
Experimental music notation resources (2015) - panic
http://llllllll.co/t/experimental-music-notation-resources/149
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edjroot
Slightly related, but I've always wondered if there are similar (preferably
successful) explorations in maths. "Mainstream" notations are clearly
optimized for handwriting, but there's just so much room with current tech for
optimizing for e.g. visual intuitiveness. And let's not even talk about all
the historical burden that's made these notations the convoluted mess they are
today.

(Uncreative, probably very bad) examples: Replace brackets with boxes, use
colors (think syntax highlighting), icons, or even basic text-like formatting.
And that's still being very conservative in relation to what could be done, as
exemplified by the OP.

Any pointers/ideas?

~~~
filleokus
I have always wondered how professional mathematicians work day to day. It
depends on their field of course, but I guess most still use pen and paper (or
a digital version, i.e iPad Pro + Apple Pencil / Wacom). I have at least never
seen any tools for "explorative" manipulation of symbolic expressions. TeX etc
works great for final type setting, but when going from mind to _something_ I
guess that something is still paper, or an equivalent. Would be really
interesting to see the equivalent of an IDE / good text editor for math,
perhaps with pen input for speed.

~~~
xelxebar
I'm a Ph.D. student in a pure math field, and just coming from personal
experience, the overall relationship with TeX is a pretty strained one. The
overwhelming majority of working out is done by hand on paper or a chalk
board.

That said, as an experiment, I did about half of my Master's thesis work in
TeX. Without quick feedback on the rendered formulae, I had a much harder time
reasoning through things, so having a comfortable text editing environment
seems crucial.

That said, I wouldn't recommend using TeX as a scratchpad. It just doesn't map
well to the sets of tools that we tend to use: mini diagrams, arrows between
parts of the page, strikeout and circling text, etc.

What might work is something like e-paper that renders a handwritten document
into text. Ideally, we could turn letters into Unicode and diagrams into
vector graphics, providing tools to edit and embellish the rendered versions
if desired.

It's extremely common to edit equations and diagrams on the fly, so I would
probably feel friction with anything other that doesn't seem to just magically
"prettify" whatever I handwrite at it. Seems like a really tall order though.

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ThinkingGuy
Some alternative/experimental music notation systems look very impressive, and
even beautiful, on paper, but with some of them I wonder if that's due to the
system itself, or the complexity of particular piece being rendered.

In the coding world, we have "Hello World" and Fizzbuzz. It would be nice if
alternative music notation systems had something similar: A simple, familiar
melody (candidates that come to mind are "Happy Birthday to You," and
"Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star") that, by rendering it in the new notation
system, demonstrated the fundamental features of that system, and could be
easily understood by someone knowledgeable in the traditional system.

~~~
psychometry
It would be nice if people on HN didn't try to turn everything into a coding
analogy.

~~~
wolfram74
But it's fairly fitting since musical notation is /supposed/ to be
instructions for making a machine behave in a certain way. It's an early
example of write-once-run-everywhere since the sheet music is relatively
unchanged from instrument to instrument.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
Sheet music contains instructions for making human musicians behave a certain
way. There is no sense in which it's a complete description of a musical
performance. Timing variations and dynamics are all controlled by the player.

If the score is figured bass, the player will improvise/create a complete
accompaniment from a sketch of the bass line and some hints about the harmony.

And it's not necessarily unchanged. The layout of a piano score and a
transposed brass line are only distantly related. The notation will be common,
more or less, with the limitation that a horn line is monophonic while a piano
can play chords.

But the key won't be the same, which means the pitches won't be the same. And
many of the expressive markings will be different too.

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jcelerier
If anyone is interested by this topic, feel free to check on the software I'm
working on : a visual notation for art & multimedia installations which embeds
traditional programming constructs (conditions, loops) but at the temporal
level. The software is called Ossia Score
([https://ossia.io](https://ossia.io)).

~~~
enqk
Is this in anyway based on the Tiled Media papers? (Tuiles Musicales)

~~~
jcelerier
not really, but I did my thesis in the same lab than one of the authors (David
Janin (ping Simon si tu passes par là!)) so there has been a lot of
discussions about the various models for representing musical time :p

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mar77i
I'm sorry if my layman's perspective is off here, but notation that impedes
the musician's ability to actually perform a piece, and be it only for visual
pleasure, seems like not a very useful idea to me. It kind of reminds me of
this: [https://imgur.com/gallery/XOT47](https://imgur.com/gallery/XOT47)

~~~
TotempaaltJ
Not everything in art has to be useful

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ttul
Snowforms by R Murray Schafer:
[https://goo.gl/images/1FHHXo](https://goo.gl/images/1FHHXo)

I performed this in France with my treble choir in 1990. Schafer sat in the
audience looking grumpy. It’s a beautiful piece, and Schafer is odd.

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emptybits
If you find yourself inspired by wild notations I recommend this coffee table
book: "Notations 21" by Theresa Sauer.

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adrianh
Requisite link to my product Soundslice:
[https://www.soundslice.com/](https://www.soundslice.com/)

We make web-based interactive music notation. Nothing “experimental” as in the
original link, but it may be interesting to the HN crowd as a boundary-pushing
web app.

