

Experimental Music Notation Resources - GuiA
http://llllllll.co/t/experimental-music-notation-resources/149/98

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bane
It's kind of surprising what a hard design problem musical notation is. Like
modern mathematical notation, modern standard musical notation is incredibly
elegant.

\- It can be read almost as fast as being played

\- It captures a tremendous level of complexity and expressiveness

\- It communicates the music _almost_ exactly

\- It's flexible and can stretch to accommodate almost any instrument in the
Western cultural inventory

Like mathematical notation, it's incredibly general purpose, you can write
jazz, rock and symphonies in pretty much the same system.

It's not _perfect_ , it doesn't perfectly encode every nuance of a performance
in the same way a recording can. But it's possible, without ever hearing a
piece, to read modern notation and be able to provide a very high quality
replay of the original work.

It's also paradoxically simple. A young child can learn the basics and be able
to perform simple pieces reasonably well.

In the early 20th century there was an explosion of ideas (seen here) for
alternate systems, all part of the deconstruction of music movement, but
they're almost all specialist systems, not really capable of encoding general
purpose music.

For a while, I was interested to see who else had come up with notation
systems and I spent some time researching through history. It turns out,
surprisingly (considering the often amazingly deep musical traditions many
cultures have), that there aren't many [1]

Most systems use a simple language glyph to note correspondence, but things
like duration weren't encoded. A modern take would be like writing a song
something like: A A E E A E D E F E and having only that kind of system to
encode everything from symphonies to pop-music.

A major innovation in Korea was the introduction of a system that _did_ encode
duration.

Other systems used relative markings, early European chants would indicate
things in such a way that notes were higher or lower than the preceeding
notes.

Both kinds of systems required lots of verbal information transmission to
properly transfer the knowledge of the song's performance. With repetition a
performer could learn the proper way to recreate the song, using the notation
as a memory aid.

Later Western efforts encoded things on a bar to provide more detail and the
modern system is merely an extension of that.

In the East, the Eastern Orthodox Christians developed a system known today as
Byzantine Notation, and it's quite beautiful. But it's still a relative system
that requires some significant contextual knowledge to perform from sight.

For fun, I encourage any musicians here to try to come up with, from first
principles, a good general purpose musical notation system. It's incredibly
hard to do without sacrificing things like in-performance readability or
compactness. If you aren't a musician, I encourage you to do the same with
math notation, starting with numbers and see what you can come up with. I've
found it's very hard to do so without more or less ending up with some
variation on the current systems we use.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_notation#Notation_in_v...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_notation#Notation_in_various_countries)
1 -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_notation#Notation_in_v...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_notation#Notation_in_various_countries)

~~~
ciconia
> It's not perfect, it doesn't perfectly encode every nuance of a performance
> in the same way a recording can.

There is a common misconception that music notation (at least the European
kind) is about capturing a performance, or describing sound. It is not. The
function of the notation is to preserve and communicate an abstract musical
idea.

That idea is then interpreted by musicians and becomes a "performance". For
example, in a jazz context 8th notes would be played "swinging", in a similar
fashion to the "notes inegales" of baroque music. In early music in general,
the idea is that the notes convey only the gist of the music, and the
performer is expected to elaborate on them with ornamentations and
diminutions.

This double life of the music, as an eternal abstract idea and an ephemeral,
momentary sound happening, is perhaps the defining characteristic of the
classical European tradition.

------
ctdonath
A pity there is no musical rendition to go with them.

Well, _Clouds For Piano_ did come out nice.
[http://llllllll.co/uploads/default/a5a394625f34fb9f61fa24832...](http://llllllll.co/uploads/default/a5a394625f34fb9f61fa24832b779dcbae99961d)

