make the rest come more easily.
- Similarly (and I think this is the way piano is taught to beginners, but it's been a long time) you can make a lot of progress by starting your thumbs on middle C, which is dead between the staves and operating from there to play simple music. As you play and read more music, you'll find yourself starting to recognize the locations of more notes across the staff, until they all come to you intuitively.
The distinction between reading music and sight reading aside (others have addressed it), learning to read music is honestly just rote practice. In the grand scheme of things, it's really not that hard. To play simple songs (all within one octave, say) from music on a staff on an instrument, you really only have to learn twelve associations of positions on the staff to a key on the keyboard or a fingering or an embouchure and a fingering, etc. It's far easier than learning a language or a programming language or the rules of hockey. From there, it's just extending those associations higher and lower, and learning other aspects of music notation, like note durations. It's just standard repetitive learning. No magic or particular talent is involved.
Start with realistic expectations. It will take longer for you, than for someone who's 9 years old. Find sources of large amounts of written material that is nonetheless fairly simplistic, but at the same time not children's songs. There's a lot of sheet music at IMSLP.
An example is the Mikrokosmos collection by Bartok, written as a method book for kids, but is nonetheless serious music.
Don't focus exclusively on reading. When you've worn out a piece from the standpoint of reading, continue practicing it to build technique and musicianship. All of those things develop together. Good luck!
Learning to sight-read is different than just reading. Sight-reading takes an enormous amount of daily dedication and practice for years to get to even an intermediate level.
I don't recall it being that difficult to achieve. Probably the difference is in early teaching and expectations: if you learn to read music as an aid to remembering pieces that are perfected over a long time, sight-reading would be slow to develop, but if you learn it as a way to be able to play new music frequently, it will come more quickly. Probably like the difference between learning a foreign language by studying grammar and working translation exercises as opposed to on-the-fly immersion — you develop different strengths.
This is a great perspective that I hadn’t considered before.
My previous experience, years ago in high school, was absolutely the former. I think it makes tons of sense to try playing a wide variety of pieces at my skill level.
I am just beginning to learn piano and when I told my teacher that I was memorizing the pieces I was supposed to be reading, he told me to simply play each piece once, mistakes and all, and continue on to the next - specifically to practice playing a piece on first sight.
I think the distinction is one of degree, not of kind. "Sight reading" is just reading music and applying it to an instrument or voice, in real time. It's a natural outgrowth of learning to read music. I'm a very good sight reader, and it didn't take me anything like years of daily practice. (Which was a good thing, because I have no practice discipline.)
Please don’t take this personally, but this isn’t very helpful advice.
I’ve learned how to do many things in my life, and I’ve come to appreciate that it’s very easy to practice the wrong thing and never make any progress.
Another way to phrase my question might be, “What and how should I practice to develop my music reading skills?”
Pianist here, regularly won sight-reading competitions in my youth etc. GP's answer seemed a good answer to me. Your first sentence seemed rude, disrespectful.
What kind of music do you want to be able to read? Presumably the music you like and want to play. So read that. You will always be reading new stuff you don't know, not the same thing over and over, so I'm not sure how never making any progress is a possibility. Sight reading/playing difficult music is not easy, sounds like you want a quick way of learning the skill, which doesn't exist.
A fellow went to a Zen master and said, “If I work very hard, how soon can I be enlightened?”
The Zen master looked him up and down and said, “Ten years.”
The fellow said, “No, listen, I mean if I really work at it, how long—”
The Zen master cut him off. “I’m sorry. I misjudged. Twenty years.”
”Wait!” Said the young man, “You don’t understand! I’m—”
“Thirty years,” said the Zen master.
Really? I genuinely trying to communicate that I was criticizing their opinion and not them personally. Did it come off as sarcastic? In any case, I apologize.
You are being awfully presumptuous. I am doing this because I enjoy it. I don’t have a destination or a timeline. I am not asking for a “quick fix”.
I’m asking how to focus studies in music because I struggled for many years with music when I was in school. I did practice quite a bit and always lagged behind.
Your response reminds me why I don’t ask people on the internet for help.
I feel similarly. I've performed the Chopin/Liszt etudes and Bach's sinfonias as a kid (which I guess translate to intermediate classical piano skill) but would struggle to sight read even the two-part inventions at 1/2 or even 1/4 speed.
I'd be quite keen to use some method to upgrade my sight reading to where I find learning new music rewarding, as long as it's known to produce results.
Currently I can learn a Chopin Nocturne or Mazurka much faster by ear (listening to it to learn the rhythm/melody/harmony) to recreate it roughly and watching someone play it to get the more exact voicing (with the sheet music as a reference mostly).
I appreciate your response! It’s honestly helpful to hear that people who are more accomplished than I am can also struggle with sight reading.
One piece of advice that I received elsewhere in this thread that may also apply to you is to sight read as many pieces as you can at an easier skill level than your current proficiency and accept that you’ll make tons of mistakes.
Personally, I’m going to buy a few thrift store “learning piano” books to try this out.
This is fascinating to me! Although I'm moderately good at playing "by ear," I would never learn a piece the way you describe it. But maybe I should try! On the other hand, I'm a very good sight reader. Interesting how two people can get to the same destination by two very different routes.
I can only give advice for “one note at a time” instruments like the flute or trumpet: practice sight reading children’s songs you know (and therefore can tell if you’ve made a huge mistake) - sight reading, not memorizing! As you get more proficient at reading those, slowly choose harder things - melody lines from a familiar church hymnal are ideal for this. If you make mistakes, finish the phrase, then repeat it, but here, you should be going for quantity, not quality.
It really isn't. You highlight something important: musicians don't usually learn to convert notation to music in their heads. Instead, they learn to associate notation with how to make the sound, e.g. finger positions.
I remember in ear training class in high school all the brass kids playing imaginary valves with their fingers when trying to sight-sing.
It's harder for singers, and quadratically harder for instruments where you have more positions and play more notes at once.
It seems like there's a three-way connection that forms in a musician's head between the note on the page, the sound the note makes, and the muscle memory for playing the note. Each connection is strengthened by different types of practice, and supported by each other, but often with the way we teach music the kinetic is a proxy between the aural and the visual; this is especially true of people who learn mechanical instruments.
One way to boost the aural/visual connection (when you already have strong aural/kinetic and visual/kinetic connections) is to pick up instruments that are very different from the ones you already know; I would think this is the goal of music education programs requiring basic proficiency with piano and singing, regardless of the student's main instrument. Once you have to learn a new set of muscle memory associations to go from the same note on the page to the same note in your ear, it starts to break down the strength of the muscle memory associations.
However, if you can sight sing, it makes playing music on a wind instrument much easier, as you have a target in your head for what the note should sound like as you play it. Sight singing is a very good skill for instrumentalists.
I am by no means even a decent amateur guitarist but "practice with songs you know" definitely lines up with what I was being asked to do when I was taking guitar lessons as a kid.
Honest answer is to find a tutor and take private lessons. Books and videos can't show you how to correct bad technique and habits, and it's hard to follow the right pedagogy without someone to guide you.
I'm an amateur double bassist, and a fluent sight-reader. To be fair, I gravitate towards situations where reading is an asset, since it gives me a leg up on the "competition" including pro's who haven't maintained their reading chops. Plus I benefit from the networking opportunities afforded by those situations.
For me, here are the problems that I see with any new notation system:
1. "Standard" notation (SN) has created a symbiosis between composers and players. If you don't compose in SN, nobody will play your stuff. If you don't read SN, you won't be able to play anybody's stuff, and will probably not even get a chance to develop your reading skills to a performance level. The ultimate stage of learning to read is sight-reading in an ensemble with other players.
2. Learning a new notation gets exponentially harder as you get older. I started learning to read when I was about 10. It's like my spinal column has created a special circuit directly from my eyes to my hands, through my ears. A lot of time when I'm sight-reading, I'm actually thinking about other things.
3. All of the repertoire is in SN, virtually none of it is in computer readable form, and much of it is out of print. I play in a large jazz ensemble. We still maintain our entire music library, entirely on paper. For this reason, SN has much more inertia than one would expect from other "notations" such as programming languages.
For these reasons, the shortcomings of SN and benefits of new notation, are practically irrelevant. Now, "standard" notation is not carved in stone. For instance, jazz bass parts are notated differently than classical clarinet parts. I get a lot of chord symbols and am expected to play an improvised bass line.
I'm not sure it's possible to say it's worse. You suffer from having learned the traditional notation, so some of this is going to look weird regardless. I'm not good at reading music and agree with some of the issues it has, but looking at this does seem like a different set of issues to me as well. I think the only fair comparison could be done by someone with a lot of experience using both.
I think it's fair to say the staff has to be spread out more for this notation since is doesn't compress 12 notes into 7 places like traditional notation.
OTOH be glad you're not reading guitar tablature ;-)
It certainly is, but there are similar obvious bad ideas in regular notation.
If you've typeset music manually, or written out nice parts by hand, you know that you need to take stem direction into account when spacing note heads. Notes with opposite stem direction will seem closer, or further apart, than they actually are. Optical illusions aren't a great feature of a notation system.
Five lines is also a bad optical choice, because it's actually very difficult to count 5 or higher parallel lines at a glance. I remember my piano teacher, who was a very strong sight reader, played a Bach fugue for me. However, the score had been annotated with a line showing the figure part ("dux", "comes" etc.) and as it happened that line was spaced exactly like a staff line. He'd played three measures before going, "wait, that doesn't sound right" and realizing he'd been playing on a six-line staff!
> They have a habit of solving problems that just aren’t problems for experienced readers, while causing problems for experienced readers.
Well, of course. They have invested a lot in the system as it is. But I've noticed even very basic changes that should not cause problems for already strong readers (e.g. a slightly thicker middle line) have zero chance at adoption, whereas changes that are not justified by didacticts (e.g. many composers inventing some quirky new way of expressing something) are.
I share your judgement that this system is poor, and that there are many poor notation systems proposed all the time, though.
That does appear to be its origin. And if you take 12 equal divisions of the octave as a given, Clairnote seems more natural. OTOH once you're thinking in terms of a 7-tone subset, maybe traditional notation is more natural. (It certainly is to me, but I haven't given Clairnote a try.)
Traditional notation uses the scale degree as the fundamental unit, whereas this uses the 12-edo chromatic tone as the fundamental unit. While it's not a big deal to most musicians, there are a lot of microtonal variations of traditional notation (my favorite is HEWM[1]). A 12-edo notation like CLairnote could be similarly modified, but it seems awkward, because (most) microtonal systems don't start from 12 equal divisions of the octave.
I don't think the sitting/hanging notes are indistinguishable. But they do need to be distinguished, which means it's more work than looking at a traditional between-two-lines note. I find it difficult.
Clairnote does make key signatures available. Surely any real composer would include them, or something equally or more informative (e.g. the text "G dorian").
I'm very surprised they don't make the sitting/hanging notes semicircular, so they're much more visually distinct (like stalactites and stalagmites).
Instead they seem to have tried two different systems for the sitting/hanging notes, both of which look very hard to read to me: https://clairnote.org/clairnote-dn-clairnote-sn/ (although as you say, if you already know traditional notation it's hard to look at this with an unbiased eye).
> I don't think the sitting/hanging notes are indistinguishable.
They aren't indistinguishable when rendered by a computer. When rendered by hand (where space notes have a tendency to float from the line to avoid being interpreted as line notes), the F and G especially would be indistinguishable.
I always thought one of the main benefits of a 7-tone subset is that it fits inside working memory. It's also what anyone who grew up with commercial pop music or western classical music has a natural ear for. Not to mention that even just looking at it harmonically, all 12 tones are most certainly not equal from a given root.
AFAIU, historically 12-TET is really a compromise, sacrificing some harmonicity to simplify and enable having symmetrical 7-note tonality in any traditional mode starting from any point in any scale. Some modern styles definitely subvert this idea, embracing the full range of chromaticity - but without abandoning 12-TET, they are still playing with the audience's harmonic preconceptions that are based in conventional tonality.
> AFAIU, historically 12-TET is really a compromise, sacrificing some harmonicity to simplify and enable having symmetrical 7-note tonality in any traditional mode starting from any point in any scale
It is. And it's a surprisingly lucky compromise. By some metrics 19-EDO, 22-EDO and 31-EDO dominate 12-EDO for traditional (5-limit) music theory. (And of course every multiple of 12 does.) But if you want strictly better thirds and fifths, the smallest EDO that qualifies is 41.
For anyone interested in big microtonal scales, there's a great website[1] that will render a touchscreen-friendly virtual keyboard with whatever scale and layout (provided it's hexagonal) you want. Don't worry about all the menus to start, just pick something from the first menu, "Tuning\Layout Quick Links".
The vast majority of _Western_ music doesn't need it, but microtonal music is extremely important in a number of Asian, Middle Eastern, African, and even Eastern European systems.
Continuing to use the status quo notation would hardly constitute driving the bus off a cliff. And the cases of microtonality are not that edge. Beyond allowing interoprability among musicians from different cultures, western notation has been critical to most (and there's a lot of it) western microtonal music.
The vast majority of users of music notation are amateurs, and being more friendly to amateurs would mean even more users.
The vast majority of decision-makers are experienced users with a vested interest in the status quo.
The issue is very similar to why corporate systems have such horrible user interfaces. The people making the decisions in IT aren't the normal users of the system. IT cares about features, integrations, and high-level analytics. Employees care to be able to sanely input their time sheets, file an expense report, or buy a stapler.
I'd like a system simple enough to use by all the kids in my local elementary school music class, much more than I care about what happens in the local orchestra.
> The vast majority of users of music notation are amateurs
I'm not sure the claims you and OP are making here are actually in tension. They said:
> the most common users of music notation (experienced musicians)
which is ambiguous, and might mean something like "of all the people that ever do any music-reading at all, the majority are experienced musicians," which would indeed be the opposite of your claim. But it might also be "of all the people that are reading music at any given moment, the majority are experienced musicians," which would be a proxy for "most hours spent reading music are spent by experienced musicians"; this could be true simultaneously with your claim (it stands to reason that experienced or professional musicians spend comparatively more time reading music than do novices or amateurs).
I don't think it's a foregone conclusion that the thing you want to optimize for is maximizing the average quality of experience for all users regardless of how much they use the thing, vs. maximizing the quality of the average hour of use.
Many people seem to not realise that there is already an alternative to staff notation; it is called the piano roll. It has all the advantages that alternative notations propose (proportional intervals and note lengths), is already in widespread use, is available in all professional music software, and is by far simpler and easier to learn. For many professional musicians the piano roll may be the only type of notation they deal with on a regular basis.
Any eclectic modification of standard western notation therefore needs to justify itself not just against staff notation, but also the simple piano roll.
Piano roll is certainly better than traditional notation for writing down music that will be played by a computer anyway. It's not great for live play.
The problem, IMO, is that once you have acquired a notation system is that you can’t/won’t make the jump the another one. So if you train beginners with eg. clairnote, they will have a hard time making the jump to a higher difficulty level. It’s not unlike a walled garden.
It's a bit like the Dvorak keyboard problem. It's slightly better, but too much of a hassle to bother with. You need something between 2x and 10x better to displace an entrenched incumbent.
I think a better music notation system would easily be at least 2x better for beginners. A rationalized system could mean 100% of kids learn to read and write music, and anyone could understand how to play an instrument like a piano from music (even if not able to do it at full speed).
My point was that it could be 10x better, and it wouldn't lead to a switch. The decision-makers aren't the same as the people whom it would benefit.
Coincidentally, there are a lot of scientific fields where jargon could be dramatically simplified, to where anyone could learn them too. Same entrenched walled garden problem. That's especially true of fields like medicine, chemistry, and biology where things were named before we understood them.
> A rationalized system could mean 100% of kids learn to read and write music, and anyone could understand how to play an instrument like a piano from music (even if not able to do it at full speed).
I played in school bands and marching band - very very few of my classmates took up music seriously beyond high school, but music reading just was a complete non-issue for everyone involved. I don’t see how the current system is limiting anyone.
> My point was that it could be 10x better, and it wouldn't lead to a switch. The decision-makers aren't the same as the people whom it would benefit.
Who are these “decision makers” you keep speaking of. There is no global cabal of music notation protectionists. I don’t think the forces that lead to internal corporate IT decision making really have anything to do with a music notation system.
There are already simplified notation systems like tabs and piano rolls and annotated staves. Your argument seems to assume there is a notation system that really is 2 to 10 times better (which obviously is mostly subjective) - but you haven’t even given an existence proof of this, so it is all hypothetical.
> Coincidentally, there are a lot of scientific fields where jargon could be dramatically simplified, to where anyone could learn them too. Same entrenched walled garden problem.
I don't think any of that actually adds up though. I had about 10 years of music reading experience when I started learning the piano, and it was still hard. Took me years to get to a decent level. Because playing an instrument (or learning an instrument in a different class to ones you already know) is actually just very difficult in itself.
I don't think music notation ever held me back for a second - I remember when learning, you'd learn the music notation for something new first in a few minutes, and then spend days of practice doing exercises learning how to play it well on your instrument.
Similarly with science, medicine, etc. - you can know all the terms, but the real difficult part is trying to understand the massive complexity of what they're describing!
Over a third of the students at my middle school were in band, and lots of them had academic problems. By eighth grade, they were all ok enough at reading music to get through multi-page pieces together.
Only a few of us could have told you what a major third or the circle of fifths was, but frankly, even that meager level of theory was useless for the immediate task of playing the same note at the same time as all the other second clarinets.
Band players don't really learn to read music as such, they learn to read finger/hand positions. This is much easier. Sheet music is really a lot like instrument-independent tabulature, but it's a bad for singing or any instrument with lots of positions or where you play many notes at once (e.g. piano)
To be clear though, a lot of kids do understand the current notation system fine. Most kids aren't saying "hey! this chord is a minor third in frequency space but occupies the same vertical distance on the page as a major third! so confusing!" They instead approach it very much "monkey see, monkey do".
That's not to say many folks don't have trouble with notation, but if I had to place a bet, almost any notational system that abstracts away from letter names or (in the case of piano) keyboard positions will pose difficulties.
I was a kid who learned enough music to be barely good enough to do music at church... Now a few decades later I'm learning the drums using Rock Band [0] (and similar, I have almost a complete collection); the video game using a "toy" drumkit on a 10 year old console. Back in the day I read that a motivation behind the drums implementation of the game was that if you can play the song in the game, you can play in real life. [1] It's perfect for doing in small doses and providing good motivation,and so I've reached the point now that I'm good enough now that I am buying a proper e-drumkit. Yes, guaranteed I will pick up some terrible habits, but I've always failed to learn things when the barriers to achieving each goal aren't as simple as possible, and I'll take some proper lessons later on.
Now... how's this relevant to OP? Well, the 'music notation' it uses is best explained via analogy to a road, imagine you are standing on a bridge looking up a highway. There are 4 lanes, each lane representing a drum, and coming towards you at a constant pace are symbols (gems) representing the hits (and bars across the whole road for the kick). There are horizontal markings for the bars as well. Song plays, hit the notes correctly and you'll hear them in the song. Get them wrong and you'll hear a clanging and the drums drop out of the song. Then you get feedback at the end of the song.
Just search YouTube for "rock band drums" or "guitar hero drums", and you'll quickly get the gist.
Now this "notation" can be via the application of some simple steps turned into the real thing. These don't necessarily have to be in order either, perhaps some different sequence is better to make the jump.
1. Rotate the 'highway' sideways, remove the perspective distortion, and it looks like a regular music staff
2. Scroll it at first... but then swap to stationary with a moving playhead
3. Remove the playhead so the player has to keep their place.
4. Make the changes to turn it into proper notation [3], but keep the colouring.
5. Get rid of the colour altogether and you're left with regular notation.
Now referring back to [1] again, this is the same idea covered there. A project idea I've had floating around is to actually implement the above steps in a game/app on a device that can take MIDI input and use the same charts format that the amazing CloneHero [4] developed.
And for regular tonal notation rather than percussive? While I haven't looked into it much... Rock Band 3 has the "ProKeys" mode which is meant to do the same thing with a 2-octave keyboard, and perhaps the same concept could be applied [5].
[1] This wasn't the original article... but this one is even better, and deals with the notation discussion. I swear I only found it when I was adding references in at the end of writing this comment! https://www.destructoid.com/how-rock-band-can-teach-you-to-p...
I might agree with the general claim, but diatonic notation is a lot friendlier to amateurs. Traditionally, kids in early education learn solfège (Do, Re, Mi...) which is very much based on diatonicism.
> I'd like a system simple enough to use by all the kids in my local elementary school music class, much more than I care about what happens in the local orchestra.
Amateur doesn’t mean lack of experience or skill - what you seem to be meaning is “casual”. There are already a number of simplified notation systems for casual use. And this alternative notation is definitely not positioning itself for casual use based on its examples - and it sits in a sort of uncanny valley.
As an experienced (semi-professional) musician, I think this is probably a false dichotomy. For one thing, "users of music notation" implies that these users know how to use it. Very many "amateur" musicians read traditional notation just fine. It's not that hard.
There is really no such thing as a "decision-maker" for music notation systems. That ship sailed a long time ago. There is no orchestra conductor anywhere pondering whether or not they should abandon a millennium or two of traditional notation for something "better."
You would be doing your elementary music students an enormous disservice by teaching them some "alternative" music notation system. And for what reason? As I've said elsewhere, learning to "read music" is far easier than many things we ask elementary students to learn.
Right, some highly chromatic music would be better represented in this notation, but it seems a poor fit for traditional western music.
Also, a single, brief, look at a piano keyboard will expose why whole-steps and half-steps always being equidistant on the sheet music might not be a desirable goal. There are similar affordances on woodwinds as well. Maybe a string-instrument player could comment on usefulness for string music?
[edit]
I'd also be interested in seeing examples of transposing in Clairnote; all of the examples in TFA were in the key of C and I don't have an intuition for how easy/hard this would be. As an amateur clarinetist I was often handed oboe music...
> Maybe a string-instrument player could comment on usefulness for string music?
Speaking from my experience playing violin (as an ameteur), players generally practice their scales until the finger positions become muscle memory. This way, the key provides the entire note position -> finger position mapping, and accidentals simply become half-step modifications. Since the scales would need to be learned anyway to play tonal music, I don't see how this notation would simplify anything.
Can concur as a bass player. Tell me to play (for example) a B and without even thinking, my hand will move to the second fret on the A string. Put a flat sign on it and I just move one fret down.
I also know the "shapes" of intervals though, and they are constant. A half-step is always one fret, a whole step is always two. A minor third is a minor third is a minor third: one finger on fret N of string M, the other finger on fret N-2 of string M+1; the names of the notes are irrelevant.
I pulled my flute out of its case after over five years, and within minutes was playing all my scales, and able to play the melody lines out of a hymnal. My tone was awful, and my lips got tired long before my hands.
To this day, I still associate flute fingerings with music I read for singing.
Even if the system was superior, at this point in history it's irrelevant because you simply won't be able to gain traction or hit critical mass for large scale adoption for all existing musicians.
The only thing this will do is teach you a completely different system and as soon as you move out of your own isolated learning and into working with other musicians and gigging or other public functions you will just get frustrated.
At the very least you would wanna system that would be somewhat transferable to the existing sheet notation and tablature systems.
Well I can't speak for everyone else obviously, but I find traditional notation much easier to read than Clairnote's alternative. Even with the description, I find it harder to glance at the Clairnote notation and see what it means.
Exactly! It's like designing a language making Hello World! programs trivial to create but makes the actual programs we write a little more difficult to create and doesn't solve the actual problems experienced by day-to-day developers. Not useful.
Yeah, agreed. I'm totally on board with fixing the fact that you have to learn ledger lines / note placements separately for each clef. Besides that, none of this seems necessary, and the legitimately of sitting/hanging notes is a big problem.
I'm all for a notation system that distinguishes major/minor thirds more clear. It's a neat idea.
You see the same with people suggesting MIDI is a replacement for notation. I program MIDI in a MIDI roll and still appreciate notation. MIDI is to notation as a play is to a script. Notation is more like a script. It's there to guide the performance. Notation has persisted and evolved for centuries for a reason!
I hate to be too much of a downer as there are some nice ideas here, but I can see at least three problems with this:
1) First and foremost, of course, the massive entrenched investment in traditional notation. It's like trying to replace the QWERTY keyboard.
2) More risk of transcription errors in written music. The difference between "sitting just above the line" and "sitting on the line" is quite subtle.
3) This is strictly tied to the 12-note equal temperament scale, with enharmonic sharps and flats. Traditional notation works fairly well with many alternate tunings, e.g. 19-note equal temperament (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/19_equal_temperament) Edit to add: looking more closely, it does include a notation to distinguish between e.g. G# and Ab, but as it's optional for most music it comes across as an afterthought that most people won't learn; and as in the previous point, it looks ripe for transcription errors. # and b are a little weird but at least they look very different!
I really like that this tries to be a more general-purpose system without being biased towards western classical diatonic music, but it looks significantly worse for that style of music (point 2) while not necessarily being significantly better for other styles (point 3).
Easy transposition across octaves is nice, but not exactly a killer feature. That's already one of the easiest things you can do on most instruments.
At first I thought it would be like switching from Facebook to Mastodon. But if there is automatic translation software, it wouldn't actually be as hard -- you can just wear your own Clairnote lenses when you want, without bothering the other musicians.
> The difference between "sitting just above the line" and "sitting on the line" is quite subtle.
Agreed. It seems worth using different heads for the two kinds of notes.
At least in Western classical music, there's a lot of emphasis put on Urtexts (scores that contain exactly the information the composer wrote and no more), composer intent, distinguished voices (stem up v down), diatonic scales (enharmonic choices matter), etc. This would make it nontrivial to simply switch notations.
In some sense it's like saying "finally, I can read Don Quixote in whatever language I want because of Google Translate!"
IMHO that's a very bad example because there's a big loss of information with Google Translate (you wouldn't get the Urtext when translating back), but there isn't with Clairnote.
Yeah, if the original score is digitally encoded such that everything really is a first-class citizen (and not, say, a GIF of some scribbles) -- a very big if -- but if so, it's not obvious that any information has to be lost in translation to Clarinote, nor that Clairnote would impose any additional information. If you want to know the scale you could encode the key signature, which Clairnote seems to make possible, just unnecessary.
That's a very important one that might not survive across re-transcription. Although in this case, Clairnote is similar enough that it might generally be possible to retain all the stem directions.
That's a good point; if/when all the scores are fully electronic, they could easily be transcribed automatically.
Anyone know how close we are to that? I feel like I'm seeing many more professional classical musicians using iPads rather than paper scores, but I don't know if they're just looking at scanned scores, or something like MIDI that can be freely transliterated.
We are very, very far away from that. To get a feel of what scorewriter software is like nowadays, Tantacrul's videos[0] on the subject of UI are very good at showing what the state of the art is. On one of his videos he shows that the best score engraving can only be achieved by using a closed source, now-unsupported command line program from the 80s called Score[1]
That's an excellent point that I hadn't thought of. If one could just pick one's favorite notation, that would make the "competition" between traditional notation and others more fair. And more and more music is being notated digitally, so this isn't completely a pipe dream.
> In traditional music notation notes an octave apart do not resemble each other.
This is what I'd emphasize. To sight read, the mapping from sign to note has to be so automatic it's unconscious. In standard notation this mapping looks different at every one of the middle four octaves, which nearly quadruples the size of the "multiplication table" you're installing in memory. Since your exposure in practice to the further ends of that range is less frequent, you're still slowed down by some notes even once the middle ones are automatic to you. (And there's probably some "cross talk" for a long time -- at least, that's how it felt to me.)
It's strange to me when people are like "eh, what's the big deal" about a UX failure that seems this big.
At least for me as a very casual musician, I instinctively know how to map all the notes on the staff and maybe 2/2.5 lines above/below. Most sheet music uses the octave above/below notation when necessary too, so it's not common (for me) to need more than that.
When I was younger and played more complex pieces, my teacher and I would sometimes write down notes that were way out there just to help things along.
Personally at first glance this notation is jarring to read, and I don't know if it would make sense investing in learning this when literally everything else I've seen and own is traditionally notated. Where I find challenge in music is not understanding notes quickly enough, it's my physical mechanics, memory, and expressiveness.
I don't agree with this "multiplication table" idea. Octaves have the same physical distance between notes on the page in traditional notation, so they can be identified at a glance. People typically do not read octaves by deciphering the bottom note, deciphering the top note, and saying "ah, this is an octave".
And even if they did, the stems of the notes (excluding half and whole notes) traditionally are as long as the distance between octaves. One of the things that I think makes traditional notation more robust for experts is the redundancy of information.
It also helps that for many instruments there’s a mapping between the layout of the instrument and the notation! This is less true for brass and the violin family, though I think even with them there are probably some arguments to be made about the harmonic series, or the spacing of strings in fifths.
Interesting, well thought out, and well-presented. Just not sure that it solves a problem. It certainly isn't radically easier to learn than traditional notation. And despite other comments here, huge numbers of young people learn traditional notation all the time, with little stress. Maybe, as is true with spoken languages, it becomes harder to learn musical notation as we get older?
All the "problems" that this notation "fixes" are essentially non-issues for musicians who already know traditional notation.
Well, it says it fixes visual representation of intervals and huge inconsistencies between how similar notes are notated.
Meaning new students would have a much easier time learning naming notes and where they are - in my experience the typical child that has taken lessons for a couple of years is still scarcely capable of naming notes outside perhaps the 6-10 they're most comfortably with. Accidentals do not help.
And everyone would benefit from visual support for the intervals.
Here's an anecdote: I have been playing piano for many years but recently discovered, because my son is learning to play cello, that I have trouble taking his cello scores and playing them with my right hand. I can play bass clefs no problem in piano music with my right hand, but my brain is apparently trained to do the translation in that context. Without it, I have to focus to not accidentally read his single system scores as a G clef.
Similarly, I've seen his teacher, a cellist giving concerts, get temporarily confused over a G-clef violin score.
Yes, these are not huge problems, but I'm personally willing to believe we could have something better.
Good points. I haven't thought a lot about it, but I still don't see how this new system is radically easier to learn. Looks like I have to be concerned with notes partially on lines, an irregular staff, two notes occupying the same "space" on the staff, etc. Then there are clefs with numbers...now I have to remember what "number" octave I'm in. And for piano, you lose the white key/black key distinction, which is obvious with accidentals in traditional notation. (This is specific to piano, and maybe not terrible.) I just don't see any tremendous reduction in cognitive load.
I'm not sure what I think about this new system but the "black key = accidental" association is probably not very helpful to anybody playing on/after an intermediate level as there are cases where accidentals mean white keys (for example f flat or g double sharp). It might be helpful if you're a beginner though.
While we certainly run into Fbs or G##s, they are relatively rare. I don't think they undo the visual cue of seeing G# and knowing that's a black key. But you might be right. After all, if we're playing in the key of E, G#s are not notated other than in the key signature (and some other exceptions that don't really matter here). So yeah, maybe accidentals <-> black keys isn't such a big deal.
Huge numbers of young people learn traditional music notation all the time, yes, but I wouldn't say with little stress. Music notation evolved much like English, and much like English it's widely recognized to be full of kludges and unnatural constructions. And similarly, changing it would resemble switching to Esperanto.
To add to your point, many people already use other systems. Tablatures are very, very common for guitar. Lead sheets are used in jazz, and they do away with many of the problems of regular notation (notably, the legibility of chords, and different clefs) by only using it for melodies. In a way, traditional music notation is really only used in classical music. And they're never ever going to adopt another system. The people who wanted another system have already split off.
> traditional music notation is really only used in classical music
And jazz and pop and rock and.... It is a universal language that allows musicians from many backgrounds to come together and play a tune together. Jazz is the most obvious example--where musicians often sightread a tune together. (Although, to be fair, a substantial part of jazz notation is chord symbols, which are not (directly) a part of traditional notation.)
tabulature is really just used for starting out on guitar in my experience and it works because the alternative is SO approachable and SO instrument specific.
lead sheets are solving a whole different problem and almost ALWAYS have the melody in traditional notation in addition to the chords. some lead sheets assume you already know the melody and can transpose to whatever key is relevant.... but still a lead sheet is there to give you hooks in order to aide improvisation.
jazz musicians have not "split off", they have added some chord notation above the traditional stuff.
Yeah, I had the same reaction. I can’t really imagine this would be any easier to learn, and doesn’t seem to solve any problem I’ve ever had with standard notation (this is with 20 years of music experience across several instruments).
I mean, English isn't hard to learn if you grew up with it either, but it's still three languages in a trenchcoat with a ton of weird things.
I mean, pronounce all of these words that have the same combinations of the letters "ough": though, through, rough, cough, thought, bough, plough, ought and borough. The notation is the same, but it's clearly not adequate to express the difference between pronunciation. If you grew up with it, you Know how they're pronounced, but as a non-native you wouldn't.
This isn't a parallel argument. There are no ambiguities in standard musical notation that parallel the pronunciation issue you point out in English. Further, there are no non-traditional-music-notation "speakers" trying to learn musical notation. One is (almost) always learning it anew, unless perhaps you're coming at it from a different notation system, which is a different discussion.
Intervals are ambiguous on the staff in the traditional system. They're disambiguated by reference to the clef and key signature. The whole point of this new system is to remove that ambiguity so you don't constantly have to keep the clef and key signature in mind when analyzing intervals.
Fair point. I can see how that might be nice. I will say that, if you play music a lot from traditional notation, that ambiguity completely disappears into the background.
Tantacrul made a really interesting video about how incredibly difficult it is to make a notation font that might be a good watch[0], and I say that to say this:
I see an issue here that left me confused for several minutes: the little bit of overlap when a note is attached to a line but not intersecting it looks like an alignment mistake and leaves ambiguity. My recommendation would be to have no overlap, with the top/bottom pixel of the note head in line with the top/bottom pixel of the staff line, like traditional notation.
To my eyes this is way harder to read than traditional notation, which really isn't hard to learn and works well for most music (and non-12TET music). It's hard to see if a note is on a line or just above/under it.
Same. Maybe it's my bias from having played piano for going on 25 years, but this notation is just irritating to look at, and has way more ambiguity than the standard system to my eyes. It also seems like it's less compact, which is a _huge_ problem. If you ever look at older ürtexts and the like, music notation is traditionally very dense to save paper and engraving costs. I don't think anything that makes music less dense is going to fly in the industry.
The main "problem" I see this notation style as trying to "solve" is that the standard 5 line western notation is built around a very strong affinity and "default" of the western diatonic scales. For any key/mode, if you're within that pattern then relationships of notes and notation is very clear. This is also enforced by the note names themselves, with A to A being a Aeolian/natural minor scale that fits into this same pattern.
It's interesting (and useful) to step outside of this default, but IMO in for a penny in for a pound; there really should be a commitment to a complete separation, at least as a "default". The examples are trying to connect a notation decoupled from the diatonic scale back to that same diatonic.
Even if you do stick with the other "assumptions" made here:
IMO you should change the note names. Numbers would be preferable to me, although maybe confusing given the use of numbers in western music analysis. Perhaps O-Z?
As weird as the standard notation system is, it works pretty well for tonal music. If you know how to play your instrument within a given key, music takes the same basic shape on the staff, even if it's transposed. It also keeps most pieces pretty compact, even if they have a wide range.
However, standard notation is also notoriously difficult to learn, to the point that many virtuoso players never actually learn it (especially guitar players).
Clairnote appears to respect most of the most useful properties of standard notation, except maybe efficiency with vertical space. Maybe some day I'll give it a try.
The fixes are all about directness, consistency, and intuitiveness. Legibility is never mentioned Tonal music is arguably more suited to the original than this is, where small differences in distance from the lines can make for a different note.
For example, I claim that the tonic scale will be more legible in traditional notation than in clarinote; portions of the tonic scale make up a significant fraction of music that many people read. TFA never claims that chords and/or arpeggios will be easier to read under the new notation, and I don't have a strong opinion on that one after my brief time with it.
Good point that stepwise tonal motion is much more apparent in standard notation. Maybe there would be a way to augment the notation for that, perhaps at the cost of losing some of the commonalities they kept. For instance, if you're willing to play with the duration notation, maybe you can use filled-in notes for notes within the key and hollow notes for accidentals. Or something.
Or maybe they could have done the staff lines differently.
I am of course sceptical whether this notation system will gain a bigger following, but I really appreciate their nice website and how they clearly communicate their idea. They even have a nice interactive online tutorial: https://clairnote.org/learn/
Music major and vocalist here. Seems like the problem is framed as “mapping dots to pitches,” which is a pretty good reduction of what notation does but glosses over some things I value in standard notation.
C4 and C5 are not the same. Singing them well requires different techniques, as would playing them well on some instruments. So it doesn’t really bother me that they’re “different” in relation to staff lines (8va and 8vb notwithstanding).
More importantly, knowing which scale degree you’re on (in relation to the key) is valuable for interpretation; it has implications for where the harmony is going. Likewise knowing how you function within a chord. If you’re on the third in a diatonic triad, much less volume is required for good balance with the other parts on the root and fifth. Even more so for sevenths, seconds, sixths.
You could argue that just listening carefully might allow you to achieve a similar balance by adjusting on the fly, but one advantage of being a skilled music reader is that you can make interpretation decisions before you execute them, even if you’ve never performed the music before.
Edit: clarified difference between scale degree and function within chord.
This is interesting. Growing up, I had 8 years of music theory, so reading standard notation is second nature. In high school and later on in rock/metal bands, I never actually used it. It was far more common to use guitar tablature (even though I was the drummer). Tab is more of a short-hand system, giving you fret markings and measures, but usually omitting rhythmic notation.
To me, this system is actually more confusing. The spacing is kind of hard to see. Maybe it's because I keep trying to read it as if it were standard notation. I wonder if it would help someone starting from scratch.
> In high school and later on in rock/metal bands, I never actually used it. It was far more common to use guitar tablature
I know you know this, but I'd like to point out for others that Tab is specific to the guitar family (basses, ukulele, etc) it does not work for any other kind of instrument.
Tabs are so much better than old school sheet music for guitar (drum sheet music I don't mind), maybe some people want to figure out their own fretting but I'm fine being spoon fed (even being a finger style weirdo).
I like it. As a kid (and well into my 30s[1]), any time I tried to learn 'music theory' I was put off by the feeling that what I was learning was more about the goofy and confusing standard notation than it was about music. By fixing the notation that barrier could be removed and students could get straight into the interesting stuff sooner. At least I think it would have helped me!
[1] I eventually came to understand a lot of the concepts about scales/keys/etc by ignoring the notation and just horsing around on my MIDI keyboard a lot.
I'm not entirely sure who's the target audience of this new notation. I've been reading music for 40 years and don't think I've once needed the vertical gaps between notes to tell me whether an interval was a major or a minor third. In fact, I think in terms of steps in the scale, not whether those steps are flattened or not. So equi-distant vertical spacing for the notes in a major scale better fits my mental model.
But that's just my own preference/habit. The real sticking point for me is the ambiguity of whether a note head is exactly on a line or just below. Sight reading needs that decision to be immediate - picking out whether the note is just below the line inamongst some large and rapid intervallic jumps is going to be almost impossible.
Also, I'm not sure the author has understood one of the key rationales for these other clefs - that the number of ledger lines can be minimised. E.g. Playing in the upper register of the trombone is an exercise in parsing 4-6 ledger lines, which can get tricky especially with rough hand-written charts. Switching to tenor or even alto clef keeps everything nicely within the stave and easier to read. Where in the staff the 'C' sits is just a detail, and it's surprisingly quick to get used to different clefs with different centres.
I basically agree. On a piano, this notation has the significant negative of making it unclear which notes are played on "white" keys and which are played on "black" keys, in the key of C. It's pretty useful to have that explicitly marked.
At first I thought the “missing” line in the middle of each stave would help me. My myopia, astigmatism and nystagmus make traditional notation incredibly difficult to read, on top of its inherent complexity. The “missing” line actually clarifies the top and bottom two lines. However, the multiple positions notes can sit relative to a line, and the seemingly arbitrary number of optional lines make this system completely unworkable, for me.
I'm a still learning guitar player (I think I've been taking lessons for ~8.5 yrs and did some piano lessons as a kid and was in school bands).
I usually work on solo style arrangements of popular songs but sometimes dabble into learning solos, different parts of songs, etc.
I try to transcribe what I'm working on in standard notation generally. For me the hard part isn't writing down the pitch; it's the rhythm and timing. Trying to document vocal parts and/or solos is hard, because they float all around.
As others have mentioned, different genres of music document their music differently. Standard notation is probably actually pretty rare.
I don't think the pitch notation system in standard notation is harder than learning the underlying concepts (scales are 7 notes, there are half steps between the 3rd and 4th degree and 7th and 8th degree (the octave) of the scales, etc.). It's an interesting approach but I don't think it's solving the harder problem.
Top search result for "alternative music notation" is https://www.dodekamusic.com which looks like it has the same ideas, plus a rectangular rhythm design which makes it all _look_ different at a glance (for better or worse)
What I like about Dodeka is not their notation, but the Dodeka keyboard.
I'm learning to play the piano now and the amount of stupid unnecessary complexity stemming from the fact that we've designed the keyboard to make playing in a single specific key easier and fuck everything else, is hurting my programmer brain.
That, and the fact that small-handed male players like me (and like 80 % of women) are gate-kept forever from a significant portion of music, just because.
It's a shame that our most versatile instrument is actually not that versatile. We could do better as a humanity.
Would their keyboard really be better for hand size? Seems to me that unless the keys were uncomfortably narrow, it would actually require bigger hands to play big chords than on a standard piano because they’re fitting all the notes in a single row instead of two? But I’ve never seen one in real life, let alone tried to play one.
I wouldn’t say that the standard keyboard is designed the way it is to make any one key “easier”, it’s more just the result of mapping the mapping based on how our notation works, and it’s just happens to be that one key doesn’t have sharps or flats so you don’t need the black keys, so it’s easier at first… Thinking of it in the way you said is probably unhelpful.
Eventually every scale becomes as easy with muscle memory if you practice enough, but the best thing to do is to try and do scales and chords by thinking about what the intervals should be. Getting intuition for that is a killer skill, especially for playing by ear when you can hear something and your fingers instantly know where to go to play it after finding the first note.
I’m curious, which key do you think is the easiest to play on piano?
I’ve found that newer folks tend to prefer keys with fewer accidental: C, G, F, D and Bb
Whereas there is a tendency for more experienced players to prefer keys with many flats: Db, Ab, and so on…
And (appropriately for the submissions topic), I think lot of this preference comes down to the fact that we tend to learn keys like C first, because the notation is simpler and it’s easier to remember the spacing. However most of the pianists I’ve talked to who prefer the flat keys will prefer them because of “how they fit under the hand”.
> which key do you think is the easiest to play on piano?
Sorry, "easiest" may not be the best word. C major is THE key of the piano keyboard and playing in C major is so easy because all of the non-exotic chords (sorry, I don't know the english nomenclature) are played on the same kind of keys and they have identical, predictable shapes.
On a keyboard like Dodeka, all chords in all keys have predictable shapes, because why shouldn't they? You should be able to transpose any song by simply moving your hands a little to the side, anything else is just bad UI.
Applause for the effort but I doubt that this will become popular. Music notation has been a certain way for hundreds of years for musicians around the world – a notation with the universal legibility of mathematics.
However, as someone who sight-reads all of his piano music, I'd be interested in experiencing if this makes sight-reading any easier or harder. It's taken many years of experience to be able to spot and predict patterns several measures ahead of where I'm playing, and I wonder if future musicians could get to advanced sight-reading levels more quickly using an alternative notation.
>Applause for the effort but I doubt that this will become popular. Music notation has been a certain way for hundreds of years for musicians around the world – a notation with the universal legibility of mathematics.
This system is really compatible with the standard one though? It's essentially a visual skin.
Removing the middle line is kinda nice - I remember as a kid having trouble and counting lines a lot to figure out what not something was.
The sharp/flat notation seems pretty week though/visually unclear?
I'm not sold on the the numbers in the clef symbols - I don't find it so helpful, and don't have a very intuitive sense of what the number of the octaves are. Especially because the rest of the notation is quite visual/geometric, it's odd to see it resorting to adding numbers here (where the normal notation leaves them out unless the clefs are in non-standard octaves).
The current piano layout (seven white keys and five black keys) is pretty closely tied to traditional music notation (sharps and flats => black keys), so I'd guess sight-reading with this notation would be harder on current pianos.
In principle you could imagine a more regular piano layout that maps well to this more regular notation. In practice, attempts to do that have generally failed and it's hard to see how to make it work.
The irregular spacing of the current piano layout can be frustrating, but it fits under the fingers pretty well, and it's very useful to be able to identify notes at a glance.
I think Clairnote is pretty neat. There are more alternate musical notation systems at http://musicnotation.org.
The current system we use because it is the one experts know and music is written in. I'm sure it could be worse, but I feel like it has a ton of backwards-compatible features as add-ons that would be so much cleaner with a rewrite. The very simplest change that could be made would be to have a grand staff that uses the same clef, so people don't need to learn two of them.
I don't think we'll actually see a change until such time as you could put on a pair of AR glasses, which could recognize/OCR your music, and then, on-the-fly 'transnotate' the song into a sane notation. (Perhaps the same could be said for making English more phonetic; and, perhaps it will never happen; in the meantime, I can't help but feeling that hundreds of hours are needlessly spent learning this system that wouldn't be needed with a simpler one, many people who'd like to learn it never do, and, oddly, plenty of singers sing better because they can't read the written notation!).
I couldn't figure out the justification for middle C being on a ledger line, and then the D above it being higher up, but on the higher of two ledger lines.
I like the idea with the octaves. I'm not as sure about the chromatic stuff; the key signatures are there for a reason and I'm not sure it reduces the cognitive load in an expert. It would in an novice, sure. Possibly said novice would then move on to prefer it as they become an expert, so it's hard to tell. On-the-fly transposition would probably be a bit harder, but perhaps that's a skill level already so high that it's hardly worth optimizing for in the notation anyhow.
But definitely there's too much dependency on where note heads are versus the staff. Even in the typography used in the example, the note heads seem to noticeably hang below the line. I'm not sure the vaguely elliptical blobs really work with this system and I'd consider pushing another step away from conventional notation and distinguishing with something more visually clear, e.g., normal heads on the lines, squared-off heads if they are a half step away or something. Something that makes it completely unambiguous whether a note is on or in the line. ("Unfortunately" conventional notation that this is trying to be compatible with has already consumed whether the head is hollow.)
I would also like to see something less trivial on the intro page. In HN terms, visual programming always looks awesome as long as you're demonstrating something drop-dead simple like simply traversing a linked list or something. Show something with a bit more crunch in it, like even something as simple as a quicksort, and the vast majority of visual programming pitches suddenly look a lot less compelling. All the PDFs on the bottom of the page 404'd for me, but I'd like to see something inline.
Still, some interesting ideas here. The standard system is definitely a bit wrapped around a piano. I could see how this could simplify teaching any instrument that makes one tone at a time; all the rules for reading music become "this note -> this fingering/position/valves/etc", which would smooth over the first couple of years nicely.
One of the tensions of the current system is the learning novice vs. the expert. The current system is heavily tilted towards an expert. At the time it was written, that was appropriate. Building some more novice-friendly features in might be more appropriate in a more democratized era. (Though how one gets past the switching costs here for any alternate notation I have no idea.)
[I don't read music.] From stories/videos I've watched on the topic, musician's don't so much read absolute notes but notes of a scale. A trained one knows their scales and can represent them with the letters A-G once each, using sharps or flats as necessary. I'd also expect them to know exactly where each note name/sharp/flat is on the instrument they play.
There's also an affinity for piano being a sort-of reference instrument pertaining to mapping of scales as it has the least idiosyncratic placement of notes compared to other instruments.
What about a scale that has lines for the white keys of the piano and larger spaces where black keys appear would be 1:1 with piano, but there would be too high a density of lines.
So how about we make the black keys the lines and we can have single spaces for single white keys and double spaces where two white keys intervene the black ones? That almost makes sense as the lines are black and the page/spaces are white.
I get the same feelings whenever somebody comes up with a "better" flavor of SQL that is "more logical" or "more expressive".... I know SQL well, it does what I want, and I think its great. When people "solve problems" with it, they're complaining about things they never tried to understand.
This is a lot like that. I wish I was better at music.... I wish I had more skill etc... but the barrier is not my ability to read music....
a multi-note instrument like guitar/piano is much harder (in my personal experience) than a single note like trumpet/saxophone... and guitar tabulature exists for that reason... but its guitar specific and is probably a bridge for most in the beginning of their learning (not unlike a saxophone fingering chart).... but I don't see general use music notation being revolutionized anytime soon.... mostly because it does not need to be.
Very cool. Every domain is always in need of fresh ideas. Even if they don't directly take off, they still provide valuable perspective and help bolster the process of slow, constant improvement.
It would be interesting to see how this, or a similar system, could be extended for any X-TET system, not just 12-TET.
I've struggled with reading music despite years of piano lessons, years of church and school choirs, and being the main arranger for my college a cappella group. Watching the video of the Blue Danube Waltz on that page was amazing. I felt for the first time like the shapes of the things on the page actually corresponded well to the musical concepts in my head.
I know it's an extremely uphill battle to actually get anything like this adopted, but I think it would do wonders for teaching and working with music. How many musical concepts would suddenly be obvious to people if they could actually see them directly on the page without layers of translation in between?
I'm not an apologist for music notation as it exists today, but it doesn't seem obvious that this is a net improvement. I watched the Blue Danube video. Apparently, I still don't understand the notation. There are some notes in the bottom staff that are sitting on the middle ledger line in a group of three. I don't see a thing where it's explained what that means. I don't get it.
I don't like it because it's not backwards compatible with traditional Western notation. This will cause problems with anyone transcribing Clairnote work without being an expert. What looks like G, actually notates G#. Major problem imho.
I’m a musician who can’t read music notation and found it hard to pick up when I’ve tried. I assume I’m the target demographic for this system. At first glance I can’t for the life of me understand why I’d put the time into learning this. For one, it doesn’t appear to make anything that I personally struggle with any simpler. For two, the entire point of learning to read music is to communicate with other musicians. If I am writing my ideas in some bespoke system that no one else knows, what’s the point?
I play both piano and chromatic button accordion (a little). One thing that seems a bit harder on button accordion is going up the scale playing thirds or sixths, because you need to be aware of which are major versus minor thirds (or sixths) in the diatonic scale you're using. With a piano, the keyboard mostly takes care of this, at least in easier keys.
It seems like this notation has similar issues in emphasizing the chromatic scale over diatonic scales maybe a little too much?
As someone who has a difficult time reading music, at first glance this looks like it might help.
My main issue is that note in the middle of the stave are essentially unknowable for me. middle c-f is doable. but in the middle it get very fuzzy, too many lines.
I thought this notation might solve that, but instead of having notes with lines through them to indicate notes on a line, they are slightly above/below. That for me makes it very hard, even though most of the stave has been removed.
While standard notation already seems optimal to me for performing music, it does leave something to be desired for analyzing harmony and composing, mainly because things like major and minor thirds look exactly the same. So I would love a notation system that made harmonic relations easier to see. I'm not sure yet if this is it, but I definitely like the idea!
I suspect the younger generation of (self-taught) composers rely heavily on the grid or matrix modes in popular DAW's -- they visually represent the 12-tone chromatic scale in an intuitive and accessible way that reflects both how we hear music, and how the notes lie on a fretboard or keyboard.
This music would be extremely hard to sight-read. The only aspect of it that I like is that it is key-agnostic. It would be cool to see atonal music written in this notation system. But for professional musicians this isn't worth learning.
The problem with something like this is that it's basically the musical equivalent of the artificially constructed language Esperanto. It will NEVER gain any significant traction in the existing world of musicians.
Electric bass player here. Oh and I'm quite mediocre too.
I think a musical notation system should not be driven by edge cases, which is what a bunch of HNers pointing out where this system falls short (microtonals, equal temperment sucks, etc, blah blah). Second, I think standard notation is designed for piano soloists, not for bands.
I've found the most effective system for sharing musical ideas with a band is the so called "Nashville Numbers System." Why is this? Well because you can't apply a capo to a vocalist. Every time I play with a different vocalist, there's going to be a key change. When we talk in terms of scale degrees "hey guys play 6m, 5/7, root", rather than "oh hey play a Em, D, G, wait j/k, that's too low, can you play G#m, F#, B? oh wait, earl over there says playing G#m on acoustic is impossible, go another half step up" everything is easy.
What does this require? Every musician needs to memorize scales, which isn't very hard. The process is: decide on the root as a band, then jam. And you handle accidentals as they come up as edge cases, rather than have them drive the bus off a cliff.
So how can we take this successful concept and apply it to notation?
I think there are two main issues with standard notation: First, the key signature is embedded into the notation. This was like HTML before CSS: the presentation should be separated from the content.
Here's the hill I'll die on: given that you're going to be playing in equal temperament, we don't need to have _any_ information about the key in musical notation. The only thing that matters is intervals. 99.95% of the audience doesn't have perfect pitch and they don't care either. All notes on the staff should be relative to some arbitrary root.
Which brings us to the second problem: Standard notation does not represent octaves consistently. This is the dumbest UX failure that annoys the absolute shit of out me as a bass player. If I want to mirror the melody line in a song for a section, I have to switch my brain from reading Bass clef where I live, to fumbling through Treble cleff notes, and they're all in the wrong spots.
Looking at the link, there are some improvements on the above two points. I do think there is still a leaky abstraction about the key signature. Given that I write things down as relative scale degrees anyway, I'd take this over standard notation any day if I learned to read it.
