
Tibetan musical notation - gpvos
http://www.openculture.com/2019/04/tibetan-musical-notation-is-beautiful.html
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girzel
I play the guqin (古琴), a Chinese zither-like instrument which I believe is the
oldest instrument in the world for which musical notation exists. Like the
Tibetan notation, it doesn't indicate rhythm or duration of notes, just
succession. Until a hundred years ago or so, people were just assuming they
knew what the melody sounded like, and to this day you will hear different
interpretations of the same piece that simply make different assumptions about
the duration of notes.

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goldenkey
Wouldn't that be equivalent to guitar tabs?

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sammorrowdrums
Tabs are actually written in beats and bars. Technically you are correct that
the duration of each note is not entirely prescribed however as it's set into
a strict rhythm notes in guitar tab don't exceed their max duration in
context.

This image illustrates it well

[https://i.stack.imgur.com/2hRnd.png](https://i.stack.imgur.com/2hRnd.png)

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williamdclt
I'm not sure those rythm annotations below the notes are part of the
"standard" tab notation.

But then, I'm not sure there's such a thing as a "standard" tab notation.

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EADGBE
That style of notation is more of the "paid for" notation we're all familiar
with. Something you'd find in a tab book along the front row of shelving at
record stores (remember those!). For those of us who were in the internet tabs
heyday: this was a delicacy - among simply things like having correct
notation.

The whole point of tab is it's shorthand mentality (As I'm sure you're aware
of). It can mean whatever you want it to mean. I grew up learning guitar on a
tab system created by my teacher, which I've never really seen duplicated
before, but was based off of chord diagrams (even for non-chords).

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sammorrowdrums
Yeah the books were great! I also discovered that Italians used solfa after
seeing an Italian blink 182 tab book at a holiday camp!

So it had the chord names written like Do-M La-m...

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michaelsbradley
Not related to Tibetan musical notation, but the notation of Gregorian chant
is also an interesting system and quite accessible (and probably interesting)
to musically inclined modern students, self-taught or otherwise (the scale is
movable).

See:

[https://www.sanctamissa.org/en/music/gregorian-
chant/choir/l...](https://www.sanctamissa.org/en/music/gregorian-
chant/choir/liber-usualis-1961.html)

[http://media.musicasacra.com/books/chironomy.pdf](http://media.musicasacra.com/books/chironomy.pdf)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRQ11bYvfVQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRQ11bYvfVQ)

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mpicker0
Another style I enjoy is Byzantine chant, though I only recently realized it
has its own notation:

[https://cappellaromana.org/divine-liturgy-
music/](https://cappellaromana.org/divine-liturgy-music/)

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michaelsbradley
Indeed, Byzantine chant is glorious! It admits of many _styles_.

For example, the Antiochian and Russian (in translation to English, at least
in parts):

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VNdXMFleBM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VNdXMFleBM)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcxAodBOvOU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcxAodBOvOU)

This is a _most_ remarkable rendition of Russian Great Vespers:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vya2xSYSz1c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vya2xSYSz1c)

I am moved every time I listen to it, a _masterpiece!_ I believe the setting
is by Sergei Rachmaninoff.

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Mediterraneo10
Russian liturgical music is not Byzantine chant. Yes, traditions like Znamenny
can ultimately be traced back to Byzantine music, but along the way they
evolved into something different. Later, Western polyphonic singing that had
nothing to do with the Byzantine tradition was imported, and that informed the
work of many prominent 19th-century and early 20th century Russian composers
of sacred works.

That is why in the Orthodox Christian world, people perceive such a distinct
difference between the liturgical singing of e.g. Greece, Albania, or Romania,
and the singing of e.g. Ukraine or Russia.

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michaelsbradley
Fair enough, but there is an audible relationship — it's not apples to
oranges, as discernible even in the recordings linked in my previous comment.

Similarly, in the West the one-voice Gregorian chants are not separated by a
great gulf from the polyphonic pieces that gained prominence in the 1500s.

One can listen to a Gregorian choir sing the _Regina caeli laetare_ and then
listen to a rendition of Palestrina's _Sicut cervus_ without the feeling of
crossing into a wholly alien musical universe:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzMa0qzwagA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzMa0qzwagA)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yd5EE0hAB8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yd5EE0hAB8)

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spectramax
I’ve always wondered, is there a better way to annotate music? Essentially, we
are transcribing temporal patterns into spatial 2D patterns. Discrete notes
were created to allow for hand written notation, but if we assume notation
doesn’t need to be handwriting-compatible, I wonder if we can do a better job
of capturing details? Perhaps some kind of spectral/FFT scroll?

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beat
The map is not the territory. Furthermore, the language of the map limits how
the territory can be described. So "better way to annotate music" depends, at
least in part, on the kind of music you're annotating.

This really came home to me when I was studying frame drumming of the central
Asian plains. In Western notation terms, this music has very complex and
difficult "time signatures", but that's because it's not metric in the same
way as European music. If you think of it in its own terms, it's actually
pretty easy to understand. Just break the rhythm down into sub-beats of 2, 3,
or 4 pulses. So for example, a 13 beat long line might be 23233. Try counting
that out loud - one two one two three one two one two three one two three -
and you'll immediately hear it. But it's hell to notate in Western notation.
And it gets worse when pieces turn into meta-sequences that have "bars" of
varying length.

I've long been involved with the free improvisation scene, and improvisation
always happens within some sort of set of rules. How do you notate something
that's made up on the spot, within a framework? Take blues guitar leads as an
example. They tend to stick within pretty limited pentatonic scales, against
the underlying triplet shuffle feel of American music, but they're not
"notated", really.

This leads to other, alternative notation systems that more aptly describe the
style of music at hand, like the Nashville Number System.

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0815test
Additive meter is actually a well-known concept even in Western music. It's
clearly needed even to make sense of, e.g. "5/4" or "7/4" meter, which yes,
are sometimes found in the repertoire - because these are already ambiguous in
practice: does the 5 in "5/4" mean "3+2" or "2+3"? You need to know that in
order to understand the music and figure out how it goes - to make it
"meaningful" as someone else said.

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beat
Additive meter just shows where the concept of "time signature" breaks down
The pulse of the music is not apparent from the notation. So it doesn't even
fully explain Western music, much less non-Western music. (That said, while
7/4 exists in the repertoire, it's exceedingly rare - European music tends to
be very simple rhythmically, compared to Indian, Arabic, or most African
music.)

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jmkd
Worth clarifying the curators of this text are Emma Lewis and Devin Zuckerman
from the Buddhist Digital Resource Center, and not Google, as the article
misleadingly suggests.

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tdeck
This is very reminiscent of early European neumes:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neume](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neume)

Here's a good example:
[https://catapultingintoclassical.files.wordpress.com/2015/11...](https://catapultingintoclassical.files.wordpress.com/2015/11/neumes001.jpg)

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meebob
Some other fun examples of points in the music notation space are the various
notation systems used by traditional Japanese musical instruments... For
instance, the shakuhachi (a type of bamboo flute) has a system where various
combinations of fingerings/blowing technique are each assigned distinct
characters (the same pitch, but achieved with different fingerings, and
therefore having different tone colors, will have different characters).
Rhythm and ornamentation are then indicated with various annotations on these
characters. You could maybe make the analogy that Japanese music notation
relates to Western classical notation in a similar way to how Chinese
characters compare to alphabetical systems...

Other instruments have similar (but generally mutually unintelligible!)
systems, with different characters assigned to particular notes/techniques
peculiar to those instruments.

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HNLurker2
Off topic: Chanting in an ancient language (which you probably don't even
understand) isn't what buddha taught and music does cause suffering (according
to the teachings)

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Raymonf
Well, there are different variants of Buddhism. Tibetan Buddhism is pretty
different from, say, Zen.

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drak0n1c
Yes there are, but as an aside, Zen chants Sanskrit too. It's a common
practice.

