
Hummingbird – A fresh take on music notation - pie
http://www.hummingbirdnotation.com/
======
arnarbi
I'm very skeptical that this is an improvement (but kudos for thinking outside
the box). Here's something that was intended as constructive criticism, but
maybe ended up more as just criticism:

Removing the key signature is _not_ a good idea. When playing in G major, the
sharp accidental on the Fs is not put at the beginning of the line just to
avoid printing it in the score. Rather, it fits there because when I play in G
major, I put my brain in G major mode, in which case it would be distracting
to have an accidental on every single F.

Similarly, writing a special symbol for each pitch seems it would get heavily
in the way of transposing on the fly. The position already encodes the pitch,
and the ABCDEFG names kind of get in the way of understanding the melody,
which is more about relative intervals than absolute values.

And what does the little parenthesis on the length line mean? For half- and
whole notes it seems to mean it doubles the length (a quarternote with one or
two parentheses), but for sixteenth-notes it seems to indicate that it halves
it (an eighth-note with a single parenthesis mark).

I also question removing the stem of a note. I have a feeling that is one of
the stronger queues for reading rhythm. Spacing is _not_ very important, and
indeed especially in dense scores for solo instruments, that need to have few
page turns, notes are often just spaced as tightly as possible.

The author also recognized that the beams on eighth- and sixtheenth-notes
(e.g. in the left hand) are very important rhythmic cues, and replaced them
with that horizontal thing with the arrow on the left. This is a bit hard to
read though when there are no stems to link them to the note and the pitch
interval is big.

The part about it being easy to write by hand looks good, and made me feel
good at first. Then you realize that hand-written traditional notation is
quite different from typeset one, just like handwritten text is very different
from printed text. Drawing all the little balls and filling in the halfmoon C,
up and down thingies seems tedious, when traditionally one writes a simple dot
or a little slash instead of the note head.

~~~
icarus_drowning
What you mean by this is that the key signature tells you what the tonic is,
and, conversely, what the supertonic, mediant, subdominant, dominant, etc.
are.

Whenever I teach key signatures this is the biggest thing I try to impart: key
signatures are more than just accidentals, they define the roles each pitch
plays.

~~~
lmg643
Agreed. Hummingbird seems like a solution in search of a problem. I could see
someone trying to learn to sight read music, get frustrated with how it is
"broken" and then invent something like this, which seems far less clear to me
than the old way.

sight reading is hard because of the cognitive work involved with translating,
say, eight notes at a time into the appropriate finger-patterns, rhythm and
pace; or translating fewer notes but at a faster rate. i don't see this making
it easier.

i'm not sure why they would bother. anyone who finds sight reading too tough,
might not really ever need sheet music, whether they do it by ear, or just
listen to music. my friend has a disklavier - incredible. robot plays the
piano better than i ever could. it makes me wonder why i still bother to try
and play, and then i remind myself that every feeble attempt i make is
intrinsically satisfying to me, so i keep trying.

~~~
vacri
I am a neophyte at reading music, but I think that the pitch symbols are
almost entirely noise. They would help me personally (oh, that's a 'C' there,
I don't have to count the lines!) but for anyone with a modicum of sight
reading, surely they already know where the C is due to its location on the
staff? At that point, pitch is already represented and the filled figures are
noise.

I wonder if a suitable analogy would be like underlining all capital letters
in a selection of prose - useful for the neophyte, chaff for the slightly
experienced onwards.

 _robot plays the piano better than i ever could_

Apart from the personal enjoyment angle, robots also can't detect the mood of
the audience (yet) and play to suit.

~~~
jliechti1
Agreed. As a pianist, I not only look at the position of individual notes, but
also the positions of the next 3 to 6 consecutive notes. This way I can think
in "groups" of notes - which is very helpful for sightreading broken chords
quickly.

The one place I could see pitch symbols being slightly beneficial is when
notes are either way above or way below the staff. But even then, after some
deliberate practice these can be recognized pretty quickly as well.

~~~
masukomi
I've read for piano, bass guitar, flute, and now ukulele. I can read treble
clef, and bass clef just fine, but stick them together as you do for piano and
my brain has a conniption. The exact same figure at the exact same place on
each staff represents two different notes. I suspect this is because the gap
between the two staffs would have required too many intermediate lines had
they re-used treble clef for the bottom staff, but this doesn't mean it is a
good readability choice.

Regarding relative position. On a piano the relative position of notes on the
staff almost directly correlates to position on the keyboard. On a stringed
instrument this is VERY far from the case. As i proceed up the scale on a
simple instrument like the bass i will proceed right on the neck on one
string, then drop down a string, shift left, proceed right on that string,
drop down a string, shift left, proceed right on that string. So you've got
back and forth, and up and down motions to keep going in one direction
tonally. On a guitar the strings aren't all tuned evenly so the back and forth
on the neck changes depending on which strings you're switching between. On
the Ukulele the top string is higher than the string below it so you end up
jumping UP strings rather than down, AND the strings aren't tuned at even
intervals. So you've just got a big jumble of movements.

Don't even get me started on the totally unintuitive nature of woodwind
fingerings or how they are almost totally disconnected from what's going on on
the staff.

In short, the relative positioning of notes on the staff is good from a tonal
perspective but crap from a finger perspective on most every instrument except
piano.

~~~
cube13
>In short, the relative positioning of notes on the staff is good from a tonal
perspective but crap from a finger perspective on most every instrument except
piano.

That's not really a problem once you build the muscle memory, though.

It's the same thing as touch typing. With enough practice, you know that
finger placement X will produce note y, the same way you know where the keys
on the keyboard are.

------
kunai
It's pretty clear the person(s) who created this is/are not (a) very
proficient musician(s).

The current notation has been in use for hundreds of years because _it works_.
The notes are large, bold, and easy to recognize and also easy to write.
Memorizing GBDFA, EGBDF, ACEG, and FACE is not that difficult.

This new notation has many egregious flaws. Removing the key signature is one
of them. Not only does the key signature allow for instant recognition of the
pitch and tones used and a general idea of what the piece should sound like,
but it also makes writing sheets that much easier for arrangers and composers.

Second, who thought it was a good idea to replace the accidental signs with
squiggly marks? A huge step down in usability, I'm afraid. Maybe in sevenths
and chords with very close note spacing, but unless you're playing Death
Waltz, it is not a problem (usually).

Also, the Consumer Reports-esque notes are also distracting and don't serve
any purpose. If I saw what is an "E" on this note, I would play it for 4 beats
-- that is, assuming that this is in x/4 time. It's more confusing for
longtime music readers than musicians, but it would still throw off many, I'd
guess. At any rate, however, if you can't memorize the staff lines and spaces,
you aren't a musician. Period.

The uselessness of this notation is compounded by the fact that practically no
instructor will be willing to give up a notation that has been in use their
entire life, and also for centuries.

Do I see this being successful? Maybe, in small circles (no pun intended). But
the harsh truth is that the current notation is easier to write, easier to
read, and more efficient.

Case closed.

~~~
jimmyjazz14
Funny I know plenty of proficient musicians who can't read music at all. I
don't disagree with what you are saying per sey but saying the creators can't
be good musicians because they want to try a new approach to teach music feels
awfully elitist.

~~~
rmk2
They are only "proficient" in a very limited sense, then. I'm sure we can
argue semantics here, but a musician needs to _understand_ the concepts that
govern music. And these concepts can only be understood and visualised by
using notation.

The circle of fifth, musical modes and any advanced form of transposition,
alongside the basic theory involved in cords, their components and their
succession are necessary for a _musician_. [1]

Technical proficiency does not make you a musician, just like being able to
type _really well_ doesn't make you a programmer if you can't...read code.

[1]: This _may_ not apply for percussionists, but even there, playing together
with others necessitates the same understanding.

Side note: it's _per se_

~~~
shmageggy
> And these concepts can only be understood and visualised by using notation.

That's not true at all. One can have a deep understanding of all the elements
of music you mentioned without knowing any traditional notation. Maybe it's
understood in terms of modular arithmetic and fractions and visualized as
such, or visualized in terms of a piano or an abstract spiral structure or not
even visualized at all. Traditional notation is only one possible
representation (an a fairly arcane one at that); others are certainly possible
and don't preclude deep understanding.

~~~
rmk2
I am well aware that Western notation is not the only one, however, I cannot
see how music theory works without _any_ notation. Whatever _form_ of notation
you choose to encode information in will still have to be decoded, i.e. read.
The reason why some notations have been more durable than others is the
relative amount of information that can be stored.

Tabs for guitar and bass are just one example of a deficient mode of notation,
since they cannot provide all information necessary to play something.

If you want to forego all notation, however, understanding theory becomes even
harder than with a deficient notation. For that, you'd have to solely rely on
somebody's ear in order to explain roots, scales and afterwards more complex
topics. The only other option is teaching visually, which ist somewhat
possible with a guitar, and somewhat possible with a piano, but is not
transferable to another instrument afterwards.

~~~
brnstz
All forms of notation are deficient. If you want proof, just listen to a muzak
(elevator music) cover of your favorite pop song. It is correct according to a
professional transcriber's notation, but it loses nuances and imperfections
that classical music notation doesn't cover.

You are right that tablature by nature does not cover rhythm and that is a gap
that won't even get you to muzak. However, there is nothing about classical
music notation that makes it an ideal form for representing all forms of
musical sound. How would you notate a Jay-Z or Skillrex song?

~~~
smrtinsert
those are actually pretty easy. The only issue with skrillex would be
identifying an instrument to play the notes, but other than that he's low on
the polyphony scale (pun intended).

When I clicked this I was hoping for a notation that describes midi values
against timbre (filters, distortion etc), and blends it with traditional
notation, I think that is a missing link between old and new - but rewriting
accepted notation for generations? That's like replacing a-Z with some sort of
base 26 number and saying its easier to learn.

~~~
anigbrowl
_I was hoping for a notation that describes midi values against timbre_

Dream on. You could show controller automation lanes as digital audio
workstations do, but those are only as informative as they are consistent with
some scheme like General MIDI _and_ a standard sound architecture. Once you
start resampling or using modular routings any kind of timbral notation schema
goes out the window.

I've seen attempts at this, and if you email I'll try and dig you out a
reference but the particular book I'm thinking of is in a box in my attic
right now. However I can't say I've found them very informative. When I think
about timbre I think about the whole synth architecture and program it in my
head, for many timbral ideas it's just a matter of walking up to the synth
later and dialing it in.

Most electronic musicians stick with simple diatonic scales or within modes,
at most switching in and out of relative minor. Harmonic complexity and
timbral complexity don't go very well together.

~~~
benoits
I would absolutely love if you could post the reference of this book here -
and I'm sure a couple of other folks would as well! It sounds quite
interesting. Thanks a bunch.

~~~
anigbrowl
I went up and had a look, but haven't turned it up yet. I'm supposed to be
getting new shelves in the next week or so and getting all those books up onto
them, so I'll keep an eye out.

------
jdietrich
Music notation is not designed to be easy to learn, it's designed to be
efficient for proficient musicians. The key issue is chunking - just as
children learn to read individual letters, then words, then whole phrases, the
rapid sight-reader has to be able to see chords and phrases rather than
individual notes. This requires a strong understanding of musical theory, to
be able to anticipate what's coming next and why.

Reforms to musical notation are like the frequent attempts we see to create
visual programming environments "So anyone can program!". They're based on a
fundamental misunderstanding of what the hard part is. Learning the syntax of
a programming language is trivial compared to learning the abstractions of
programming; Likewise, learning to identify note names and durations is
trivial compared to learning to think intuitively about music theory.

~~~
cube13
Also, as a few other people have noted here, it's actually less expressive
than standard notation.

There's no way to show phrasing(especially important for figuring out how to
phrase 5/4 or 7/4 time), triplets, and I'm not sure how slur/tie notation
works(especially because dotted notes are presented as tied notes... not ideal
since they're technically not the same thing).

~~~
kemiller
In the detailed guide it said that slurring, triplets, pretty much anything
not specifically mentioned is unchanged.

------
bbx
Maybe it's easier to learn, but it's definitely not simpler. There's a
difference [1].

Probably because I'm used to reading the tradional notation, I had a hard time
deciphering theirs. There's a reason why, after _centuries_ , the standard
notation is still relevant. You basically need 3 elements to play an
instrument: height (pitch), length (rhythm) and power (dynamics). And I can't
imagine a better way to translate these informations than a traditional score.

But I appreciate any attempt to revisit musical notation, like the one that
spawned the guitar tablatures, which is incredibly simple _and_ easy to learn.

I'm concerned by Hummingbird's readability. Though each symbol carries
multiple (and sometimes redundant) informations, I feel like there's a lot of
noise. Also, drawing these symbols requires some high precision and I fear
that handwritten versions will render some confusion, especially the small
rest and rhythm symbols. I often scribble some music lines on a piece of
paper, and I rarely have issues re-reading myself.

On a side-note, using English-based mnemonic hints ("Empty" for E, "Full" for
F...) will hinder its portability across other countries, especially Latin
ones where Do-Ré-Mi-Fa is more widely adopted.

[1] <http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2011/11/11/simple-versus-easy/>

~~~
jff
Guitar tabs are simple and easy to learn, IF you're playing a song you already
know. Most tabs I've seen just tell you which fingers to press down and which
strings to hit, often excluding time signature, note duration, note intensity,
rests, and other sightreading essentials.

~~~
bbx
You're absolutely right. Tabs are most useful when you already know the song.

As you say, most tabs don't include much information besides pitch and order,
but can include guitar-specific ones, such as bends or slides.

It's possible though to write _good_ tabs, such as the ones available in
Guitar Pro
([http://www.guitaring.info/uploads/software/Guitar%20Pro/Guit...](http://www.guitaring.info/uploads/software/Guitar%20Pro/Guitar%20Pro_1.jpg)).

Tabs' major appeal is that there's no learning curve: what you read is almost
a physical representation of what you play. And it only requires a text editor
to write, and can easily be published and shared on a website.

~~~
whyaduck
The best tabs are printed under a staff that contains the missing rhythm
information (along with the actual pitches, etc., of course). Not exactly
concise, but very info-rich.

------
robotmay
I've actually just spent my afternoon writing out some music for the first
time in about 15 years, so this is quite interesting.

However I must say that I just don't get it. Every example I look at appears
significantly more complex than the standard notation, and harder to discern
at a smaller size. One place I can see it really struggling is on copies.
Music tutors spend a lot of their time copying music sheets, and I suspect
this would be quite difficult to read on a low quality reproduction.

Standard notation has survived for hundreds of years. I'll be the first to
admit it's not exactly easy to get your head around to begin with, but once
you understand the rules it becomes apparent as to why it is the way it is.

~~~
cpressey
I've often thought that if there's space for something to be reformed in
musical notation, it's the fact that different wind instruments are notated in
different keys[1]. I realize there are historical reasons, but it just seems
like such an artificial barrier between musicians in a modern band or
orchestra.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transposing_instrument>

~~~
mtinkerhess
It's a standard part of musical training to be able to read a part written in
either concert pitch or in your instrument's pitch, or even to be able to
transpose on sight into any key. It's not easy but learning to do so pays off
when you're on a gig and the singer insists on playing Lush Life in B natural.

~~~
cpressey
We can debate how large an obstacle it is, or whether learning to overcome it
is valuable, but clearly it is there, even if it's just an annoyance. I just
think it would be really nice for (e.g.) a clarinetist to be able to sub in on
an alto sax part on sight without having to go the extra mental work of "Ah,
right, up a perfect fourth --"

------
ajdecon
Initial impressions:

* The pitch shapes encoded in the notation are fun and probably help learning, but I think they'd be distracting past a certain point. They don't convey any extra information that the staff doesn't, and if they didn't match it's one more thing to trip up on.

* The sharp and flat signs are way too subtle, compared to the traditional accidentals. I'm not going to see those when I'm sight-reading.

* This is also true for the eighth notes and shorter. Those flags are tiny!

* No key signatures?!!

I love that someone's playing with ideas for notation, but this notation is
_worse_ for experienced musicians because it makes important information
harder to see at a glance. (Yes, sure, I'd get used to new shapes, but the
distinguishing marks on the page are _smaller_?!!)

I can't comment on whether it'd be easier to learn, but this is notation
you're going to be _using_ much longer than you're going to be _learning_ it.
Optimize for long-term usefulness.

------
greenyoda
Learning musical notation is not the hard part of playing music; getting your
instrument to make the right sounds is. Changing the notation doesn't make
that any easier.

Also, if you've only learned this new notation, you'll be unable to read any
of the 99.99999% of music that has been published in the conventional notation
over the last few hundred years. It would be pretty limiting, somewhat like
learning to speak a language that's only spoken on a small island in the
Arctic Ocean.

~~~
stdbrouw
It depends on the instrument. For melody / monophone instruments (woodwinds,
brass and to a lesser extent strings) musical notation is easy. For piano,
it's easy once you master the bass clef. For guitar, it just never gets easy
because the score has to be full of fingering information to make it even
remotely clear where on the fretboard your fingers should go.

Musical notation can definitely be improved upon.

~~~
14113
the only problem with this to me is that this new notation simply seems to add
redundancy to the score, repeating information which is already there,but not
adding much new.

------
banjomonster
One advantage traditional notation has over this is that the modifiers are a
lot larger and more visible. For sight reading, notation needs to be easily
scannable and irregularities (like sharps and flats) need to be highly
visible. Connecting the beams on eighth and sixteen notes also serves to group
the notes according to beat, and that makes parsing a measure much easier
(also easier to skip ahead when you mess up). Neat idea though.

------
whiddershins
I applaud your efforts to update something so anachronistically designed. I
think it looks very cool, I like the duration symbols.

On the down side, I am very surprised you decided to redo music notation, but
keep to a 7 tone diatonic graph structure.

One of the most counter-intuitive things about sheet music is it assumes a 7
note scale, making the graph inaccurate: the space between B and C are
displayed visually as the same as the space between C and D when that is not
the case in any physical realm, and it makes transposition harder than it
needs to be.

In my view, the 7 note scale assumption is a horrible, frustrating, legacy,
like having to learn DOS before being allowed to operate an iPhone.

7 note scales are a misleading assumption not only for any "modern classical"
composers, but also for any blues, rock n roll, north indian classical music
...

There may not be an easy solution to address all this, but I am curious about
the reasoning behind your approach.

------
msluyter
I once struggled trying to create a notation for tap dancing, so I applaud the
attempt and hate to shoot it down, but... My eyesight is pretty poor, even
with glasses, and I find this difficult to read. I find traditional sharps and
flats easier to scan than the little note prefixes. They're bigger, and look
substantially different. Same wrt some of the smaller rhythmic values.

Also, in the first measure, beat 1 of the base clef, it's hard for me to tell
whether the bar sign for sixteenth notes applies to the very first note. I
have to try to gauge the vertical alignment without the help of the
traditional vertical bars extending from each note.

Finally, the mnemonic symbols for each pitch seem superflous to me. Once
you've learned the staff they just amount to irrelevant visual adornment,
IMHO.

"Easy to learn" might not equate to for "easy to use by trained musicians."

~~~
14113
I definitely agree about readability - I occasionally struggle to read music
when there's more than about 3 people to a stand, and I had trouble reading
this notation on a tablet, fairly close to my face.

------
cwp
I'm fascinated by this kind of cultural technology. I think we ought to be
experimenting with notation of all kinds—numerals, alphabets, languages,
measurement systems, calendars and so on. We need to make it easier to learn
new systems of thought so that we can actually adopt better ones!

~~~
udfalkso
This comment reminded me of an episode of Radiolab that I recently listened
to. It's about a man named Charles Bliss who attempted to create a set of
symbols that would let us think and communicate in a pure way across cultures
and languages.

If you want to give it a listen: <http://www.radiolab.org/2012/dec/17/man-
became-bliss/>

~~~
cwp
Interesting, thanks.

I tend to be a little skeptical of attempts to make "pure" forms of
communication, because I think there are bound to be trade-offs, as in any
engineering endeavour. I'd rather see schemes that are optimized for a
particular purpose. What would a language oriented toward scientific and
technical communication be like? How would currencies designed for ecommerce
work? How would a calendar for global organizations work?

------
jtheory
I like the idea of working to make music notation better -- it's certainly not
flawless -- but I'd strongly discourage music teachers from using this system
with any actual music students.

I'd much rather see methods of improving the readability of standard notation,
by adding colors, interactivity, or anything along those lines -- but not
_replacing_ standard notations (for accidentals, note flags, etc.) without
really, really good reason. The further your system departs from standard
notation, the less valuable it is automatically, so for a departure even as
far as hummingbird (which is still obviously related to standard notation),
the value it adds already needs to be huge just to break even....

Think about the choice you're making for your student -- instead of getting
started learning standard notation, you're starting them down another path of
reading music; the moment they leave your studio or classroom and walk into a
music shop (or even another music class), they will be completely lost.

There's a lot of sheet music freely available online -- whoops, not for your
students, though.

There are also a ton of apps, interactive sites, online tutorials, software,
etc. that can help music students master all aspects of music performance,
analysis, and even composition. Well, some students. Not yours.

I know this sounds harsh, but it's a bit like attempts to fix the English
language. Everyone knows it -- English is horribly irregular; every rule of
thumb for spelling has a million exceptions; there seem to be more irregular
verbs than regular ones; there are obsolete tenses only used in some common
_phrases_ and nowhere else. But if we fixed the problems -- even if we just
regularized spelling and nothing else -- the first generation of students
using the new system would be a bubble in a world that used "old" English. If
we successfully rode out the change, after a century or so all _new_ documents
produced would be in new English... but anyone interested in reading anything
before the switch would be at the mercy of automatic translators.

It sounds like a dystopian novel where an autocratic government wants to cut
their population off from all knowledge of history.

------
Yhippa
I like the idea that someone gave alternate musical notations a shot.

I looked at the sample pieces and liked that they had simple and complex
pieces to look at. As I went through the simpler pieces the notation was easy
and fun to pick up. When I looked through the more difficult pieces I felt
like I spent more time analyzing each symbol to figure out what exactly it was
saying. They were "overloaded" in a sense to me.

I feel that if I'm sight-reading music (or haven't practiced it much which is
the more likely case) that this would fatigue me having to parse so many
pieces of information for a note. It made me realize that one of the things I
appreciate about standard notation is that you have a defined set of symbols
with minimal overloading and that you're marking it ("annotating?") it up to
make changes to it.

It's an interesting experiment. I just don't think I could get used to it for
complex pieces.

------
hoytie
I think the visual reinforcement of note names is a poor idea. When I play
piano, I play best when my brain and hands are reading the music spatially.
When I start thinking of note names I become much more clumsy and slow,
because it's interrupting my spatial thinking. I always recommend that people
think about intervals as opposed to note names when learning a piece of music.
It encourages various good habits, like being able to identify overarching
patterns in the music and play in different keys easily. Intervals also
correspond more closely to how your hands have to move. Because of all this I
don't think it's helpful in the long run to have the visual reinforcement of
each note name. It might be easier for children or beginners at first, but in
the end it may be a crutch that prevents the student from "seeing" the
music..!

------
stevenameyer
In my opinion while this notation may be easier to learn (I have my doubts
about this, but as someone who is familiar with standard notation I'm going to
reserve judgement on this), the notation misses a lot of nuances and details
that would be necessary to play more difficult pieces.

Some of thing I feel like it fails to capture:

1.key changes- eliminating key signatures makes key changes less obvious which
is important to realize as it is important as to how you play the piece.

2\. Phrasing- the visual shape of the notation seems very vertical to me,
which works for some pieces but would drastically change the way I play
certain pieces.

As well the following don't have any example and their current notation would
likely conflict with the proposed notation: ornaments, tone of a
note(staccato, marcato, slurs, formatta etc), dynamics

I'm intrigued by a new kind of notation for music, however I feel like while
this maybe more approachable it won't work for high level performers, and
having to learn a new notation if you reach a high enough level kind of
renders the notation kind of useless to learn.

------
ronyeh
Here, I propose yet another take on music notation:

[http://www.essential-music-theory.com/images/grand-staff-
spa...](http://www.essential-music-theory.com/images/grand-staff-spaces.jpg)

Instead of difficult to read/write symbols which map to letters, which map to
pitches, why not just use the letters themselves?

I would totally love to just learn with letters written on the staff. And over
time, maybe my sheet music app could randomly replace letters with black
filled circles, and then eventually with standard music notation.

~~~
ronyeh
And the _most_ natural notation would simply be "piano roll notation" which
when oriented vertically looks like this:

<http://synthesiagame.com/>

The drawback is that this notation is less compact. But, it's the best
notation for teaching beginners.

I'm trying to figure out how Hummingbird notation is any better than "piano
roll" notation or simply putting letters on the staff. It's definitely a cool
idea (infovis-wise), but I think it needs to be user tested: standard vs.
hummingbird vs. letters-on-staff vs. "piano roll"...

~~~
bbx
I've come across Synthesia before and it's well-thought learning tool. But its
major drawback is that it's only aimed at piano players.

I think Hummingbird's goal is to become an alternate standard of _global_
music notation, based on the fact that it resembles the traditional one (and
actually uses it as a base). But Hummingbird also has its flaws (that I
mentioned in another comment).

------
pragone
Maybe I come from a different musical background as the authors of this, but
none of this make any sense to me.

"Long notes are longer; sharps point up and flats down." \- Having notes take
up _more_ space is about the worst possible thing in the world for me; as a
pit musician, the last thing I need is more wasted space on a page, giving me
more page turns to deal with while I'm changing instruments and key
signatures.

"...rhythms have the same spacing" - I don't know what this means. Rhythms
don't have spacing. The spaces between the notes has nothing to do with the
music that's played.

Then there's the fact that all current musicians would have to re-learn how to
read music. Perhaps someone can tell me what's drastically broken about the
current system? I'm not saying it's perfect - I don't believe any system is
perfect. But it's worked pretty well for the last few hundred years.

~~~
kenferry
I would expect page turns will be going away. You can already use your iPad as
a music stand, though it's kind of small.

If you're using a real device, page turns can be automated or eased. The
device can listen to what you're playing (tempo shouldn't be too hard to pick
out) and turn pages appropriately. Or, you could use a foot pedal or what have
you - perhaps your phone.

Apps for this sort of thing already exist, though I don't know how good they
are.

------
a-nikolaev
In handwriting it will be much more illegible than conventional notation.
Also, small details are very bad for nearsighted people.

Don't get me wrong. I am always fascinated by new approaches for doing things
and new musical notation is a fun idea. But not in this case. Practically
speaking, they don't improve anything at all.

Conventional notation is _not broken_ or something.. Imho, it is actually
looking pretty great typographically, and works fine in practice.

They could make new notation that works better on computers, to be used in
music software, such that it is easy for typing using a keyboard. That could
be a real improvement.

------
gtani
Interesting. As a player of piano, woodwinds, and others I've gotten used to
different systems of scribbling over the staff to convey something that's not
metadata but not primary info. Well-tempered Klavier is a good bad example,
there's all kinds of scribblings about what Bach intended, including argumets
about incidentals (is a note flatted or not?) (and what's the umbrella term
for trills, grace notes, flourishes like that?). It's actually much harder for
wind and strings, where infinite pitch/tonality /attack/decay combinations are
possible, e.g. lipping up or down on a single reed, squeaking, honking,
sibillant, and I'm pretty sure there's no way to write down the loops i get on
fretless guitar, bass and cello.

Also I've been trying to get used to Don Ellis quarter tone system, and work
thru haskell school of music (fantastic book, for anybody interested not just
in notations, but production, composition and capture(A/D conversion/DSP etc.
Also shoudl read books by Gould and Read someday:

[http://www.amazon.com/Behind-Bars-Definitive-Guide-
Notation/...](http://www.amazon.com/Behind-Bars-Definitive-Guide-
Notation/dp/0571514561/)

[http://davidvaldez.blogspot.com/2012/09/quarter-tones-by-
don...](http://davidvaldez.blogspot.com/2012/09/quarter-tones-by-don-
ellis.html)

[http://haskell.cs.yale.edu/?post_type=publication&p=112](http://haskell.cs.yale.edu/?post_type=publication&p=112)

------
mrchess
I lost it at making a symbol to represent a note letter -- a terrible idea.
Ex. D for Dot.

One thing to understand about music is that the letters are meaningless, as
learning by letters restricts you to playing in a certain fashion. For some
reason letters got introduced, I don't know why, but all that matters is the
distance between notes.

Not learning letters first allowed me to easily transpose into any key since
the LETTER DIDN'T MATTER.

Cool idea, but has some serious limitations in real music, the obvious one
being transposition.

------
peapicker
I'd rather learn byzantine notation than this 'Esperanto' of music notation.
(example: [http://stanthonysmonastery.org/music/KarasSample-
with%20head...](http://stanthonysmonastery.org/music/KarasSample-
with%20header.gif) )

Ni-Pa-Vou-Ga-Di-Ke-Zo-Ni

~~~
bane
Do you know of any more resources about this system? One of my side hobbies is
learning more about alternative representation systems for languages, math,
music etc. Finding resources on alternative music systems is kinda hard in my
experience.

~~~
peapicker
The following page contains a link to a beginning Byzantine Chant textbook
that explains the system:
<http://www.stanthonysmonastery.org/music/LearnByz.htm>

The pdf is in Greek, but has been annotated with English notes throughout. It
also contains embedded mp3 resources so you can hear what the notation is
showing.

More details can be found: <http://www.byzantinechant.org/notation.html>

Including video tutorials: <http://www.byzantinechant.org/tutorials.html>

~~~
bane
Thanks so much!

------
jff
Hummingbird notation: lots of little dots, vaguely grouped together

Traditional notation: 16th notes are tied together, with the tying actually
serving to reinforce the duration of the individual notes while indicating
that they should be played as a group.

------
frostmatthew
I applaud the attempt, clearly the creator(s) put in a lot of time and effort,
but I don't see most of the changes as more intuitive at all. It's also
attempting to solve a problem that doesn't really exist, the current notation
is not difficult to learn - and anyone who thinks learning to read music is
the tough part about learning an instrument is in for a real surprise once
they get much past "Mary had a little lamb."

------
wam
The discussion here reminds me of the longstanding debate over editors like
vim/emacs vs (whatever you want to call the other editors). Or semicolons vs
indentation, to make a slightly more "reading" oriented comparison.

There's obviously a difficult learning curve for many people, but others who
are already proficient argue that the rewards of learning standard music
notation are worth an extended effort, if that's what it takes.

The thing I've noticed most about sheet music as I'm learning it is that it's
_compressed_. It uses different symbols and techniques to say the same thing
in a smaller space, and reuses space and symbols more efficiently by applying
modifier symbols at the beginning of the staff and elsewhere. It allows notes
on lines and spaces instead of just spaces or just lines. Tighter, smaller,
more on the page. Changes in pitch can also be indicated by modifier codes
next to the notes, sharp and flat, allowing further combinations with only 2
more symbols.

So I have to learn to decompress the information at the same time I'm
interpreting it. Tricky! I do stop and wonder if this compression algorithm is
the right fit for humans. I don't buy the argument that continuity with the
volume of existing sheet music is a good reason to never develop an
alternative. But any alternative needs to be much better on some metric that
outweighs continuity. Otherwise we should just keep hacking the learning
process with color coding and mnemonics and whatnot.

It's funny, I was talking to a friend about my struggle to learn sheet music
and music theory, and he said "It seems hard at first but you'll start to get
it pretty soon." And I said "Yeah, it's sort of like math in that way." To
which he replied "oh, I don't know about that, I can't do math. I've never
been good at it."

~~~
bmj
The difference between "editor wars" and a new musical notation is that
choosing a particular editor does not limit you in reading or writing things
that people have already done. If I learn to read music via new notation,
that's great, but I'll still have to learn traditional notation if I want to
play a piece by Chopin (assuming someone hasn't "translated" it to the new
notation). If I use vim, I can still read a program written in emacs. Editing
it may be a different process, but consuming it isn't.

~~~
wam
That's true, but the comparison I'm getting at is the learning curve. The
process of consuming an algorithm or procedure is more of a tabs-vs-semicolons
thing, a language war.

I mention editors because the arguments about learning one often have to do
with the trade-off between expert efficiency and expressiveness and the
painful learning curve (for many). And because that's honestly what the
discussion reminds me of, whether or not it's a perfect match :)

------
octatone2
I immediately lost all context of key and mode trying to parse the examples.
Also, the grouping symbol looks like an arrow pointing backwards in time.

------
rikware
Like many have mentioned, this seems to add a lot of noise to notation. This
isn't really demonstrated in the pieces they have on the site. I'd like to see
what it looks like with something a bit more complex like a Bach Fugue. I feel
like the rhythm notations, in particular, would become more difficult to parse
as the rhythms become more complex.

Also, how do you notate tuplets?

------
Arzh
This isn't a new notation, it's just a new font on the old notation.

------
jmilloy
>Pitch symbols are obvious, barely requiring memorization. There’s no need to
count lines, and treble and bass clefs are the same.

First, why not just put A, B, etc inside the circle? That's easier than these
hanging-chad symbols. But mainly, do musicians read music by translating the
symbol (position) to a letter and then the letter to a fingering (for
example)? I expect instead, they translate directly from the (relative) symbol
(positions) to a fingering. That's what I did after just a few days while
self-teaching piano.

>There are multiple cues to the same information. Everything has both a symbol
and spatial element, for all kinds of thinkers.

Generally, I think this kind of redundancy is a bad thing. While programming
computers, we usually agree that there should be one and only one clear way to
accomplish base tasks in a language. When storing data, consistency is
essential.

~~~
cronin101
> We usually agree that there should be one and only one clear way to
> accomplish base tasks in a language.

You are obviously not a Ruby programmer. ;-)

~~~
jmilloy
I expect all languages have redundancies. But do you tout them as a benefit?

 _All string functions contain options in the method name and as arguments, so
everyone is happy!_

    
    
      s.match_i("foo", insensitive=True)
      s.split_r(",", direction=-1)
      s.replace_ig("dog", "cat", insensitive=True, global=True)

------
kenferry
Interesting!

They should look at adding rendering support to <http://www.lilypond.org>,
which is basically TeX for music rendering.

If they had that, all the music in <http://www.mutopiaproject.org> would be
rendered in their format for free.

~~~
niggler
" basically TeX for music rendering."

Tex for music rendering does exist: musixtex [http://icking-music-
archive.org/software/musixtex/musixdoc.p...](http://icking-music-
archive.org/software/musixtex/musixdoc.pdf)

------
bane
I've long held a fascination with the myriad ways humans have invented for
writing things down. Sites like Omniglot [1] get a semi-regular visit from me.
In a side quest, I spent a little while looking for alternative systems for
representing math and music and came up unbelievably short. There are
_remarkably_ few alternate systems for them.

Wondering why that was, for fun I decided to try and come up with some
different approaches to representing math and music to see if I could better
understand why there's so little variety.

It turns out that it's incredibly hard. With math (at least basic arithmetic
and algebra), after you mess around with the basic symbols, there's not really
many other places you can go with how actual equations are structured without
losing lots of the easy-to-use mechanical features that modern notation
supports. In a few ideas I essentially recreated a parse tree, which made
reducing the sides of the equation relatively simple, but moving things across
the equals turned into a nightmare.

With music the obvious alternatives fall into a couple categories:a system for
each instrument, something that can succinctly capture the expressive bits of
a given instrument (fingering, bowing, vibrato, etc.) and throw out bits that
don't work on that instrument (vibrato on a piano, pizzicato on a wind
instrument etc.), but it gets impractical stupidly fast. The other alternative
is a universal system like we tend to use today, but you end up with all kinds
of space wasting piano roll-a-likes or hard to read while playing encodings
like A2--B#2--C2--

This will probably not replace current notation, but it represents quite a bit
of creativity and at least a noble _attempt_ at doing something which most of
the people on earth haven't managed to do (almost all musical traditions in
history essentially exist in a state of verbal transfer). I think it's cool
and has lots of great ideas.

[1] - <http://www.omniglot.com/writing/alphabets.htm>

------
alainbryden
As someone who is currently unable to read music, but wants to learn, this
doesn't seem any more inviting than traditional notation. I'm further
discouraged by the fact that even if I were able to somehow learn this
notation faster, I wouldn't be able to read anything that hasn't been
translated into this notation, which would really limit the practicality of
going to all that trouble in the first place. My first impression is that
learning this notation would be duping me into becoming dependent on a single
source for all my sheet music.

Maybe it would be helpful if instead of the front page demoing the most
complicated excerpt you can conjure up, it demonstrated some simpler (well
known?) music in both your notation and traditional notation.

------
rinon
I would draw a parallel between this notation and guitar tablature.
Unfortunately, all professional guitarists (and especially classical
guitarists) that I know prefer traditional notation to tab. I personally find
tab terribly hard to parse (disclaimer: I'm a classically trained musician). I
think that the proponents of Hummingbird will need to somehow address and
overcome this idea that "real" musicians only read "real" music. Overcoming an
entrenched standard, especially one with hundreds of years of history is a
terribly hard journey, even if you're only aiming at a tiny fraction of users.

I also have quite a few quibbles with the specifics and usability of this
notation, but this is not the place for that.

------
klodolph
How do I write triplets? Percussion? Tremolo? Why are all of the "critics" 25
or younger? How do I write parts with multiple voices?

~~~
kenko
I also wondered about triplets, quintuplets, etc. Also what if I want a dotted
quarter note, how is that notated? Extra pitch information for microtones?

------
kemiller
This is neat, but the mnemonics are pretty anglo-centric.

~~~
riffraff
considering I grew up with do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-si I find the mnemonics
impossible. But also, I don't understand the point: why not just write "A-B-
C-D" rather than strange half filled circles?

~~~
kemiller
That would make your do-re-mi problem worse, no? They're designed to be
compact and visually distinct, and such mnemonics are really only useful at
the very beginning anyway. I like the design, it's just a case of probably
unconscious "English privilege".

~~~
riffraff
sure it would, but if one is trying to make a breaking change it's worth going
all the way and giving up medieval names too, I think.

------
braum
Doesn't look easier to me. More importantly this will only cause whoever
teaches it as a first language to some child will make it that much harder
once they are around other musicians or in a school system.

------
anigbrowl
_Reinforced

There are multiple cues to the same information. Everything has both a symbol
and spatial element, for all kinds of thinkers._

That doesn't strike me as a positive, really. I look at it thinking I must be
missing something, especially witht he above, below and C symbols.

Quite a lot of musicians have their own 'private' notation and I'm no
exception, I have shorthand for ideas that go in my notebook and which would
make little sense to anyone else. Traditional notation is pretty awful in a
lot of ways, but I'm afraid I don't see any real improvements here - it's
still uninformative rhythmically, and still promotes chromaticism over scale
degree.

I really can't see what the benefit is. Although I don't like traditional
notation and can't sight read, at least it's consistent and reasonably easy to
learn. This is no worse, but it's not so much better that it's going to cause
any significant number of people to switch. People who play acoustic
instruments that need to sight read will still need to be able to do so with
traditional notation so I am having trouble seeing how this will get traction
in that market. Guitarists already have tab as an alternative, drummers have
drum grids, and electronic musicians use piano rolls or things like hex maps,
to the extent that they use written notation at all.

------
CountHackulus
How am I supposed to represent multiple voices in this? Something like a
4-part fugue would be much more difficult to represent in this notation than
in traditional notation.

------
smortaz
Holy cow. About 20 years ago i wrote a similar proposal for "improving"
notation. My primary aim was for easier sight reading. It didn't go as far as
yours. But three key ideas where:

* Add 1 line before bass clef (E) and one line above treble clef (A). That way, both treble and bass clefs become the same (EGBDFA). There's really no reason for your brain which just learned that the 3rd line on the treble clef is B, to suddenly be D on the bass clef... WTH?! This way, the 3rd line is /always/ B!

* Make note-head shapes include its flat/sharpness. Again, there's no good for your brain to have to remember that F is reaaally F#, or be scared of that key sig with 6 flats. Instead let's say a round note is natural, square is sharp, triangle is flat (or some such). Suddenly the note-head /shape/ carries all the info needed for immediate recognition and no on the fly translation is necessary.

* (less radical idea) A third one is writing piano music vertically, like japanese. Why? Because the piano keys are vertical while the music is horizontal. If you turn the music 90 deg clockwise, from left to right the keys match up with the notes from low to high.

Of course if you're a naturally good sight reader, none of this stuff matters,
but my gut feel says these will be improvements for new comers.

------
joeld42
Very interesting. I've been trying to learn to read music so I gave it a shot
with some of the example songs. I think I'm right in their target audience
with where I'm at.

I liked the symbols as reminders (I still have to count All-cows-eat-grass or
f-a-c-e sometimes), when I was unsure of a note it was quicker to think of the
reminder, but still the position was primary, unlike other versions where the
notes are labeled with their letter name (which makes it impossible for me to
actually pay attention to the notes) it was just a hint.

But after I played through the song a few times, it felt a little "busy", it
was more work to filter out the symbols. It also seemed a lot harder to count
the rhythms with this notation (maybe this is just because I have more
practice with traditional notation). Finally, I feel like this gives less of a
sense of the overall flow of the song -- the ties and the phrasings.

As a sort-of-beginner, my reaction to this was that it didn't simplify things
much, so I wouldn't want to invest the time in learning this and not being
able to read the vast amount of preexisting music out there. On the other
hand, I wish I had some of these cues when I was first starting.

I'd love to see this not as a replacement to traditional sheet music, but as a
standard was to annotate traditional music for beginners. The symbols as hints
in particular would have been great. I think this is a great idea but trying
to do too much, just a small tweak to any language system is a huge
undertaking (and can have huge results). But I'm glad someone is trying. Maybe
it's because I'm older now, but learning to read music has felt much harder
and more frustrating than learning to program computers.

------
roryokane
Nobody has mentioned this yet, but this is just one of dozens of past attempts
at creating a new music notation. Even if you think that Hummingbird is worse
than traditional notation, don’t be so quick to dismiss the idea of
alternative music notations in general. Each author’s attempt at a new
notation changes different things about traditional notation. Read more about
some other notations here:

<http://musicnotation.org/systems/> – a list of various notations

<http://twinnote.org/> – TwinNote, a notation. One trait it has in common with
many other notations is a chromatic staff: the distance between notes on paper
always exactly corresponds to their difference in pitch, so accidentals are
not allowed or necessary. TwinNote comes with template files for the open-
source music typesetting program LilyPond, so music written in LilyPond format
can automatically be printed in TwinNote.

<https://www.google.com/search?q=alternative+music+notation> – more about
music notations through Google

------
stormbrew
I like the idea a lot. Especially the embedding of note-name in the note
itself as an additional measure to the spacial line-distance, as I'm not
terribly great at dealing with interpreting the spacial gaps (especially when
the note is more than 3 or so lines away).

But I find the symbols confusing in their own way, and not because of the
language barrier others have mentioned (they're just a mnemonic, the words
cease to matter after a certain point and other mnemonics can probably be
devised for other languages). I find them confusing because I think there
should be a progression to them. And the progression of A and B I find doubly
confusing, because in music the notes go up, but in this the darkened part
goes down. I look at a B and intuitively think it's an A and vice-versa.

I think I'd prefer a system where they look like clock hands, more or less. A
is 10:30, B is 1:30, C is 4:30, D is 7:30, E is a slash going through 10:30
and 4:30, and F is a slash going through 1:30 and 7:30. I think I'd find that
more intuitive. (note: all diagonal so they don't conflict with the spacial
lines)

------
retrogradeorbit
One thing normal notation is great for is hand writing score during
composition. The filled in quavers become a diagonal line (running bottom left
to top right). Whole notes a little circle. And the rhythms and slurs are easy
to draw. In fact I think this is why classical notation is how it is. In
medieval times the scores would have been hand written.

I would hate to handwrite with this during composition.

------
notb
The whole aesthetic seems wrong. The perfect circles and even lines seriously
clash with the naturally drawn clefs. In the example music, they adopt a new
font for the time signature to blend in better, I guess, but the clefs are
still out of place. There's an appealing naturalness to traditional notation
that this system abandons and ends up looking like a schematic or alien code.
Should really work the style into a more natural feel. There's potential here,
but it's falling a bit flat (a pun and also literally the lines are too flat).

The sharps look like a guy flipping the bird. And the flats look a guy with a
fist, ready to fight. Funny but a bit distracting.

The focus on pitch letters (abcdefg) and lack of key signatures reveals a weak
music theory foundations. The key says what scale to use and then you think
about the relative positions, you don't think about the letters.

It feels a bit like training wheels for reading music. Maybe thats the real
purpose?

------
cpressey
I completely support anyone who wants to invent new notations for things. It's
fun. But I'd just like to note that if logical, regular notation was
necessarily better, we'd all be speaking Lojban and programming in Scheme.
Also, I suspect a conventional eighth note would be easier to make out in a
dim concert hall...

~~~
Scaevolus
Simplifying notation doesn't automatically make things better.

Theory: people prefer infix to prefix or suffix notation because it more
closely mirrors the Subject-Verb-Object patterns of their native languages.

Corollary: lisp feels awkward because it doesn't map cleanly to native
language thinking.

Lojban is mostly SVO as well.

~~~
cpressey
If that theory was correct, one might expect Forth to be really popular among
Japanese speakers. I don't see a lot of evidence for that.

I tend to think it's a more general effect where humans actually _want_ a
certain amount of irregularity in their languages/notations, to act as markers
or error-detecting codes of some sort. e.g. "he", but "him" in accusative
case. But who knows; English gets by with "you" being both singular and
plural...

------
aufreak3
Most of the comments here seem to be about the qualities of the notation
itself and whether it is good. I would like to ask why _this_ notation of
_all_ possible notations?

Music notations - systems of analogies between visuals and sound - are tools
for communication. If you have some new concept to communicate, inventing a
suitable notation for it is a great way to gain recognizability for the
concept. This holds with music notation as well as mathematics (ex:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphic_notation>). If you have no new concepts
to communicate, inventing a new notation is like changing all the words in the
python language to other words. Some things may be easier and others harder,
but overall, the change isn't worth the trouble for most.

If there are no new concepts to communicate but there is a new medium to work
with, that needs to be taken info account. Legacy notations were invented with
the constraints of the media of the times they were developed in - in this
case, paper and ink. There is no need to be bound by old media constraints
when you're making something that has to be learned fresh anyway. Notice how
hummingbird still does everything in black and white? We've had color displays
for ages now (even on paper), so why not map note names to colors? Why map
time to space when we've had _dynamic_ displays for ages now and can just map
time to time itself, or a mixture of time and space. Why should every
instrument player see the same notation? Why can't we adapt the display to
suit the instrument?

Guitar Hero, Dance Dance, the Japanese drumming games in arcades all
illustrate what "notation" can be using an interactive medium. The would-be-
musicians don't read paper notation. Learning the display is so easy that they
just pretty much pick up the controller and begin playing. For other kinds of
"notation" that can help the fresh ones, check out the iOS apps by Smule
(Note: I don't have anything to do with Smule. I just like their work.)

------
PySlice
The standard music notation and the criticism this new notation receives here
look to me as if we were stuck for centuries with only one programming
language, C++, and nobody could change it.

Sure, it has been working fine for many years, and a die-hard fan of C++ would
come up with many criticisms of anything new: No pointers? It's for beginners
only. Garbage collection? I can see the programmers that created it are not
very proficient. Etc. etc. etc.

And you know what? There are really great programming languages that do many
things differently and also work very well, or even better than C++. They are
not perfect, but the traditional way of doing things (C++ or the standard
music notation) was not perfect either to begin with.

So, I hope people experiment more and more with new notations, and maybe they
will improve the standard notation or even replace it someday.

------
alexanderh
This looks pretty slick. Just the fact that its a bit easier to write is
awesome. Even if the usefulness of this notation doesn't pan out, the
hummingbird website is a great example of good marketing and messaging. It's
the perfect name and the perfect website to promote something like this.

~~~
jtheory
Is it really easier to write?

Every note has to have a line that extends its full rhythmic value past the
notehead -- you can't just write 10 circles to say "this big chord fills the
whole measure". Every accidental must be marked on the note -- so if you're
writing a piece in C# major and it doesn't diverge from that key, you're going
to have to notate the accidental on _every single note_.

 _EDIT: they do allow key signatures; they just don't mention it in the
example or intro video._

And every notehead's shape varies based on the pitch class (i.e., C, D, E,
etc.) -- so except for "E"s (empty) every note head has some decoration you'll
have to do... you can't just make a spatter of dots/stems with a slash over
them for eighth notes.

For some music, this seems like it would be a bit more work (mainly the
varying noteheads); for other music it'd be a serious problem.

------
nwatson
Mapping the pitch of notes to special symbols (to distinguish, eg, 'B' from
'C' or 'la' from 'ti') has been done before. See
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shape_note> and the accompanying images.
Introduced in year 1801.

~~~
baddox
And I think it's a reasonable idea, especially for studying, practicing, or
sight reading. I'm current struggling to map staff notation onto the guitar
fretboard (I can play piano from staff notation, and play the guitar "by ear,"
so I'm trying to synthesize the two abilities), and I think this might make it
slightly easier. For a lot of classical guitar transcriptions, or any guitar
transcriptions that refuse to transpose (an octave), there is a _lot_ of
extreme ledger lines, and the shapes would help immensely.

~~~
jtheory
If you're choosing between "rewrite this guitar music to transpose so there
aren't crazy ledger lines" vs. "rewrite this guitar music into a radical new
notation system", I think I'd go with the first choice.

Standard notation for guitar music also suffers from the "where on the
fretboard do I play this" problem -- sometimes there are hints (like finger
numbers), but often you just have to try a few options and see what's best...
which is rough going if you're trying to sightread a piece you don't know yet.

TAB notation, of course, fills in the missing info on suggested finger
placement, but omits other essential info (rhythm!), so by itself that's also
broken....

------
tzs
OT: I'm curious. Does anyone besides me have a tendency to get off by one on
the values when playing from a written score?

I have a tendency to play a note and then my eye moves to the next note--and I
take the value of that note as how long to let the prior note play before
playing the next note.

------
danhodgins
Love your thinking here, and your landing page is fantastic. Very inspiring.
The 'before' and 'after' toggling is a very effective way to illustrate the
value your system brings.

If you can help my mom put an Ipad on the music stand instead of a song book
she has to manually flip through while playing you might just win another
customer. Right now, when i do a jam session with her (I play guitar) she
literally has to stop playing piano to flip the pages. She does this 3-4 times
a song which is quite jarring. The humble paper song book and conventional
notation system could use a 'shaking up', and you guys have started innovating
this problem, so thanks!

I could easily see this becoming the tabulation (tabs) system for that piano
and other instruments have not had to date.

Well done!

------
ebbv
This is the musical equivalent of trying to improve the English language. Sure
there's room for improvement and your ideas may be good ones but there's a
massive established standard and you're not doing your students any favors by
teaching them this over the standard.

------
mgmeyers
I like it. It will no doubt be refined as more people learn. It will be
interesting to see how it holds up.

On a side note, I think a majority of the arguments I've read against it
aren't very good ones. I see most of them boiling down to, "it's different, I
don't want to have to learn a new language". This is what I said when I was
learning standard music notation. I can see the issue of its anglo-
centricness, but even that is a minor detail. One doesn't need to understand
the words "above" or "below" to be able to associate the symbols with the
notes.

I don't think a fair critique can come out of a quick glance at the
hummingbird website. I'd be more interested to hear what people say after a
few months of working with it.

------
dhosek
My first thought looking at the sample notation was that this would be hard to
keep legible in hand-written music. It seems like it doesn't really do much to
improve the legibility of notation while it does force the use of their
software.

~~~
devindotcom
I was thinking the same thing - could be quite difficult to read under
anything but good circumstances.

------
jondot
I've played in an orchestra from 8 to 18, performed live, etc. In my peak I
was also a proficient trumpet, guitar and drum player.

My opinion:

* It is very nice to see someone trying to improve something that's hundreds of years old. This is an _excellent_ teaching tool. Words cannot express how better it is!

* It is a poor tool for the live performer. When performing live, you already know the piece. What you need is visually clear, bold, guidelines. You also want to answer "I'm playing this now, what's next?" very fast; and to do that you need a clear visual relativity. I don't think Hummingbird does that well with the collection of small nuances and decorations.

------
yongers
Kudos to the team for coming up with a viable form of alternative notation!
But personally (I've been playing classical music since I was 6 so my opinion
is most likely biased) I find the new notation harder to read and comprehend
but that's the consequence of my classical music education. So the new
notation is meant to make it easier to read and learn even the "trickiest
music"; I am just curious what this notation would look like with a genuinely
complex piece of classical music (think Liszt, Rachmaninov or any other bits
of classical music that one would think as technically challenging).

------
drderidder
If you think hummingbird is strange, check out the notation system my former
engineering prof came up with <http://www.pianotheoryman.com> \- based on
real-time systems engineering experience!

I'm a classically trained pianist and an engineer, and I get why tech-minded
people are frequently tempted to hack western notation, but notation is that
way for a reason, and it isn't what prevents people from becoming skilled
musicians. It's talent.

------
tiglionabbit
Here's a suggestion: Add a sixth line to the staff. Now all clefs are
identical two-octave portions, instead of getting shifted more and more as
they retreat from middle C.

------
sampo
In my opinion, the greatest weakness of traditional music notation is that a
same melody has to be written in 12 different ways, depending on in which key
it is. After you've trained yourself to read in all 12 keys (or 5-6 most
common ones), everything works nicely, but that's a lot of repetition.

A notation that would solve this problem, would be great progress.

But this Hummingbird notation does nothing to help with this problem.

------
jonsterling
This is an absolutely terrible idea; I hate to say it, because it looks very
visually appealing. First mistake is to remove the key signature.

------
futhey
Seems counter-intuitive to me, but I'm interested to know who the target
audience is for this? People who want to learn guitar for fun but think
learning to read sheet music is too hard (I have never understood this), or do
you expect that the big music institutions will adopt this? It doesn't really
solve a problem for them (Although it might solve a problem for hobbyists).

------
famousplayer
A great idea and new way of looking at music, but with music and expressing it
in a new visual manner, it is still missing a few things that may improve the
piece stylistically. Crescendos and dynamics for example.

Although this might be an easier way to visualize and teach music for young
musicians, it might be harder to translate to traditional music as one gets
older.

------
paulrademacher
Pitch is encoded by location on the staff, and also by the shape of the glyph.
Isn't redundancy necessarily bad in any notation?

~~~
cpressey
Redundancy can actually be useful in notation as a sort of error-detecting
code. In this case, if the pitch-symbol and pitch-position don't match up,
someone must have made a mistake in transcribing it.

Whether it helps one when reading music is another matter. I remember learning
to play an electric organ as a youngster with a book of sheet music that came
with the organ; being aimed at beginners, each note head had the note letter
written inside it. Hummingbird is basically using the same idea, just
replacing the letter with a symbol. It probably does make it easier to learn.
Whether it would be of any use for an experienced musician, I kind of doubt.
(I certainly outgrew expecting the note head to contain the note letter,
myself.)

------
Dove
I think the shapes would make more sense if they represented "do re me"
instead of "ABC". The latter might be helpful to students, but the former is
genuinely helpful to singers. And in fact, it's been done before:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shape_notes>

------
gaoshan
Well, I don't have my glasses on hand so I can't really comment on what look
like small smudgy bits but overall I like the idea... just can't see it. One
advantage of current notation is that it is larger and easier to see plus
familiar, so I know what it "should" be even when it's a tad blurry.

------
Stratoscope
I'm a harmonica player. I don't play a chromatic instrument; I play diatonic
instruments in various keys and tunings. The harmonicas I play most are in the
Melody Maker tuning [1], which has a major diatonic scale in the "cross
position" that harp players like to use.

When I read a score, the first thing I need to know is which harp to pick up,
and whether it will be playable at all on this kind of harmonica.

Looking at the Hummingbird notation, how do I figure out which harp to play? I
have to study the whole piece to see which sharps and flats it uses, and then
translate that pattern back into a likely key for the piece. After I do that,
I have to go over the sharps and flats a second time to understand which ones
will be normal notes on that harp and which will be bends or overblows or
impossible.

I guess I could look at the end to see what note it resolves on, but that
wouldn't tell me whether it's in a major or minor key. And even if you told me
what key the piece is in, I'd still have to study the entire thing to sort out
which of the sharps and flats I can ignore and which I have to worry about.

Switching to the traditional notation, I can see from the key signature that
the piece is either in Eb major or that key's relative minor, and I'd use the
Eb Melody Maker for either. Also, I can see at a glance that all the notes in
the treble clef follow the Eb major scale except for those E naturals in the
middle. Those would be trouble, but the alto part looks easy enough.

It may not turn out to be a good harmonica piece anyway, but I immediately
know which harp to play. And other than the accidentals, I know the notes will
be the ones in my scale, so I can start noodling with it right away.

Traditional notation isn't _great_ for a diatonic harmonica player. I don't
really think in absolute scale notes at all, since I change harps to change
keys. I think in terms of relative scale notes. Letter notes may be anywhere
on a harp depending on what key the harp is, but the tonic is always going to
be the draw 2, blow 6, and blow 9 regardless of the key.

So the ideal notation would be one I could always transpose to match the key
of the instrument I'm playing. Maybe Hummingbird would be OK if it was only
used on computers and always transposed on the fly. But give me a printed
score and I'd be lost. At least with traditional notation I've got a chance.

[1]
[https://www.google.com/search?q=melody+maker+harmonica+tunin...](https://www.google.com/search?q=melody+maker+harmonica+tuning)

------
malodyets
Shape-note systems for learners have a long history; this one has some clever
touches, but ultimately that's it's niche -- it's not going to replace
traditional notation, but it might help more non-musicians and non-reading
musicians start reading, which is a good thing.

------
icarus_drowning
Might I suggest that barlines remain connected vertically on both the grand
staff and on instruments in the same family? This is a very easy and intuitive
way to make a score readable, especially when it involves large groups of
instruments (such as orchestral scores).

------
arc_of_descent
I've spent the last year taking some serious time to compose some music. I
always knew how to read sheet music and I think the current notation has
survived cause its easy to read and write. This Hummingbird notation looks
relatively much more complex to me.

------
bwest87
Hey guys. My name is Blake West. I'm the co-inventor of Hummingbird. First,
thanks for all the discussion. There really is no such thing as bad publicity.
You've helped us crack 13k downloads in under 48 hrs. 2nd, I thought I'd just
quickly respond here to some of the main points...

1.) "Traditional is fine. it's not broken": Neither were text-only command
line interfaces. But GUI's are just easier to learn for most people.

2.) I am indeed a professional keyboardist, have been playing and reading
traditional notation since age 7, and I also teach 25 students a week still. I
know theory like the back of my hand, and can talk modes, b9 chords, and
12-tone rows all day long if you like. Jazz and pop are my thing and I play to
lead sheets more often than not now a days. So I know this fro m both angles.

3.) We do have key signatures. They're at the start of each song in plain
english. no need to be cryptic with symbols.

4.) Relative pitch notations seem like a good idea, but they really aren't.
The function of a pitch is honestly pretty subjective and changes frequently
in a song. Not to mention, they'd be much harder to learn, especially for
young students. Relative pitch is an abstraction, and abstraction is the
luxury of experts.

5.) Why not use a chromatic staff or other such layout? Because we actually
wanted some adoption. Most other alternate systems have failed because they're
SO different that they are completely alien. Ours is "backwards compatible",
and also if you did want to switch over to traditional from Hummingbird, you
could, and it's not that crazy.

6.) Why not use colors? Because music still gets printed and photo copied vey
often, and will for at least another 5-10 yrs. And color printing is still 7x
more expensive.

7.) "You can't hand-write the symbols". Yes, you can. It is slower, but our
point is that most music is printed off of notation programs today, so hand-
writing is usually reserved for small edits, or writing fragments from
scratch. This is still completely fine even with an unsharpened pencil with
Hummingbird. I have done it with my students many times.

8.) "Picking out lines and spaces isn't that hard" - If you spent time around
kids you would be SHOCKED at how bad their spatial reasoning is before about
9-11 yrs old. It is really hard for them without a ton of frustration. That
frustration often leads to them thinking they're "bad at music". That turns
them away, and it shouldn't have to.

I know there's other stuff, but just not enough time...

Thanks.

------
jng
Fixing the orthography of English language comes to mind. If that so-
obviously-improvable notation is impossible to fix, this one probably is, too.

But good luck anyway finding something that helps students learn music more
easily. It's clearly a goal worth fighting for!

------
mekarpeles
I feel like a lot of semantics are lost here. Some of the elements are
partially filled -- these elements seem more challenging to classify than the
traditional approach. Also, it's unintuitive how "long" a "----" line should
be held for.

------
josscrowcroft
If I'm not mistaken, the few bars from the homepage are Chopin's Revolutionary
Etude, Op 10 No 12.

I think I prefer the way it looks in traditional notation, and I think music
might be more intuitive to write as such – but heck. Always be innovating.

------
DanielBMarkham
Whoa there. Too much too quickly.

This reminds me of EMACS -- it's going to take a lot of mental work for me
even to begin to understand the strengths and weaknesses of this.

Even if it were better, beats me how you'd actually get people to give it a
chance.

~~~
jerf
I've used traditional notation for more years than I spent minutes looking at
this. I'm not sure anybody can say anything useful beyond "hey, this isn't
what I'm used to".

~~~
DanielBMarkham
It'd be nice if on the page they told us what kind of investment we would be
looking at to actually make an informed decision -- "After only 12 hours of
going through our tutorial, you'll be sight-reading better than ever!" or
something.

------
archagon
Whether or not this is a good solution (I haven't examined it closely yet),
there are certainly a lot of problems with traditional Western notation. For
example: you're limited to 12 pitches, you can't precisely represent bends,
you can't precisely represent note lengths, many of the symbols are cryptic at
first glance, some of the words don't get translated (tempo markings), some of
the symbols are imprecise (again, tempo markings), it's annoying to write
music in non-traditional modes, it's annoying to write music with syncopation,
etc. Sure, this has worked fine for musicians over the past few centuries, but
music has changed a lot since Mozart. I think Western notation could use a
little rethinking, so I'm happy that someone is at least looking into it.

~~~
plus9z
Sure, these are generally valid points, but Hummingbird doesn't really solve
them. I'd love to see a solution to those problems, though. >12-pitch
solutions exist, but they're just cumbersome.

I'd disagree about the precision of note lengths and tempi being a problem,
though, simply because humans aren't very good at keeping exact time. I mean,
ask someone to count off exactly 60 beats evenly divided over the course of a
minute. What about 80? 100? 133? The speed at which you count off is highly
dependent on your heart rate (and possibly state of mind). So assuming we have
an exact tempo, what's the likelihood a note length within it is going to be
played with that same amount of precision? Well, it's all up to the musician's
ability to interpret the composer's intentions, which is much the same as what
we have now. In fact, there are ways even now to specify exact bpm (even if we
can't exactly express slight tempo changes). The notes themselves are
estimates, but fairly good ones at that, and they're effective enough to get
the point across to the musician.

~~~
archagon
Well, with tempi, my main gripe isn't the exact BPM but rather the fact that
you have to memorize all this obscure Italian (+ other?) terminology in order
to understand what's going on. Why can't we have standard localized terms
instead?

As for exact note lengths, I mostly agree with you, except for certain pieces
of modern music (EDM, for instance) where the meter is fairly rigid but the
note lengths are off from the defaults. It would be nice to be able to
represent that accurately.

------
pthreads
This notation is stupid as shit. In addition to the problems mentioned by
others it is so hard to see from a reasonable distance while holding an
instrument. Compare that with the traditional notation.

------
afterburner
The flat symbols are ___tiny_ __. I'm supposed to read this on a music stand?

I dunno, I already learned how to read sheet music, so maybe I'm biased, but
my gut reaction is that it's not an improvement.

------
bpatrianakos
This is a neat idea. Before I got into web dev I was majoring in Music
Composition. I wish I had been exposed to this when I was studying music, it
really does make a lot of sense.

------
eweise
I don't understand what C, below and above mean. Making the bass and treble
clef notes the same seems like a win. Other than that the traditional notes
seem pretty easy to read.

~~~
icarus_drowning
I disagree with making different clefs the same. Clefs are different for a
reason-- they attempt to keep most notes on the staff. Bass and Treble have
won out over competing clefs (if you ever want a challenge, trying reading the
various versions of C Clefs like alto/tenor) because they keep most notes on
the staff most of the time for most instruments. (Violas, Celli, Trombones,
and a few others excepted).

There's also the fact that Treble (G) Clef and Bass (F) Clef are a perfect
fifth away from Middle C, which reinforces the importance of perfect fifths in
the system of major keys, but I suppose that's a small consideration overall.

------
flipcoder
I love how a cool website and some videos can turn any shitty idea into
seeming "revolutionary". +1 for marketing ability, but that's it.

------
thomasfl
The difficult part is to remember which note each lines represent. Especially
the left hand keys takes time to learn.

------
vickytnz
I hate to be that person, but I'd have liked some of those testimonials to
include music students and teachers.

------
mydoghasworms
Very interesting concept, but I can't see this replacing traditional notation.

------
endlessvoid94
This is going to piss a lot of people off. Can't wait to see what happens.

------
plus9z
Funny that I came across this right after a concert (Bottesini, Elgar,
Hindemith, Monti, Saint-Saens, and Dvorak -- all 1st movements of one of their
respective concertos, except for the Trauermusik -- if you're wondering).

So to start off, it's not really a valid criticism to complain about
Hummingbird's alleged emphasis on absolute pitches as opposed to relative
pitches. Honestly, I can read the notes without giving a crap about note
names. I mean, are the circle-names that distracting? The visual position of
pitches is still consonant with traditional notation, so it's still
maintaining the relative spacing you would expect. Additionally, the new
accidentals are at least still on the left where you'd expect them to be.

As far as why this is better than the "teaching notation" [1] of today, it
should be obvious when you zoom out a bit: the current system simply doesn't
visually scale. That example's quite difficult to read without looking at
staff lines. Reading a letter name from inside a note head is impossible
unless you make everything "Fisher-Price"-sized (i.e. unmanageably huge). I
mean, good luck reading this [2] at any distance if it had note names inside.
Sure, by the time you get to the point to be able to play that sort of piece
you shouldn't need note names, but if we're discussing notation, Hummingbird
is definitely better than "teaching notation" in that respect.

On the other hand, we have some new issues that are introduced:

(1) Lack of stems or beams. As others have noted, this really is difficult to
use to scan pieces quickly before/during sight-reading. They've missed the
point with proportional spacing, because there are pieces with really
horrendous spacing that are still actually readable. However, getting rid of
beams makes thinking about rhythmic patterns harder, because now you have to
look in two places to find rhythm grouping (in their version of "beams") and
rhythm (with that squiggly crap under the "note head").

(2) Not to mention, this results in another readability issue when it comes to
notes shorter than a quaver (8th-note): scaling. I cannot tell the difference
between 16th and 32nd notes when I zoom out even a little; the curves all
smoosh together. And WTF is with those rests? They're completely unreadable at
the same zoom level. Traditional notation, however, makes things obvious
because the flags are a clear indicator of the length of the note. In fact, I
can zoom out 8 times farther in traditional notation and see note lengths
EASILY.

(3) This brings up the issue of lower visual information density. I'm not
buying that this will help non-visual learners. I mean, where's the auditory
or tactile feedback here? Not to mention, this hampers visual learners too,
because traditional notation manages to make all the visual cues large yet it
still takes the same amount of space. Hummingbird depends too much on
minimalism, and turns fat, thick beams into anemic lines, and heavy, bold
accidentals into awkward little markings. I'm not saying that this is an issue
that is confined to Hummingbird; badly typeset traditional scores,
particularly computer-generated scores, suffer from this as well. I'm saying
that at its best, Hummingbird is on the same level with respect to clarity as
incompetent traditional typesetting.

(4) Why did they get rid of dotted notes? I mean, functionally, a half-note
tied to a quarter-note is the same as a dotted half, but notationally, they
are used differently. The former would be used in simple duple to represent 1
beat + 1/2 beat, 2 beats + 1 beat, etc. and the latter would function better
in simple triple or compound meters, where it might represent a whole measure
or a whole beat, respectively. Either way, this type of rhythmic grouping is
absent from Hummingbird. I mean, there's a reason why most typesetters don't
go around using triple-dotted half notes every time there's a dotted half tied
to a dotted eighth; it's less readable.

(5) The abstraction in the note names is weird. If you're going to abstract
note names, why not just use position? Why do you have to learn a system using
circle-symbols that no one uses anyway?

(6) Yeah, that key sig thing is really a non-starter. Although I do have
memory lapses regarding the key signature at moments, it's still important,
for the same reason that knowing harmonic and melodic progressions are
important, namely that you know how the notes function in relation to one
another in the piece. If you want to scan a piece of music and write a harmony
for it, or do anything to it besides just reading it, the key sig is almost a
necessity.

(7) This might become a non-issue in future versions/revisions, but what about
other notation for ornamentations and other musical aspects in general? Slurs
(look a bit like rests, and violates every sense of notational consistency as
a result), certain chords (if you want to typeset two adjacent notes, normally
you just shift one note head to one side; Hummingbird makes that impossible),
multiple voicings (how do you mark separate voices if you can't use stem
direction b/c there are no stems to work with?), trills (not the "tr" mark,
but the wavy line that sometimes follows or replaces it; looks a bit too much
like a bunch of 8th notes tied together), tremolos (if there are no flags, how
do you write a tremolo?), Bartok pizzicati (which look remarkably similar to
16th rests and sharp symbols), tuplets (how do you express a tuplet if there's
no stem? Then the tuplet bracket looks like a beam, and the tuplet number
might as well be a fingering), acciaccature/appogiature (there is no concept
of note size, so notating grace notes is impossible), glissandi (they look
like beams -- is this getting old?), and articulation marks (many of which are
too close for comfort to random symbols that I won't bother enumerating here).

I mean this huge post is just scratching the surface of the fundamental issues
with Hummingbird. By all means, find a way to improve notation, but if the
intent is make reading note names easier, don't sacrifice literally everything
else. If I was given complete control of Hummingbird, revision 2 would be
identical to traditional notation, except for the note heads. Yeah, there
would still be scalability issues, but the change wouldn't castrate the
notation as a whole, it would allow a very smooth transition to traditional
notation, and at the very least those circle things are ignorable by
professionals. The final issue, then, is how do you differentiate half notes
and quarter notes or tremolos... Ah never mind, it's just a mess already. And
don't forget, we have a better two-century old version of this proposal
already [3], but some shapes still look a bit too similar to one another...

TL;DR Hummingbird is equally fast to read, but is less information-dense and
scalable, and invalidates many aspects and necessary facets of current
notation, which all combined introduces unnecessary headache for everyone
who's not a newb. Can't comment on behalf of the noobs, because it's been a
while, and you can't really imagine what it's like to not be able to read
notation when you actually can.

Also what guy designed those samples with GRAY staff lines? They blend into
the white background waaay too easily, and makes Hummingbird harder to read. I
mean, that traditional F-C-F quarter note triad looks like an F-(B? or C? or
D?)-F triad in Hummingbird.

[1]
[http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.14/Documentation/f8/lily-13872c43...](http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.14/Documentation/f8/lily-13872c43.png)
[2] [http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.12/Documentation/user/e3/lily-
bfe...](http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.12/Documentation/user/e3/lily-bfe938fb.png)
[3] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shape_note>

~~~
plus9z
Basically my defense of traditional notation is that although it makes easy
music hard to read initially, it makes difficult music easy to read in the
long run. If a notation has to compromise, I'd rather pay the price at the
beginning than for the rest of the time I use the notation. Also, I would ask,
what problem does Hummingbird actually address (besides note naming)?

------
DonnyV
This would be a pain to read for drum music. Especially drum set music.

------
3327
can anyone tell me why the first "high c" in the example bassline has inverted
colors? white dot in black circle vs the mapping table of black dot in white
circle?

~~~
plus9z
It's fixed now, apparently.

------
mikec3k
The current notation works & musicians have been learning & using it for
centuries. I'm not a musician, but I've learned to read traditional music
notation. It's not that hard. Why fix what isn't broken?

~~~
shmerl
Why some people create new languages or new alphabets? Because it's fun, and
why not?

------
mumrah
I see in no way how this is an improvement.

------
toddc
Hummingbird - shot down in flames.

------
tosic
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

~~~
plus9z
Really? Then how do we have progress? I mean, I prefer current notation, but
who's to say that this is the best possible notation to express musical ideas?
Although Hummingbird isn't going to supplant it for a lot of reasons, there
may be a better system that will.

~~~
tosic
We do have progress by fixing broken things and by gradually improving working
things. This did happend already over (quite some) time with the current
notation.

~~~
plus9z
Not all progress is gradual. Sometimes we need a complete overhaul. In this
case, I don't see the need, but if there is something that much better than
current notation, then I would hope that it does supplant this.

------
the1
nope

------
creed0r
I was going to write the longest comment this site has ever seen, explaining
every single bit that's wrong with this idea but I decided to rather keep it
short:

>>>> This is the most stupidest idea I have ever come across. <<<<

It's very nature is wrong on so many levels that my head starts to hurt,
seriously.

And to offer people, who never got the current system taught well and who have
been waiting for something else that would presumably make their lives easier,
a sort of "easy-way-out" solution, rather than attacking the real problem at
hand, is so cheap and just so wrong that I feel sorry for all seconds spend
thinking on this bullshit rather than on how to improve the overall
teaching/teachers quality.

Forget this crap. Teach the current system the way it's supposed to be
teached, learn it the way it's supposed the learned and the reward will be
lifelong priceless knowledge and skill.

