
Show HN: Simplified music notation - crehn
https://github.com/hoffa/notation
======
swiley
> Reading music is hard.

People say this about many notations including the latin alphabet when they're
first learning to read them. Mathematical notation is another one, and while
some people have legitimate complaints I think they're usually much better off
just learning the current notation.

> All I want to know is where to put my fingers. Note length, tempo, [...] is
> minor in comparison

NO!!! Music is the combination of rhythm and pitch. In many cases rythm is
more important than pitch! A music notation without rhythm is like writing
without vowels. Yes you can feel out the meaning of the sentence but it's
ambiguous to the point that the meaning can also often become completely lost.
This is my complaint with things like guitar chords; you can figure out how to
strum along if you've heard the song before but it's not nice!

People learning with western music probably underestimate just how important
rhythm is even in classical music but so much more in newer music. You can't
just throw that away.

>This is written from the perspective of a clueless piano beginner who just
wants to play.

I feel horrible saying this but, that wasn't surprising to read. Really,
practice reading new pieces for a year or so and you'll be able to sight read,
it really is like learning to read all over again and the confusion will
slowly go away.

EDIT: you also have to keep in mind that music notation is meant to be used by
composers as well as performers, the way this removes key signitures can make
you think more chromatically which I would argue hurts beginner composers a
lot (who should be thinking tonally IMHO.)

~~~
L_226
I grew up playing multiple instruments, and I have never been able to read
rhythm from sheet music. I don't know if I'm just lazy or if I have a problem.
Definitely the hardest part of playing in my opinion. Have played: violin,
piano, clarinet, alto sax (plus a short foray into alto-clarinet :).

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
People underestimate how difficult it is to learn to read written music. You
have to learn the notation, parse its meaning, and then embed the finger
movements required by the notation in muscle memory so you don't need to think
about them consciously.

The most efficient fingerings are often not obvious and feel very clumsy to
beginners - which is why they're written into piano scores. If you do what's
easiest you'll cripple your progress later.

And ideally you need some awareness of phrasing, context, and other elements
of musicality, which some people will be born with, while others have to
learn.

Your brain is translating a complex set of symbols into a complex set of
movements, while being aware of context and state.

A different kind of notation will do very little to make any of this easier.

------
jlg23
> Note length, tempo, velocity, progression and other stuff are minor worries
> in comparison. Those things can be felt, without learning.

Can it? How do you learn a piece for which you only have a sheet? I would go
even further and say that the most I learned about music was from handwritten
notes on musicians or conductors[1] sheets.

Yes, I can figure out a lot myself just because of my background knowledge but
give me something of an obscure era/modernist fashion and I am completely
lost. Furthermore, I played the flute, so tempo, for example, dictates how to
start a note (lacking the English term here) because there is a huge
difference of what I can do to a single note when played larghissimo in
contrast to prestissimo.

And especially with lots of modern music, composers resort to their own,
additional notation because classical notation is _not enough to express the
music on paper_.

~~~
probably_wrong
> Can it? How do you learn a piece for which you only have a sheet?

To be fair, guitar players seem to manage. I truly cannot understand _how_ ,
though. Most guitar tabs are oddly silent on the topic of what to do with your
right hand, and yet everyone uses them.

~~~
hashkb
Tab is a leaky abstraction and cannot be sight read. It exists because
guitarists are notoriously lazy and/or because guitar is easy. That there is
no piano tab, and that nearly all pianists become literate should be telling.

~~~
thebricksta
Hey there, easy on the guitarists.

Guitars, like other string instruments, have multiple ways to play each note.
Depending on the note progression, hand position needs to slide up and down
the neck of the guitar to ensure the necessary groups of notes are all easily
reachable from the current position. Tablature solves this issue by telling
guitar players where to place their hands. Orchestral sheet music involving
stringed instrument parts often include both the standard staff and tablature.

Of course, the simplicity of tabs also make it a great way for the community
to spread knowledge. A simple tab can be written down in notepad in minutes
and passed along freely, whereas sheet music requires specialized software and
hours of time.

This makes it very attractive to beginners who aren't looking to become
professional musicians, but simply want to mimic what they hear on the radio
for their friends. I can either sit you down at a piano for two years and
teach you sheet music, or give you a few weeks and tabs. Will you be playing
perfectly? Of course not - but you'll be enjoying yourself.

Mind you, piano notes are already in a 1:1 correspondence with the staff, so
hand placement is greatly simplified and tablature would be redundant. When
the bar to musical literacy is to learn how to read a notation optimized for
piano, it becomes a pointless question to ask why piano players achieve
literacy.

~~~
furgooswft13
I agree mostly. Guitar is often easier to learn for a lot of the music people
want to play, pop songs with simple chord progressions. Once you get your
fingers in place, strumming in rhythm is pretty natural to most people. Bar
chords (and their bastard stepchild power chords) make this even easier.

Also the regular layout of the frets makes improvisation much easier as you
just find the right starting point to whatever song you want to jam over, and
start going up and down the same pentatonic scale pattern.

Of course all this only gets you so far, but it's enough for a lot of teenage
rockstar wannabes to have fun. No harm in that at all.

By contrast most of the songs people seek to first play on the piano requires
a much steeper hill to climb. Even Fur Elise can be very challenging to play
at tempo for a beginner. Moonlight, while slow, still requires catching a lot
of notes at once and reading a dense score with plenty of double sharps and
what not (and God help you if you want to try the 3rd movement). Outside
classical, it's much more difficult to get a good sound by just banging out
chords, unlike strumming on a guitar. Some sort of separate melody and
baseline is almost always expected on the piano.

Now if you want to rip out some mad Eddie Van Halen solos or perform classical
finger-picking songs then all bets are off. In fact I'd say mastering multiple
melodies at once (some sort of counterpoint) on guitar is much more difficult
than piano.

And yes translating standard notation to guitar fingering is much more
challenging, because it makes no sense for the guitar neck, and you have to
know not just to hit say A3 but where on the neck it would be best to do that
given your current position.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
1st movement of Moonlight needs 5-7 years from a cold start to play well. You
can learn to pick out the notes in less, but it's harder to play smoothly than
it looks.

The 3rd movement of Moonlight is a Diploma level (i.e. university, 10 years of
playing at a bare minimum) piece.

Guitar is popular because it's the opposite of piano. You can get somewhere
recognisable within six months or so. But many players plateau after that.
_Really good_ guitar isn't any easier than really good piano.

------
relyks
I think Hummingbird notation is a better alternative:
[http://www.hummingbirdnotation.com/](http://www.hummingbirdnotation.com/)

~~~
werbel
I discovered Hummingbird when looking for alternative music notation for my
tattoo (a phrase from my piano song).

After reading the "docs" it was easy to read the notation but for some I
struggled with transcribing it. Maybe it'd be easy to first write classical
notation and then change it to hummingbird.

Also just noticed that even in the toggle example on the home page "natural"
symbol is missing (flat/sharp reset).

~~~
rhaps0dy
>Also just noticed that even in the toggle example on the home page "natural"
symbol is missing (flat/sharp reset).

Yes. But, also from the toggle example, you can notice that each note that is
sharp or flat (even if that is part of the key) is individually indicated.
Thus, there is no need to keep track of the "state" of sharpness or flatness.

I think this is kind of cool but I would need some time to learn it. Not that
I've found traditional notation ever constraining.

~~~
werbel
You're completely right, sir.

------
krsdcbl
I honestly feel this is harder to read than classical notation - minute
details of the head shape indicate sharp/flat, and i have to almost count the
lines to know note length, instead of stronger visual clues.

Not mentioning the pain of making these little shapes & accurate-length-
strokes all by hand if you consider writing it.

All in all I'd say yes, you changed _where_ the basic information gets
encoded, but does it really make it any better?

------
ReverseCold
> Rests aren't explicitly displayed.

Hmm.. Would you just leave a space there instead of a rest? That actually
seems harder than the current system.

------
crehn
OP here, wasn't expecting this to gain much traction. Lots of great comments
and ideas!

This started as a fun challenge/side project, nothing too serious. Not trying
to replace modern notation, just testing an alternative.

The notation is more intended for piano beginners who want to play songs
they've already heard. Within that context, here are some (perhaps wrong)
assumptions the project is based around:

\- Most people know what sounds good

\- Most people don't care about about recreating songs "perfectly", they just
need a little bit of help

\- Most people can already hum the songs they want to play

\- Improvisation is fun (and encouraged with this sort of trimmed-down
notation; letting loose is better than constraining)

And some of the issues I faced when trying to read and play music:

\- Key signatures require constantly scanning left-to-right

\- Hand positioning is different for different scales

\- Rest symbols bring little value considering the visual noise they add

\- At any reasonable tempo, 1/16th, 1/32nd, etc. note symbols bring little
value considering the visual noise they add

\- Inconsistent symbols

Will keep working on this. I'm no musician and would love to learn from those
more experienced than me.

Thanks for the interest!

~~~
chrismorgan
> At any reasonable tempo, 1/16th, 1/32nd, etc. note symbols bring little
> value considering the visual noise they add

Such notes are commonly quite heavily used in classical music. Whether they
might be better doubled in length with the tempo doubled, is another matter.

It can go the other way, too: if you look in hymn books from the 19th or early
20th century, you may also find hymns that use whole and half notes, with the
occasional breve and quarter note; whereas if you look at a later edition of
such a hymn book, you may find those notes got halved, to use half and quarter
notes, with the occasional whole and eighth note. I certainly find the latter
easier to play.

~~~
mathw
I mostly play baroque music from notation, where the convention was to use
roughly doubled note values compared to today - most of what I play has the
beat in minim/half-note sized values, so we're often in 4/2 or 6/4 rather than
4/4 or 6/8.

The lack of visual noise from the sparser notation, hollow note-heads etc. is
rather pleasing compared to some later music where you're into demisemiquavers
where you could have just had semiquavers. We see semiquavers in my viol
consort we know they're going to be teeny little notes in most pieces. There's
just less ink on our pages!

I don't really understand why it shifted to shorter values. I guess it
probably wasn't deliberate though. These things usually aren't, they just...
happen.

ETA: maybe the increased visual grouping of beamed quavers and smaller notes
was considered valuable for conveying the composer's intentions with regard to
phrasing, especially as printing technology became increasingly capable of
properly reproducing them.

~~~
chrismorgan
My experience with scores in both /2 and /4 is in hymn books, playing the
piano. I find the /4 version decidedly easier to read than the /2 version, and
my brother and dad have said the same thing. It generally conveys the flow
better. Naturally, there are other differences in the engraving as well, some
for the better and some for the worse, so it’s not a fair comparison.

------
noname120
I suggest you to update your readme to include a side-by-side comparison of
the traditional notation system with the one that you are proposing on a short
tablature.

~~~
cyclecycle
I think its clear enough as is, and that the readme benefits from its current
simplicity. Though for interest's sake this wouldn't hurt.

------
matchagaucho
_" Rests aren't explicitly displayed"_

 _" Stem length denotes note duration"_

If only my eyes were 20 yrs younger. This hurts to read :-(

~~~
swiley
That also sounds pretty much impossible to hand write. I hate notating stuff I
come up with on a computer. I've tried lillypond and some GUI tools and none
of it is as comfortable as just writing it down.

------
vinayms
I appreciate the effort but I am unable to understand the purpose of this.

As the creator says in a post here, if it is intended to be used by beginners
to play music they have already heard before, can't they simply play it from
memory? Why do they need to struggle reading the notation? They already know
the song. I mean, what's important for a musician, at any level, is to develop
an ear (or mind?) for notes and rhythm; everything else is bells and whistles.
So, can't beginners simply play by learning the black and white keys and their
octave ranges?

If this is meant to be used to play songs previously unheard, thus by sight
reading, then all music written in established notations must be mass
translated to this notation. Not impossible, but just a tremendous amount of
work, dare I say wasteful, overall. Investing some time to learn the existing
notations instead has more ROI.

When I started playing guitar in college, and got introduced to western music
(I learnt Carnatic violin as a schoolboy, the notation was mainly for notes
aka 'svara'), I quickly gave up trying to sight read since not only was I not
a professional, it was also much simpler, and more natural, to just play
instead of multitasking. Note(ha!) that I can read music, but I can't do it in
real time.

------
furgooswft13
Reading music is not hard, playing it is.

You'll be comfortable with reading standard notation relatively quickly
compared to how long (forever) it takes to get your fingers to move to the
right keys at the right time.

Standard notation may not be ideal for many instruments, but it is perfect for
piano. It was designed off of the keyboard layout after all. I've sometimes
been asked if there is an equivalent of guitar tabs for piano. Yes, I say,
there is, sheet music.

~~~
burke
I really don’t think this is true. I don’t think what’s provided here is
better for piano than standard notation, but much of standard notation is
optimized to be easy to write by hand. We don’t really need that constraint
anymore, and could probably come up with a notation that would be easier to
build familiarity with without throwing away information.

~~~
furgooswft13
I'm curious what you, or anyone else, thinks could be improved without just
being different.

I've seen suggestions such as ditching accidentals and just giving every note
their own line or space, but that would make it much harder to recognize
common chords or shapes in different keys.

Really the problem is the piano layout itself. It's designed to make playing C
major easy and everything else hard (though many experienced players would say
they prefer a scale with lots of black keys such as B major because those are
easier to hit accuratley).

Of course there's already an answer to that, the Janko keyboard[1], which has
been available for well over 100 years. It has a regular layout for easy
transposition, and allows each hand to reach a wider range of notes without
large jumps. Perhaps music notation would have evolved differently if this
type of keyboard had been prominent.

Alas we got what we got, and have a massive catalog of music designed for it,
and already experienced piano players certainly are not going to try to help
change that.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jank%C3%B3_keyboard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jank%C3%B3_keyboard)

------
cyclecycle
Really like the idea of trying to improve things that are so widely adopted
and entrenched that most (me, at least) don't think to change.

We face the problem that people differ in what they think the features should
be though. Ideally we would have a method to deduce what's the best symbolism
for maximising input/output speed to human's minds. Some kind of scientific
voodoo.

Beyond me what that might be.

~~~
analog31
I think that the effort to improve music notation should be encouraged, in
spite of the entrenchment of traditional notation systems.

In my view there are two huge barriers:

First, sight-reading of traditional notation is a widely shared working skill
that nobody's going to give up. It's too much of a productivity booster and
ensemble management tool. If you write in nonstandard notation, nobody will
play your stuff.

Second, the huge bulk of existing written music is in non computer readable
form, so it can't be re-notated without considerable effort. My band has well
over a thousand "charts" most of which were printed before the age of the
personal computer.

Dealing with the second issue might help with the first. If there were a
decent OCR for sheet music, it would create a bulk of "source code" for
printing in modern notation, and perhaps give readers a choice. For me, since
my brain is hard wired for traditional notation, that's what I would choose.
But for someone learning to play music, they could choose a more intuitive
system.

------
adrianh
As somebody who has devoted six years of his life to building a web-based
music notation rendering engine, I salute you!

I make Soundslice
([https://www.soundslice.com/](https://www.soundslice.com/)), which syncs
music notation and real performance audio/video.

I've seen several "alternate" or "simplified" music notations come and go.
While I applaud experimentation, I've gotta be honest: if you do the work of
learning to read traditional music notation instead of inventing a new
notation, many more doors will be opened to you.

You'll be able to jump in and read _hundreds_ of years' worth of music, you'll
be able to communicate better with fellow musicians, and it'll help develop
your music theory knowledge.

I say all of this as somebody who began as an amateur guitarist, reading only
ASCII tabs. I know what it's like on both sides of the notational divide. :-)

------
thsowers
I studied piano in college and during one lesson I was struggling to read some
Chopin piece that had double sharps. I asked my professor why classical music
notation hadn't been "improved" over the years, because some parts of it
seemed so convoluted to me. I felt that the goal was to get to "the music",
which was actually the sound of the piece, and the methods to reach that
didn't matter.

He told me that this was how Chopin had communicated his music, and this the
only true medium that he (and many other composers) had to get their works and
musical ideas to present day.

I still feel like classical notation can be a undue burden in many cases, but
it also feels like studying an older dialect of a language so that you can
attempt to most accurately translate the meaning

------
clockface
I think a better approach would be to keep all the traditional musical symbols
and rests, but get rid of all accidentals.

As long as you're changing the staff, why not use a chromatic staff?
[http://musicnotation.org/](http://musicnotation.org/)

------
mastazi
> Rests aren't explicitly displayed.

How would that work? If I see 3 notes with a length of 1/4 each in a 4/4 bar,
how do I know where the rest goes?

------
pbhjpbhj
Natural sharp and flat: why do the notes all lie to the right: why not flat to
the left, natural in the middle and sharp to the right (the shape of the note
head doesn't matter much then but I'd go with < o and >).

If you're going to use height to indicate note duration then why not put a
bold crossing line to make it more clear.

16th and 32nd length notes are going to get a bit unwieldy in the OP's scheme.
I'm not sure length of tail is preferable to having flags on the stem and
suspect it's worse.

------
mpalmer
I like most of this - but.

Leaving out rest symbols and encoding note duration by stem length are two
choices I feel would make sight reading harder, not easier.

+1 to side-by-side samples

------
FridgeSeal
> Reading music is hard.

Well I mean, it's not. Presence of a learning curve isn't a problem.

------
samjanis
Nice.

It's like guitar tabs, but for piano.

Keep working on it!

------
forgotpwd16
I didn't see a link, but was that inspired from SMN[1] as you've used the same
symbols for sharp and flat notes?

[1]:
[http://www.simplifiedmusicnotation.org/instructions.pdf](http://www.simplifiedmusicnotation.org/instructions.pdf)

------
yongjik
> Assuming d is the note value (where 1 is a whole note) and h is the size of
> the gap between staff lines, the stem length is (log₂(1 / d) + 1) * h.

I wonder if the author thought about triplets.

...and what about quintuplets? They do appear prominently in some music.

------
rtkwe
It seems pretty hard to read the note length quickly vs the current system.
Especially when we start getting to 32nds or 64ths the difference isn't as
immediately obvious and you'll have to sit and count lines.

------
jancsika
Reminded me a bit of shape note singing:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shape_note](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shape_note)

------
prohor
I have the same feeling, that the note notation is way too complex. I would
love to see something like this getting traction.

------
kurtisc
How can you differentiate quavers in 6/8 and 3/4? The former is played as
triads, the latter as pairs.

