
A History of Music Notation - fern12
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/music/maps/sound-systems
======
archagon
If anyone wants to mess around with “drawable” notation (along the lines of
the “avant-garde” section), I made an iPad app called Composer’s Sketchpad[1]
that lets you do just that. You can use it to sketch out complicated solos or
mess around with microtonal music in a way that ordinary notation does not
permit. I really need to give it a nice 2.0 makeover with full MIDI in/out,
but making money on esoteric App Store software is hard!

[1]: [http://composerssketchpad.com](http://composerssketchpad.com)

Bonus devblog: [http://archagon.net/2016/02/05/composers-
sketchpad/](http://archagon.net/2016/02/05/composers-sketchpad/)

~~~
baldfat
> but making money on esoteric App Store software is hard!

You mean "but making money on App Store software is hard!"

~~~
archagon
Yeah, but especially when your app costs money, is targeted at a niche
audience, and doesn't have a good way to do continuous updates or IAP!

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smortaz
one improvement to the current piano music notation is making both staves
start/end on the same notes. ie, EGBDF for both. right now a student learns
the "right hand" / treble staff to be EGBDF... you'll mentally learn that the
third line is a B note - maybe natural/sharp/flat, but it's a B. great. now
you learn the bass clef and all the work you did for the treble clef is not
applicable anymore: cause it's GBDFA! WTH? the third line is now a D and not a
B like before. sure, youre supposed to learn both clefs together, but
especially for beginners and sight reading, it wouldve been nice if both had
the same sequence. especially when theyre only a 3rd apart! a possible way to
achieve this is to add an A to the top of the treble clef: EGBDF[A], and add
and E to the bottom of the bass clef [E]GBDFA. now both are are easier to
learn and you dont have to constantly shift a third in your head. the 3rd line
is _always_ a B in both staves.

Another improvement, especially for piano music is to make the white/black key
indication carried in the note shape/head. right now the note head carries
duration information. it could also include whether it's a black key or white.
this is useful especially for complex keys with many sharps/flats. this way
whether you're in C major or Ab Minor, you dont have to constantly remember
which notes are accidentals. sure, youre supposed to learn the scale and
remember (including all the cancellations, double sharp/flats), but it's
massively easier if this useful info is carried in the note shape. eg: square
note head = black, triangle = white.

sorry for the rant!

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
The reason they're a third apart is because middle C goes on an imaginary line
half way between the other two.

The grand staff is really a single giant clef with the middle line missed out
for clarity, and some extra space added around it to allow for leger lines.

Your system would need extra legers above/below the clefs, so it wouldn't be
an obvious improvement.

Coloured note heads are better at conveying pitch than note shapes - which are
already used in percussion notation. But coloured note heads cost a _lot_ more
to print, and scores are expensive enough as it is.

Having notation that is consistent across all instruments, not just piano, is
a good thing.

I doubt anyone would duplicate current notation if it was designed from
scratch today. But like a lot of things - including CSS and HTML - it's a mass
of accreted compromises with a massive existing user base.

 _No one_ is going to re-notate centuries of music with a new system, no
matter how much more logical it is. It's not going to happen for the purely
practical reason that most music will still be in the old system, and
musicians would still have to learn that system to play it.

~~~
edjw
> Coloured note heads are better at conveying pitch than note shapes - which
> are already used in percussion notation.

Shape notes are used in singing traditions such as Sacred Harp and Christian
Harmony to help singers find the right pitch. It works very well. I don't know
if anyone uses them for instrumental music.

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

------
bane
Musical notation is _really_ interesting, a bit like mathematical notation.
There's really only one standard way of doing it, both relatively recent, and
both having histories going back thousands of years.

There's a few oddball variants that survive, and almost all ancient systems
just used strings of characters from whatever the local writing system was to
represent the music, but did so imprecisely. Few of the systems even provided
absolute pitch guides or timing and provided more of a sketch of the tune than
a high precision description.

For fun, try to come up with your own system from first principals without
arriving at something that's kind of like what we use today and can still
compactly describe just about any kind of music. Try the same with math
notation. It's both hard and fun!

I'm glad that they put in the avant guard entry, but a few musicians also have
various kinds of shorthand. Here's an entry on Yanni's.

[https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-Yanni-cant-read-
music](https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-Yanni-cant-read-music)

~~~
21
What do you think about the piano roll, which is extremely approachable and
used extensively by modern producers (of popular songs) with zero to little
schooling in the area. I think is the WYSIWYG of music notation (and just as
DOC vs Latex, less powerful and less expressive)

[https://i.ytimg.com/vi/F5vcDzzqT7c/maxresdefault.jpg](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/F5vcDzzqT7c/maxresdefault.jpg)

~~~
jcranmer
Since I'm not terribly great at the technicals of playing a piano, I thought I
would do really well with a piano roll, but in practice, I find it much easier
to read sheet music. Some reasons why:

1\. Piano rolls spend a lot of visual real estate on functionally unimportant
stuff. You need to see the full 7-octave range even if you need to play only
3-4 octaves at any given point of time. By contrast, traditional scores let
you use clef changes or 8va/8vb notation to do access different ranges,
allowing the full range to be compressed in around 2 inches or so of space.

2\. Even worse than pitch range is the difference in the time dimension: when
you have a piece that varies between long, sustained notes and bursts of short
melodies, a traditional score can give you the pitch contour of the first part
and the sufficient detail of the second part. A piano roll means that you
either have to stretch the first bit out so long you can't see the overall
contour or you have to make the second part so small as to be virtually
unreadable (or, as I've found on some pieces, both!). Alternatively, you might
opt for a non-uniform mapping on the time dimension, but that is probably
going to screw players up big time.

3\. Piano rolls (at least every one that I've seen) are unable to reflect
useful ancillary information, such as dynamics, very effectively. Admittedly,
traditional scores tend to suck at reflecting the true dynamics very well, but
they are more than adequate for getting people to reproduce them in a rather
recognizable way. It's kind of like written text and language--our written
languages, even IPA, can't faithfully reproduce spectograms of human speech,
but there's sufficient information to reproduce sounds that we can understand
as pretty accurate speech.

4\. It definitely seems a lot harder on a piano roll to recognize patterns
that ease the actual playing of the tune. For example, seeing that this
section is an earlier section at a different tempo, different key, different
pitch, etc.

~~~
evincarofautumn
Your comparison to IPA is interesting—it’s as if the piano roll is a raw
“phonetic” transcription, while traditional notation is more like a structural
“phonemic” representation that conveys the sounds as they’re functionally
understood. The former treats all information as equally important, missing
high-level structure and using space poorly; the latter omits some information
and encodes other information redundantly or in a compressed format to convey
what’s most important to the reader.

------
flavio81
Beautiful. In the XX century, many modern composers (like for example
composers of serial music) invented diverse methods of music notation; it
deserves to be explored in depth.

Here are some truly _fascinating_ examples of them!

[https://llllllll.co/t/experimental-music-notation-
resources/...](https://llllllll.co/t/experimental-music-notation-
resources/149/10)

And here

[https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/5-12-examples-
of...](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/5-12-examples-of-
experimental-music-notation-92223646/)

Warning: This will blow your mind.

EDIT: Also this link: [https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-
culture/5-12-examples-of...](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-
culture/5-12-examples-of-experimental-music-notation-92223646/)

------
rdtsc
There is also Byzantine Notation

[https://orthodoxwiki.org/Byzantine_Notation](https://orthodoxwiki.org/Byzantine_Notation)

The interesting thing there I found "Byzantine notation, on the other hand, is
relational; the note is dependent on the previous note and the symbol itself,
which specifies the interval from the previous note. "

EDIT: Saw Ethiopian notation there and got curious and found this chant
(performance?) from a music school from Addis Ababa

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iztBcn3UZIA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iztBcn3UZIA)

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indescions_2017
Link to "Hurrian Hymn to Nikkal" c. 1500 BC. Modern arrangement could easily
score the opening to a new David Fincher film ;)

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

21st Century notation software is fascinating in the way it bridges classical
technique into contemporary sound production. It allows for the tiniest
nuances in composition and engraving. A combinatorial ruleset of very high
dimension indeed. While simultaneously integrating with state-of-the-art
instrument synthesis and production software. It's just a remarkable attention
to detail and UX design. I'm really inspired by it. Truly software as an
"Extension of the Mind"!

Dorico | Steinberg

[https://www.steinberg.net/en/products/dorico/start.html](https://www.steinberg.net/en/products/dorico/start.html)

------
erasmuse
I think modern musical notation could be improved by making a more readily
apparent distinction between phrase marks and tied notes. As it is one often
has to read ahead on a tied note to see if is tied or not, which costs
attention.

~~~
JasonFruit
You have to be reading ahead anyway to be physically prepared for the next
notes. This is a problem only for the nearly musically-illiterate.

~~~
erasmuse
Sure but I could be reading even _further_ ahead if I didn't have to carefully
trace the horizontal line from a tied note (to see if it stays on the same
level or if it jumps to another note). On the other hand if it were, say, a
thicker line, or a broken line, or a line of different colour, or a something-
else-to-distinguish-it-from-a-phrase-mark, then I could be utilising that time
more fruitfully.

------
zde
Sadly, they miss the important ones.

[http://noname.c64.org/tracker/manual_online.php](http://noname.c64.org/tracker/manual_online.php)

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jcelerier
Shameless plug: [Ossia Score, a visual programming paradigm which can be used
to make music and other creative
applications]([https://www.ossia.io](https://www.ossia.io)). Unlike many
software in this category, it is not centered on the idea of data flow, but on
time flow as main interaction paradigm (eg it looks more like a sequencer than
a patcher), while still allowing programming elements.

------
emptybits
For those intrigued by alternative music notation, I highly recommend the book
"Notations 21" by Theresa Sauer. It's a gorgeous hardcover "art book" with
full-page examples of modern notation systems (generally quite stunning and
artistic) by over 100 different musicians and/or composers. If you search
Pinterest for the title and author you can see some examples.

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zeveb
Pretty cool, but it leaves out
[http://www.byzantinechant.org/notation.html](http://www.byzantinechant.org/notation.html)
(which looks, unsurprisingly, like a distant cousin of the Seikilos notation).

~~~
delibaltas
I thought exactly the same. Maybe it is missing because this notation is still
in use.

------
mr_monkeywrench
Carnatic, Hindustani?

