
How I’d redesign piano sheet music - cyanbane
https://medium.com/@alexcouch/how-i-d-redesign-piano-sheet-music-355c4f9012f1?source=tw-a086ba56b195-1435792847059?source=tw-504c7870fdb6-1428623404341
======
bbx
What happens if you rotate that first image 90° counter-clockwise?
[http://i.imgur.com/i2V57On.png](http://i.imgur.com/i2V57On.png) You get a
traditional sheet music with simpler graphics.

What about the new features?

    
    
      - Easily printable: traditional scores already are
      - Screen and scroll-friendly: you can stack traditional score pages vertically
      - Chord names: already exist on traditional scores
      - Lyrics: same thing
      - Foot pedal arrows: same thing
    

The only novelty here is to match a piano's physical _horizontal_ pitch range,
which forces the time axis to be vertical instead.

I guess sheet music is like code: sometimes you just need to learn it the
_hard_ way.

~~~
amsilprotag
I challenge "easily printable." This way of writing sheet music is vastly more
space inefficient. Each beat requires an entire row of space, whereas a beat
in sheet music might require 3 square inches at most. Having many pages of
sheet music, like in coding, makes it much harder to understand the song as a
whole and navigate repeats.

I do like the fact that — unlike with sheet music - the 12 semi-tones are
spaced evenly, as they are in reality. This allows for fast visual recognition
of chord types and intervals.

~~~
rspeer
As long as you're playing tonal music, chord types and intervals will be
strongly associated with the 7 note names, not just the 12 semitones. A
perfect fourth will always be the same size on the staff, for example.

If it's "spelled" differently -- if an interval of that size is actually
written as C-E#, for example -- then that's a sign that something weird is
going on and you're not supposed to think of this interval as a fourth.

The fact that we write music using the 7-note diatonic scale is kind of like
compression: it optimizes notation for the notes and intervals you're most
likely to play. It's just not suited for atonal music, much like compression
is not suited for random-looking data.

~~~
ericmo
I know little music theory, but I've been playing instruments "by ear" for a
long time and it made many things easier to me when I learned that if you're
using diatonic scale, it's very unlikely that you'll use notes outside of the
scale; e.g. if you're playing a song in C Major, most of the time you'll play
C and D, not C# or Db, so if you need that note, it's easier to switch than
having an almost unused line in the sheet.

------
analog31
I'm a bassist, of the "don't quit your day job" variety. Owing to the accident
of having a certain musical background, I'm a fluent sight-reader, and the
groups that I play in require this skill. I frequently encounter a mixture of
standard notation (SN) and chord symbols, plus the occasional Nashville number
chart.

From what I can tell, people have explored different notation systems for a
couple of reasons. The first is that SN is an entry barrier for beginners. The
second is to express musical ideas that don't fit within the bounds of SN.

But in my view, the reason why SN remains in use, is that there's a symbiosis
between composers who can write it, and musicians who can sight-read, i.e.,
perform it directly from the sheet. Tabulature, or other pictographic
notations don't work because the composers don't intimately know all of the
instruments that they're writing for (including the variety of tuning and
fingering systems for each instrument), and nobody knows how to sight-read
those notations.

Another issue with any method involving computer graphics, is that there are
still a surprising number of composers who use pencil and paper, because
notation software is so cumbersome.

In one band that I'm in, the composer brings new material to each rehearsal.
It's all written out by hand.

~~~
cwp
I agree. The value of SN is that it's _abstract_. It assumes a certain
structure (the one that western music uses) and describes melody in terms of
that structure. It doesn't concern itself with the actual sounds involved (eg.
frequencies and durations) or the mechanics of producing them (eg. tablature).

SN is difficult for beginners because music is difficult for beginners.
Notations that focus on the mechanics of the instrument are easier to start
with, because they don't require any theoretical background in music. That's
fine, but they won't be able to replace SN.

I'm very interested in this sort of cognitive technology, but I have yet to
see a proposal for improving on SN in its own terms. Is there some notation
out there that is simpler than SN, but just as expressive? Something that
could be approachable for beginners, but still useful for experts?

~~~
analog31
One thing I'm familiar with, thanks to my kids, is the Suzuki method of violin
instruction. Kids start out just playing by rote memorization, and by ear,
with no charts. There were books for the Suzuki repertoire, more for the use
of adults, as the kids didn't read from them.

When I was growing up, Suzuki was controversial in the US because teachers
were afraid that kids would lose the chance to learn how to read, and be
musically crippled for life. I have to admit that I was among the skeptical,
since I learned according to the European method.

The first note that I ever played, an open string, I read from a book that had
that one big note sitting there in front of me. The entire emphasis was on
"getting the cats out of the instrument" as it were, but yet it was all done
with reading from the git-go.

What's happened since then in the US (don't know about elsewhere) is that
reading is introduced gradually through a separate curriculum. It's been going
on for long enough that Suzuki kids are now playing professionally in
orchestras, and we've met one or two "superstar" concert violinists through
master classes for the kids, who have mentioned their Suzuki background.

So apparently you can start out without reading, and live to tell about it.

~~~
ams6110
Well we all learn to talk well before we learn to read and write, so I guess
it's not too farfetched.

------
raverbashing
Yes, musical notation is hard. But no, this is not an improvement.

While a lot of the problems of it comes from its limitations at the origin
(think medieval musicians writing music) it is a very flexible and interesting
format

What are the problems I see with it:

\- Apart from the center notes, it's hard to know which note is which. I know
that the second line from the bottom is a G, beats me what's that thing 3
lines above the regular lines

\- It's hard to capture what's happening. Chords on top help

\- Having to identify notes in G clef, F clef (and C clef sometimes)

\- It's an absolute mess when you have lots of simultaneous notes

I know there are a lot of historical, instrumental or music-theoretical
reasons things are like that, but there's room for improvement

I just wouldn't think of twinkle twinkle little star when designing it, I
would think of something more complex (and Let It Be, props to him, is not
very complex but also not very simple)

(And that's not touching the issues with the piano, that's another load of
items)

~~~
andrewliebchen
It's clearly stated that the solution is meant to be like guitar tabs for
piano. It's a limited, instrument-centered approach and not intended as a
complete or universal solution.

~~~
baddox
Traditional sheet music is already like guitar tabs for piano, because pianos
(unlike guitars) only have one physical place where you can play a given note
(like middle C). The reason guitar tabs make some sense [0] for guitar music
is that "middle C" on a guitar can be played on several different strings.

[0] I say "some sense," because tabs are still fairly limiting, particularly
in depicting complex rhythms. Traditional sheet music is still very common
(and, I contend, indispensable) for advanced guitar study.

~~~
PepeGomez
Does it matter on which string the note is played, except to not get yourself
into an unplayable position?

~~~
epsylon
What baddox says is true, but I have to add that there is a noticeable
difference in timbre between the same note played at two different places. So
if you find yourself with the choice, you have to use your own judgment to
decide which fingering you think sounds better.

------
dfan
This has some things in common with what we did in designing the notation for
keyboards in Rock Band 3 (see [https://images-na.ssl-images-
amazon.com/images/G/01/videogam...](https://images-na.ssl-images-
amazon.com/images/G/01/videogames/detail-page/rb3.KBD.ss.04.lg.jpg) for an
example), where we had the same sort of concerns in mind.

This sort of "piano-roll" notation has the nice feature that the elements are
easy in theory to parse: time goes along one axis, pitch goes along the other,
and you just do what it tells you. As far as notation for Western music goes,
it does have some disadvantages.

All twelve pitch classes are spaced equally, so the scalar structure of tonal
music is harder to make out. I can tell just by glancing at a page of sheet
music whether it is tonal or atonal, and I can't do that here. All the notes
kind of look the same (though I'm sure this is true for someone who isn't
fluent at Western notation trying to read sheet music!). One way we tried to
ameliorate this in Rock Band was to color different groups of notes
differently, so you had a lot of features to grab onto (e.g., the boundary
between E and F is the boundary between blue and green).

Durations are completely visual, which is nice from a intuitive point of view
but means that it's harder to parse the underlying pulse and rhythmic
structure of the music. A grid might help here. (I was constantly insisting
that the grid in Rock Band be made to be as helpful as possible.)

Anyway, it's a nice visualization of keyboard music, and I don't doubt that
this is easier to understand for people who don't read music already. I wish
he had chosen a less hyperbolic title, though.

------
laurent123456
It's not really new as it's used in most MIDI software to represent chords
over time [0], or in many music videogames [1]. I think this style might work
for very simple music sheets, but would become way too confusing and imprecise
for complex ones.

[0]
[http://www.musicmasterworks.com/MMScShot.gif](http://www.musicmasterworks.com/MMScShot.gif)

[1]
[http://i.ytimg.com/vi/rNg50UGkXfw/maxresdefault.jpg](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/rNg50UGkXfw/maxresdefault.jpg)

~~~
nileshtrivedi
I think it was first made famous by Synthesia:
[http://www.synthesiagame.com/](http://www.synthesiagame.com/)

~~~
marpstar
No way. "Piano roll" UIs have been available inside of MIDI software for 20+
years.

------
legohead
Does the author actually play piano? I didn't see him explicitly say it. I
play violin, and reading sheet music was _never_ a limiting factor. It was not
a challenge to learn, and you don't learn all the symbols in the beginning. As
you get more proficient and read harder music, only then do you learn new
symbols.

Maybe sheet music can be improved upon, but the real question is should it?
Sheet music is easy enough to learn, and once you learn it, all music opens up
to you.

~~~
rquantz
I'm a violist, and I used to teach violin and piano. With stringed
instruments, as you say, just making a sound and holding the instrument right
are so difficult for beginners, reading music pales in comparison. Piano is
unique-ish as an instrument that you can sit down at and start making a sound
essentially right away. I found that for my beginner piano students, learning
to read was probably the biggest challenge starting out. However, _not_
learning to read is even worse, as then you won't be able to learn music going
forward.

And, all that being said, learning to read music is really not very difficult.
There seem to be a lot of complaints from the HN crowd about music notation,
but learning to read music is wayyy easier than learning a new programming
language. Seriously, just get over it and learn the system that everybody else
uses, and you will be able to play any piece in just about any repertoire on
the planet.

~~~
analog31
In my view the hard thing is sight-reading. With programming, if it takes one
person twice as long as another, to read or write a program, at worst their
productivity will be a bit lower. Or maybe higher. ;-) If you can't read music
at tempo, then there are certain kinds of work that you can't do at all.

Granted, sight-reading skill is a matter of degree. I can read a jazz band
gig, but would struggle with complex modern orchestral music. In musical
styles that I'm familiar with, I can often make a good enough guess about
what's next, that I only have to focus my attention on the dangerous bits. My
attention often wanders away from the page.

I used to think that sight-reading was something that had to be learned,
starting at an early age. I don't know if I still believe that, but I know
that most adults who attempt to learn, find it to be prohibitive. This is one
reason why it would be great to find an alternative. Even a piano with keys
that light up.

~~~
v0x
As someone with an occasional passing interest in playing the piano, Synthesia
has been great for me when it comes to learning songs.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WolqGAgiolM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WolqGAgiolM)

Of course, it is not exactly a substitute for sheet music, but it is eminently
readable to the novice.

------
doctorstupid
Computer scientists of all people should understand why standard notation is
used. It's a high-level symbolic language that allows for music to be ported
across instruments and for the communication between musicians. Low-level
markups such as tablature are akin to assembly and machine code. They cut out
the work of the compiler at the expense of portability and higher level
reasoning (such as key signatures). In this analogy, the musician is a dynamic
compiler of musical notation into the physical actuations required by the
instrument. Tablatures remove most of the work of compilation by depicting a
more direct relationship to the physical playing of the instrument, and for
this reason they are less cognitively demanding. But if one wants to be a
musician, rather than a player of an instrument, I recommend sticking to a
symbolic language such as standard notation. It's hard to imagine a composer
writing a symphony in dozens of unique machine codes.

------
mattbasta
I really love this. When I was young, I was really excited to learn to play
the piano. The biggest problem I had was being able to read the sheet music.
It was incredibly difficult for me to read and understand the notes for both
hands at the same time. A big part of this was that when individual notes were
off the normal staff (e.g., C is below the staff), you either had to have an
innate sense of how far from the staff it was and what note that corresponded
to, or you had to stop playing and count to see which note it was. This seems
to solve all of those problems.

~~~
tacos
So does a deck of flash cards. If you learned multiplication tables you can
learn to read music. And if you can play video games you can play piano.

And it's NEVER too late to learn.

~~~
ams6110
I suppose one could also say "if you can learn to sight-read a novel you can
learn to sight-read music" and it might be true but I think there is a certain
natural ability prerequisite. I played in school concert bands for four years
and could never manage to sight-read anything very complicated. Practicing was
a chore and when we got new music I always had to sit and pick through it very
slowly measure-by-measure until I figured out how it was supposed to sound.
Once I knew that, I could "read" the music but I could never play a new piece
on first sight. I knew all the notation but I could not look at a new piece of
music and "hear" it in my head.. It felt more like trying to read a book
letter by letter. I never was able to really see "words" and "sentences". By
the time I quit I really just hated everything about it.

I also had tremendous difficulty learning basic addition, subtraction, and
multiplication facts compared to most of my friends. And I don't play video
games.

I do enjoy listening to music quite a bit, but I think I am a person who
doesn't have an ability to play it.

~~~
PepeGomez
Are you dyslexic as well, or does it only happen with music?

~~~
ams6110
Not in the usual sense. If there is such a think as numeric dyslexia I might
have that to some degree. I frequently transpose digits. I have trained myself
to be very careful whenever I have to transcribe a number, fill out forms, or
even dial a phone number. I find it helps to look at numbers in groups (pairs
or triplets) rather than individually. I don't recall every trying that with
music...

But I don't have any difficulty with reading text, and enjoyed reading a lot
as a kid so in that sense I am not dyslexic.

~~~
mavhc
There's
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyscalculia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyscalculia)

------
theseoafs
The traditional notation system has lasted so long for a reason. It's super
difficult to figure out how long notes are meant to last with this notation
system. It also takes up a lot more space than normal music notation.
Moreover, it looks really difficult to write because of how note durations are
represented.

~~~
goodside
"[The] target user is probably learning easy, contemporary songs, and already
knows what they sound like before they learn them."

Leaving out exact note durations is intentional, and probably the main reason
why it's so easy to read. The shaded tails from notes just have to evoke
what's already in your head.

~~~
jdpage
The problem there is that 90% of people have the lengths of notes in their
head _wrong_. Sure, if you ask them to hum a song, they'll produce something
that sounds rhythmically passable, but it's a far cry from being correct.

------
emptybits
Just wanted to leave this here, for people who get off on alternate music
notation...

An amazing collection of functional/beautiful/arty alt music notation can be
found in "Notations 21", edited by Theresa Sauer. One score per page, all
wildly different in their approach to encoding music. Just wow.

This video has some images from the book:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8F2Dv27CSuI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8F2Dv27CSuI)

------
jdbernard
A bit of a click-bait title, don't you think? Maybe "How I'd redesign piano
sheet music _for beginners_."

This is basically just tablature for piano. Great for simple pieces, unweidly
for anything more. Can you imagine notating Fur Elise with this? That's a
fairly cmomon beginner/intermediate piece. Or etudes? Or any excercise that
develops techincal proficiency?

Maybe it has a place, but like tab or lead sheets it is not a replacement for
sheet music.

~~~
leventhan
I play guitar and find having both sheet music and tablature together useful.
Sheet Music has an incomparable amount of timing information and other
nuances, and tablature has the fingering positions you can sight read
effortlessly once you've got the piece down.

------
archagon
I am on board with the goals of the article, and I've actually been working on
an iOS app to pick away at this problem[1] (albeit in a different way — mine
is more fluid and is intended to be used interactively, not to be printed).
Sheet music is a great format to represent classical music, but the fact that
it doesn't allow you to easily notate one of the most common elements of
modern music — syncopation — points to the fact that it's out of date for
today's needs by about a century. Modern music does not fit into a rigid
meter. It goes off-beat; features arbitrary note lengths and overlapping
meters; pitch bends without a second thought; ties performance and production
together with the notation. If you want to write down popular music on staff
paper, you'll be using a _lot_ of awkward dotted notes and rests.

In my app, I figured I'd try to distill written music down to its basic
elements — pitch and time — and allow users to draw on notes arbitrarily, with
the equal temperament pitch grid as a guide and pitch/time snapping available
as an option. (As an aside: the pitch axis is basically a logarithmic graph of
tone frequnency — cents from A440. Because of this, I can swap out the equal
temperament scale with basically any arbitrary scale. I've implemented *.scl
file import and have been playing around with odd non-equal tunings from
huygens-fokker.org's archive[2], though I don't know if this will end up in
the final user-facing product.)

[1]: Early demo video:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ra8OvnoxKQw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ra8OvnoxKQw)

[2]: [http://www.huygens-fokker.org/docs/scales.zip](http://www.huygens-
fokker.org/docs/scales.zip)

------
theOnliest
This idea isn't entirely new (is anything?); for an earlier version, check out
Klavarskribo:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klavarskribo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klavarskribo).
It didn't really take hold, because it's much more inefficient than normal
notation.

~~~
plorg
I spent a long time Googling before finding this, only to see that it had
already been posted. When I was in college I went on a tour of the Netherlands
with my school's choir. We sang in a number of Protestant and Reformed
churches and I remembered one of the music students pointed out a hymnal,
still used by a congregation in Friesland, that used this particular notation
system.

Someone else suggested that this was a notation with which they were familiar,
from an old hymnal of the (U.S.) denomination affiliated with the college I
attended. I had assumed it to be quite an old system as the hymnal appeared
quite antiquated. Still, it doesn't surprise me that it (only?) dates to the
1930s, nor that there would still be churches using it. Many old Reformed
churches have short institutional memories but nonetheless cling to assumed
traditions. That, and the Frisians are, stereotypically, an old, stubborn
people.

------
konceptz
The first issue that I see with this notation is that you loose information
compared to standard notation. For example, a half note contains the
information of how long it will last along with the note itself. This
information is given to you when your eye hits the note at which point you can
stop looking at it. In this notation, you either have to continue seeing the
note for the length or memorize the lengths of different notes which would
require you to "zoom out" much farther.

IMO, an experienced sight reader would have more difficulty sight reading more
complicated music using this notation.

~~~
gambiter
This is intended as a 'piano tab'. If you can sight read, you already have
music. Those of us who don't know how to read music would benefit.

------
ollysb
Sheet music evolved when it would be difficult to produce a different
representation for each instrument. Now this can be automated it makes a lot
of sense to produce specialised formats, such as tab for guitar or this for
keyboard. As a novice keyboard player I'd certainly prefer to use this than
sheet music. Having said that there are advantages in sheet music that a
professional musician would find lacking here. There's no rhythmic grouping
(the beams provide this cue) and I'm sure there are many others that I'm
unaware of.

~~~
platz
Yeah, this only makes sense if you already know the song. trying to infer the
correct timing spatially would be difficult.

------
jveld
Here are some shortcomings I thought of immediately.

\- Traditional notation is instrument-agnostic.

\- It may be easily printable, but a staff is easily _writable_. With just a
pen and a ruler, I can produce a neat staff in ~10 seconds. The ruler is
optional if I don't care about prettiness. With this, you more or less have to
print it: getting the spacing right by hand would be quite difficult.

\- I have mixed feelings about the the traditional representation of key.
Missing a sharp or flat in an unfamiliar key is probably my most common error
when reading sheet music. OTOH, The traditional notation _tells_ me which
sharps and flats to use. With this system, I have to already know the
structure of C# major if I want to noodle around (always). This would seem to
be more hostile to beginners.

\- The precision issue has already been brought up many times, but I would add
that all the lost information is an archival disaster. It might seem
superfluous since we have recordings, but given the rate of change in
technology, access to data in old formats is by no means a certainty. Since
this notation basically requires you to have heard the song in order to play
it, it would become incomprehensible pretty quickly.

It seems to me that most of the complexity of musical notation reflects the
"essential" complexity of actually playing the music. For example, consider
key: even at the level of simple rock songs, a basic grasp of "key" is
absolutely essential, and if you're playing a piano, this means you have to
know which sharps and flats to use. If this seems pedantic, consider that the
main difficulty of learning to play a piece is dexterity. It's going to take a
bit of effort just to make your fingers hit the damn keys. Since this effort
has to take place anyway, the little bit of extra effort to learn notation
doesn't seem like much to ask. Besides, the amount of notation required to
play pop songs is relatively small - that rendition of "Let it Be" contains
about 10 symbols, most of which are related.

This isn't to say that traditional notation is perfect, or even good. It is
rather baroque, and I'm open to a "redesign," as long as it really solves the
problem. This redesign isn't useless, but its scope of usefulness seems so
limited that I'm not really sure it's worth it.

------
sean-duffy
This isn't redesigning piano sheet music, this is just creating a piano
tablature. That's great and all, but this has existed for a long time, it's
similar to how Synthesia[1] represents piano notes. The fact that the timing
can't be easily read from it means that like guitar tabs, it can't be a
replacement for traditional sheet music. There's a good reason sheet music has
been around for so long, it makes sense and is versatile, it doesn't pertain
to any particular instrument, and I don't think it's going away any time soon.

[1] [http://www.synthesiagame.com](http://www.synthesiagame.com)

------
mentos
I've been playing the piano since I was a kid and found it very difficult to
learn to read sheet music. There was a period for maybe 3 months where I was
fluent in reading after 3-4 years of study but then took some time off and
lost the ability.

I think very visually and find watching someone play a song on youtube
infinitely easier than trying to learn with the equivalent sheet music. I
really feel like this comes down to a left brain/right brain thing but I'm not
sure how true that generalization is.

Are more visual approaches like youtube tutorials or this redesigned sheet
music the way of the future? I wonder if it might it be detrimental to take
this approach from the start?

------
maho
By pure chance I had just sat down at a piano, trying to figure out my old
music sheets that I had managed to play, with lots of stress and never well in
any sense of the word, 10 years ago. (My piano lessons got me to "Fröhlicher
Landmann", before my teacher and I gave up.) Now I struggled with the most
basic lessons and contemplated about the inefficiencies of the notation.

I gave up, somewhat frustrated, and then saw this post. Here is my experience:

\- The top to bottom timescale is easy to get use to and makes sense, given
that you need a wide space just to fit all the keys. I placed my iPad on the
piano in horizontal mode and could well imagine an app that scrolls the sheet
for me, for time progression. Edit: Sorry, I was so excited about the article,
I did not even see that it goes on after the notes, where the author talks
about this.

\- With the standard sheet music, because decoding was so inefficient, I would
first figure out the keys and then try to memorize the finger pattern as
quickly as possible, so that I don't have to decode the notes again. With the
new notation I got lazy and kept my eyes on the sheet for the whole time,
which actually slowed me down. I had to remind myself to memorize more. Just
something to get used to, I guess.

\- The notation does not give an exact rhythm, which I actually loved. If
you've ever heard the song, you quickly figure out what the rhythm is supposed
to be. The minimal rhythm notation is great, because it's not in the way of
the notes.

I had a lot of fun learning the start of this song, and I would love to see
more. I always wanted to learn some Beatles songs, and the sheet music that my
mother bought so many years ago was always too complex to be fun. With this
notation, songs like that are a lot more approachable. I don't think it makes
sense for classical music, where the timing is not as obvious, but for pop and
folk songs, or playing along to Studentenlieder ("im schwarzen Walfisch zu
Askalon", anyone?), it seems like a great choice.

One minor sugestion to the original author: It would be great if the grey
lines that correspond to the black keys would be bolder and darker. I had
trouble seeing them, but I don't have the best eyesight...

------
vitd
I love the idea of trying to come up with a better way of notating music to
make it more accessible. That's a great idea.

However, I'm skeptical that this is it. First, looking at the 2 notations of
"Let it Be," we can see that the new notation does not convey the same data,
or even a simplified version of it. It's a different version of it. I find
that odd.

Second, I don't think learning music notation is very difficult. I learned to
read treble and bass clef when I was 5 years old. It was much harder trying to
make my fingers press the right keys at the right time than memorizing which
circle on which line matched with which key or note.

Looking at this, I'm reminded of Laban notation
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laban_Movement_Analysis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laban_Movement_Analysis))
and Benesh Notation
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benesh_Movement_Notation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benesh_Movement_Notation))
for notating dance. Both are very complicated and essentially never used by
the people who actually do the dancing. Furthermore, I'm told that Benesh, for
example, allows a notator to add written (human-language) notes below the
staff to convey additional information. In other words, they know it doesn't
convey everything it's supposed to.

So what do dancers do? They learn from video. They watch the masters who went
before them directly performing the movement. Frankly, I think it would be
great to see something similar for music. Having a video of someone playing a
keyboard from above, possibly with a graphical overlay showing the notes
pressed would be way better (in my opinion). (Which isn't to say it's without
issues - far more bandwidth, video codecs, playback hardware, etc.)

~~~
ta92929
I have always wondered how dance/ballet is recorded, and I'm not surprised it
comes down to video. But music is more limited data I think, an opinion
supported by the fact that sheet music exists and sheet dance is still
questionable.

There's a passage in a piano piece I'm having trouble with and I tried
watching videos of pros on youtube to figure out how to play it. It was
frustrating and almost useless. The video goes by too fast. Granted, I was
looking for technical details, not notes, but I think notes would be almost as
hard.

E.g. Can you tell what notes are being played in the video below?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8IHzqVKugE&t=35](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8IHzqVKugE&t=35)

Here's another fun one to try:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpXqdBKSSFo&t=4m51s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpXqdBKSSFo&t=4m51s)

~~~
PepeGomez
You can slow down youtube videos in the gear menu and it still can't be seen.
I suppose you would need 60fps to see that.

------
peeters
I think this a cool idea. I think piano needs its own version of the guitar
tab to be more approachable. For someone who knows the basics, just seeing the
chords goes a long way. But this gives better detail.

One thing it glosses over is how the format responds to greater range. It
acknowledges the fact that only 3 of piano's ~7 octaves are shown, but it
doesn't address how much difficult it would be to read if there were notes in
both the C2 octave and C6 octave at the same time. It gets much more difficult
to line up the timing in that case because your eyes would be scanning
frantically every note.

In traditional sheet music, notes played at the same time are never more than
an inch or two apart. Will this format support sheet music's equivalent of 8va
to keep notes properly within visual range?

~~~
joshuapants
> I think piano needs its own version of the guitar tab to be more
> approachable

But then you end up with the same problem you get on guitar: beginners use tab
as a crutch and don't develop skills as readily as they should once they're
over the beginner hump.

~~~
hluska
This is the hardest part of learning and teaching music. On one hand, it's
hard to stay motivated when you're mangling Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, but
almost any shortcut you take in this stage will retard your growth later...

------
gdubs
I don't want to diminish the author's effort here, but this system feels like
it would have difficulty beyond basic cases. And, in the most basic cases, it
doesn't offer much more than simply calling out the chords over the lyrics.

It does lead me to think that a simple piano roll layout, like the ones found
in Logic and other digital audio workstations, would be useful for those of us
who are terrible at sight reading music.

------
rebootthesystem
The only people who waste time trying to reinvent the wheel are those who
never use a wheel.

This is silly. Standard notation isn't absolutely perfect but it's pretty darn
good. If a symphony can come out of dozens of musicians consistently by using
standard notation I think we are OK.

I think the problem often has to do with not wanting to put in the time to
master not only the notation and the instrument but also the hours and hours
of work required to crate the synaptic connections necessary to read and play
without thinking.

It's like complaining about vim because it is hard to learn. The problem isn't
vim, the problem is the person who doesn't want to do the work.

------
ChuckMcM
Reminds me a bit about how Mark Twain would redesign English spelling. Once
you've read sheet music for a while and played it you don't really see it any
more, you hear it in your head and you play it. I'm sure there are many
different ways you could write it but they all suffer from the same challenge,
which is is first training your brain to read it.

Given the amount of information on a page though, you would have to at least
match that, otherwise you spend to much time flipping pages and not as much
time playing.

~~~
harryjo
The article says that the notation is for beginners.

I am surprised all the JavaScript programmers on HN are so opposed to an
accessible notation for beginners.

~~~
ChuckMcM
I realize you're trolling but you might consider that thought a bit more
carefully. In particular 'notation for beginners' is simply one instance of
"<x> for beginners" which, doesn't scale to "non beginners". I have had a lot
of UI's foisted upon me with the admonition "Its really easy for beginners to
come up to speed!" and often it is, but as they get up to speed their ability
becomes hampered by the design which doesn't support "non beginners".

It isn't surprising, the first time anyone tries to master something a bit
more complicated their initial thought is "this is soo confusing! Why doesn't
someone design something easier to learn!" and for the motivated ones they may
follow through.

The problem is then that they have mastered their "easy" thing and now their
trying to do more complex things, or in this case describe more complex music,
and wham, suddenly they just can't seem to make it work. But had they actually
mastered music notation _first_ they would have mastered a system that has
successfully expressed a wide variety of music, styles, and levels of
complexity. So they wouldn't end up stopping in the middle of their
"progression" to go back and learn a new system because their old system
pooped out on them.

------
smortaz
very nice! my 2c for improving notation are more evolutionary. i see two main
issues with sight reading:

1\. treble/bass clefs are not consistent: one is EGBDF, the other GBDFA. eg
instead of the third line _always_ being a B, it's a B in one & a D in the
other!

2\. having to remember sharps & flats. ie, despite the note being F, you have
to remember that it's not really an F, but in this case an F# or Fb.

the proposal:

1\. make the clefs consistent: make them both 6 lines, and both EGDBFA. this
means adding an E to bass at the bottom, and an A to the treble on the top.
now a student has to remember only one format and note positions are
consistent. the third note is always a B regardless of the treble or bass
clef.

2\. to resolve flat/sharp issue, especially for complex keys with many
sharps/flats, use the note's head shape to distinguish. ie, instead of just an
oval head to represent a note's pitch, use for example a round note head for a
normal G, a square note head for G# and a triangle note head for Gb. that way
no matter what the key, your eye can easy and immediately recognize that that
G is not in fact a G, but a G# or Gb. after all we already use note shape
(solid/hollowness) to indicate duration. why not go a step further and make
realtime parsing easier by making the notehead shape indicate sharp/flatness?

~~~
smorrow
Oh, and there's already a notation within the standard system for your first
proposal: a treble clef with "8vb" written below it.

~~~
acjohnson55
Someone else mentioned adding another line atop the treble clef and then using
the 6-line staff for both clefs. I like this idea because it maintains the
one-line gap between the staves and also somewhat reduces the need for ledger
lines, which drive me a bit mad.

------
dgreensp
Compared to normal sheet music, this system mostly deletes cues. In normal
sheet music, you have both the shape of the note and its rough position
horizontally on the page as cues about the rhythm. Measure lines are removed
in this system, which is a pure loss of readability, like removing periods and
commas from English and replacing them with extra spaces (while saying you are
trying to aid beginners, who may be still learning what a sentence is!). In
normal sheet music, a note is either on a pitch line, or between two lines,
where as in this new notation, a note may be on the left half or the right
half of a space between two lines. It's just visually more difficult to parse.

The octaves are seemingly delimited by solid black lines, but these lines
actually represent the note C#, counterintuitively. My feedback there is that
you've been staring at this too long if you think it immediately resembles a
piano keyboard. Make it look more like a piano keyboard if you want it to be
more readable than sheet music for beginners.

Make the example of your notation match the example of traditional notation.
There should be three notes in the right hand at the beginning of Let It Be.

------
Marazan
_It looks like a keyboard doesn 't it_

Not really.

~~~
jdbernard
Yeah, I couldn't see it until the graphic of it next to the piano.

~~~
thret
The graphic overlaid on the piano keys was much easier to read - as easy as
guitar tabs. Why didn't he just do it all that way.

------
gkya
Having learnt standard notation one can easily read music composed for any
instrument, and even compositions from a different musical culture (e.g.
makam), whereas with this system one's limited to western-music piano pieces.
Besides, standard notation is not hard to learn, in fact it's only as hard as
learning the alphabet, which kids do in the school, and I'm yet to see someone
coming up saying, hey this alphabet is too hard, better kids explain
themselves with pictogrammes and emoji, which convey the ideas more directly
and easier to recognise.

------
jlarocco
Is this really necessary?

When I took piano lessons as a kid, I never had a hard time reading the music.
It looks really complicated knowing nothing and jumping straight to Beethoven,
but realistically, you'll learn to read sheet music a lot faster than you'll
learn to actually play it.

I only took lessons for a few years, but by the end I was able to read sheet
music that I had no hope of actually playing.

And then there's hundreds of years of music using the existing notation, so
anybody serious about music will inevitably end up learning the old notation
anyway.

------
hluska
Disclosure - this is a local startup and though I don't know the founder (or
founders, I don't even know) I did fall in love with this app at an open house
a few years ago. I am always biased in favour of entrepreneurs, but I double
down on local entrepreneurs.

Disclosure 2 - I'm generally a horrible musician, but when I was very young,
my Grandma Yvette taught me to play the fiddle before the Suzuki program tried
to save me and show me the violin. French Canadian fiddle music is all about
patterns and so it's possible that that shaped my brain to look at music and
its theory as a set of patterns.

However, those aside, I wonder about a tool like Musix (or Musix Pro) for
notation. Within about five minutes of playing with the app, I felt like I had
absorbed more real, practical music theory than in my years of formal
instruction. Entire melodies started to make intuitive sense to me.

I wonder if a tool like Musix could be useful as a notation tool?? It still
makes timing difficult to express and it would likely completely break with
more complex pieces so I can't picture it seeing much uptake amongst highly
experienced musicians, but I feel that if I had been exposed to an isomorphic
notation at a young age, I'd be a significantly better musician today.

Anyone with more experience care to weigh in??

~~~
tacos
Back when Electronic Arts made tools for electronic artists, there was a great
program called Deluxe Music Construction Set. I've heard similar versions of
your story from people who experimented with that software. Clicking notes on
a staff, seeing things light up on a piano keyboard. Some people prefer to
learn like this, and some people did.

Professional notation software is an utter shit show. Microsoft Surface 3
launched with an interesting touch screen notation program in their promos.
Stuff is out there, though notation isn't as popular (or nearly as well done,
or as immediately rewarding) as some of the other apps like Ableton Live.

------
hapahacker
I want to say that it's really exciting to see something TAB-like for piano.
Something to ease the learning curve into instruments other than guitar I
think are in dire need. I hope more instruments can get this kind of easy-to-
learn-notation.

I hope this doesn't entirely replace staff notation. The reason for this is
because of its connection to music theory. Once I got to a certain level with
the violin, I didn't have to think about how notes mapped to the violin
physically, but was able to think more in terms of music theory (or at least
it was rather easy to switch between the two). This opens up an entire world
if you start tinkering with improvisation and gives you a common language with
other musicians.

I think staff notation is also quite amazing because it represents music in
such a way that it can be easily understood by musicians of many, many
instruments at a glance. Imagine writing a symphony of however many
instruments in different kinds of notation, or being the conductor who has to
read it all simultaneously...

All that being said, I could totally imagine a world where a huge percentage
of musicians (especially amateurs) learn only these easily readable musical
languages, while people who want to dive deeper learn staff.

------
joshvm
I like playing the piano because the staves correspond more or less directly
to the physical layout of the keyboard. If you flip a score 90 degrees, you
end up with this, with the notes laid out over the keys. Compared to almost
all other instruments pianos are ideally suited to sheet music. Manuscript
notation is also (necessarily) very information dense.

It's an interesting approach; there are apps that will do something similar to
this. They're very much like guitar hero. Some of the newer electric pianos
will even illuminate the keys in the correct order.

I think one of the reasons that guitarists use tablature is that using sheet
music notation for the guitar is more difficult to learn (at least to me).
I've struggled with the guitar because I haven't put in the time to get my
head around translating between manuscript and which strings/frets I need to
be using. Violinists don't seem to have the same problem, but perhaps that's
because most violinists are classically trained whereas most guitarists
aren't?

~~~
the_cat_kittles
guitar is also difficult because the same note can be played in as many as 5
different places. sometimes its hard to tell which string to actually play it
on, since a choice has fingering and possibly picking ramifications later.

~~~
bmj
How many guitarists (and I'm thinking classical or, perhaps, jazz guitarists)
can just sit down and sight-read a piece? I suspect part of the craft is
learning a piece, and learning the most efficient fingerings/patterns for the
piece.

~~~
leventhan
I've been in guitar orchestras, what we do is annotate our sheet music with
optimal finger positions as we work through the piece. Especially for long
pieces you can't necessarily keep in your head, this helps with sigh-reading
tremendously since the positions are written in the sheet music.

Some sheet music for guitar also has note-level annotations for string number
and finger positions, which does the above for the guitarist.

------
ejcx
Not bad, kind of guitar-hero like. I like that the key and key changes could
be very clear. It's also nice that new musicians wouldn't have to memorize
certain keys, since an F# when playing in G major could just be printed on the
line.

It is also much easier to see intervals. A minor 6th for example would always
be a certain number of lines/spaces away, no matter the key. Octaves are
obviously also easy to recognize.

I think a couple things are confusing and not as clear as they need to be past
the beginner level. For example dotted notes. Counting something like dotted
8th notes or recognizing a dotted note would be hard. You can see a similar
confusing rhythm in Linus and Lucy, where the 8th note at the end of each
measure is held into beginning of the next measure.

It's pretty neat and a unique project. Pretty cool and I could actually see it
being used in for things like Elementary School Music class.

------
brobinson
Vertical orientation of sheet music looks very much like a music Tracker. [1]

I've recently been learning a tracker program called Renoise [2], and the
vertical orientation is a very nice change compared to other DAWs I've used
(Reaper, GarageBand, Logic Studio).

Reading sheet music has always been a huge chore for me, so I generally seek
out guitar tabs instead when it's possible. Vertical sheet music without the
staves would be amazing for people who know music theory but never had the
need to learn sheet music like myself.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_tracker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_tracker)

[2]
[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/da/Renoise_...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/da/Renoise_2.6.png)

------
triplesec
This is a neat idea, and I can see a place for a different notation for all
instruments to make music easier to read for them. However, of course, this
means that music for one instrument is not readable for another, this is no
universal system. If perhaps this were also tied to a universal ur-system
which ties together the formats for all instruments in a way whereby someone
who knows one format can read other instruments' musical notation, either by
reading an abstracted central version, or have an automagic system for
transcribing the musics to their familiar notation, then this might be the
sort of thing to be useful. However, for general musical use, a universal
system is likely to be nevessary for musicians, because it makes it much
easier to read anything that's lying around.

------
DanSmooth
The best use I can imagine for this is as a progressive tool to learn
traditional sheet music. You start with this (simple stuff, maybe even add the
finger-numbers onto the dots so one knows which finger hits which key) and
make it harder step by step. Introduce pedaling, remove the numbers on the
dots or replace them with their note (first by letter, later by graphical
representations on traditional sheets), before you gradually transform it into
traditional sheet music. Last step would probably the switch from horizontal
to vertical but at this point you will have the notes down and it should make
it easier to transfer from notes to keys.

------
vitorbaptistaa
Interesting. Reminds me of the Synthesia game [1], which is like a Guitar Hero
for the piano but where you can actually learn to play the real instrument,
and not some plastic controller.

I still prefer the Hummingbird notation [2] though. Instead of this, it
improves the classical musical notation without creating an entirely new
notation. It's relatively easy to go from hummingbird to classical notation
and vice-versa.

[1] [http://www.synthesiagame.com/](http://www.synthesiagame.com/)

[2] [http://www.hummingbirdnotation.com/](http://www.hummingbirdnotation.com/)

------
paulojreis
This is a very interesting subject. At least for me, as it draws on two of my
passions: HCI/UX/usability and, well, music.

I think this kind of approach is _defined_ essentially by a closer mapping
between the sheet and the physical world (which is, according to usability
tenets, something good). So, under this "definition", we can consider other
approaches which are very popular and indeed work: guitar tabs and "Guitar
Hero"-like games.

In the wise words of Thom Yorke, "anyone can play guitar", and I think this is
- nowadays - mostly due to guitar tabs. Tabs make it very easy to step into
guitar playing. So, I think, it's not a surprise that these approaches are so
popular, as they have a easier learning curve for beginners, which is in
itself also not a surprise if we consider the usability principle of close
mapping with the real world. Traditional music notation just has more layers
of translation, so to speak.

So, what are the drawbacks of this? I can think of three, which might explain
why these approaches aren't promptly adopted by traditional music education:

1) As this is, essentially, a closer mapping to the physical world, said
mapping has to be "done" to a specific instrument. An alternative notation
such as this one or guitar tabs wouldn't be very helpful for, e.g., wind
instruments. So, with this we would create specific "languages". Arguably,
having musicians understand an universal language is a good thing - I'm no
piano player, but I can read a piano sheet;

2) Repertoire, generally. The amount of music written in traditional notation
is just huge, the inertia to start writing stuff with a different notation
would be a problem;

3) Dynamics: I think these approaches overlook dynamics. It's not only about
what and how long you play, it also about _how_ you play it. For wind
instruments, e.g., the dynamics can get quite complex - if a pianist has to
read 5 notes, a flute player has to read one but with 5 dynamics annotations.
This is, however, somewhat addressed in guitar tabs, as there are quite
excellent tabs with not only dynamics annotations but also instrument-specific
techniques. Maybe, in this approach, circle sizing could be used to
communicate velocity?

------
amelius
How I'd redesign a piano, is with the black keys equal in color and shape to
the white keys. That way, transposing a song by a semitone is equivalent to
shifting your hands by one key. Much more natural.

I think they call an instrument with this property "chromatic", but I'm not
sure.

Actually, perhaps somebody can explain why the black keys were invented.
Because their existence makes little sense to me. For example, a guitar is a
chromatic instrument, and can be played perfectly fine without any difference
between "black" and "white" notes.

~~~
gjulianm
You have to ask yourself what should feel more natural: transposing songs or
actually playing them. I don't know much about why the piano was designed like
this, but I can see your idea wouldn't be useful:

\- Black keys are a reference. Either by touching them or by looking at them,
you can always know where you are. Not so easy with all the keys being the
same. \- The size of the keyboard is more or less adapted to our hand size.
The distance between whole tones is similar to the distance between our
fingers. A fifth is as wide as my hand, and I can play an octave without much
effort. Making all the notes the same shape would change that and those common
intervals would be more difficult to play. \- Our hand is not flat. The fact
that some notes are higher than others makes playing more comfortable. \-
Range. Same-shaped notes would occupy more space (unless you make them smaller
than white notes, which would be uncomfortable) so either you get way bigger
pianos (as if they were small) or pianos with less range.

There are probably more reasons why the black keys are there, these are just
top off my head.

~~~
amelius
Thanks for your explanation.

I think there is another advantage (to merely having the white keys) besides
just transposing being easier. And this is that the same intervals will always
have the same spacing on the keyboard. I guess this should be my main argument
for this type of layout being more natural.

~~~
gjulianm
Yes, they would be the same spacing, but that spacing would be extremely
uncomfortable and lots of pieces would become impossible to play. Making the
black keys the same size as the white keys, a 8th would become a 13th. I don't
have small hands and I can barely reach a 11th interval. Basically, a lot of
simultaneous notes could no longer be played. A solution would be to make the
keys smaller, but then you wouldn't be able to play semitones because your
fingers wouldn't fit comfortably. To fix that, you could raise some keys, so
basically you would end up with the current setup.

~~~
amelius
Good points. But I really don't understand why the keys need to be that big.
People are used to typing on smartphones, where the sensitive area of a key is
like 30% of the width of a finger. Of course, making them that small would be
a little extreme, but I think piano keys could be much slimmer.

~~~
normloman
Have you seen anyone try to type on a smartphone? Slow, and riddled with
typos. Keep piano keys the width they are, unless you want slow, error prone
pianists.

Besides, we already have the ideal chromatic keyboard layout:

[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=hexagonal+music+controller&t=lm&ia...](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=hexagonal+music+controller&t=lm&ia=images&iai=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.c-thru-
music.com%2Fimages%2Faxis64-01.jpg)

------
return0
I don't understand why insist in "little dots" notation in music if you plan
to redesign how it's written. There are common patterns in music that standard
notation does not take into account, e.g. a chord is much easier to read and
recognize by its name rather than figuring out the dots. There are many more
rules that would allow such groupings of notes in a way that's much faster and
easier perform. Why not take that approach and make it as easy as reading
texts?

~~~
avita1
You lose a lot of information that way, e.g. voicing/inversions. Also, reading
text names get a lot more cumbersome when you need stuff like "Ab half
dimished +9".

------
abustamam
I like the idea but one big flaw is eye-movement.

With traditional sheet music, you can see all the notes you need to play
clearly in one place.

With this one, if your left hand is playing in lower octaves, and right hand
playing in higher octaves, your eyes will have to move around a lot just to
know which keys to push. This is in addition to moving your eyes around the
actual keyboard to make sure you're hitting the right keys.

However, I do like the simplicity of using this system to learn a fairly basic
song.

------
jilted
So traditional Sheet Music and hence, notation is akin to C or Perl's verbose
and/or messy syntax...the problem is, it's not just about the Notes with
Music: there's a lot more in terms of dynamics and the like going on which
notation has evolved over thousands of years to support.

Interesting read though. For something not so 'serious' (e.g. not a Concert
piece), it could definitely make the correlation easier.

------
tobico
The funny thing about talking of tabs for piano, is that sheet music is
already that. By representing music on a diatonic staff, with a key signature,
it's shown in a perfect format to translate it to keys on the piano, at the
expense of some other kinds of instruments, vocals, and general understanding
of the music, where it would be more helpful to see the music on a chromatic
staff.

------
squar1sm
Just call it piano tab. It's fine for chords and pop songs. There's no way
it's going to work for complicated music. I love the project though. It's a
fantastic job, I hate to be negative. You did a ton of thinking on this.

For pop music, fake books are easier. That's how you play pop music.

------
Old_Thrashbarg
Those are great, I could start reading those immediately for piano. I think it
would be more enticing for newcomers to learn this "Guitar Hero sheet music"
than traditional sheet music.

Just imagine if Guitar Hero had been done with traditional sheet music. I
don't think it ever would have taken off.

------
Phithagoras
An interesting fact is that Jean Jaques Rousseau also came up with another
method, arguably similar to this one. details at
[http://normanschmidt.net/rousseaumusicpad/](http://normanschmidt.net/rousseaumusicpad/)

------
jakejake
This looks pretty much like piano roll to me, used in just about every midi
software.

I'd use it though, even though I can read music I like to use tabs for guitar.
This would be nice for me since I don't play piano, but would like to play a
simple tune once in a while.

------
mixmastamyk
Isn't C the first key of each group? If so, his black lines appear to be on
the wrong side.

------
sampaio96
[https://medium.com/@sampaio96/why-you-shouldn-t-think-
about-...](https://medium.com/@sampaio96/why-you-shouldn-t-think-about-
redesigning-piano-sheet-music-dc42ff1b7e62)

------
d2p
I really like this. I used to play piano, and I just hated reading sheet
music. This seems to much more simple.

I don't think it'd work well in paper/book form, but on a scrolling screen I
think it'd be a great learning aid.

------
lmg643
this is the second redesign of sheet music I've seen in the past few years. I
applaud every attempt, because it forces us to reconsider what we already
know. however, as an amateur musician for the past 30 years, it's worth
considering how great of an interface "normal" sheet music actually is. The
same clefs and staffs are used for every instrument, so you don't have the
compatibility issues that this piano sheet music would have. The only sheet
music I personally can't sight read is for the cello, which uses a different
clef.

------
nthcolumn
Those old saloon barrell piano didn't exactly sound like Chopin so I'm
guessing this is a lossy format.

~~~
danellis
That's because it was interpreted by a machine instead of a human. All
notation is lossy when compared to human expression.

------
em3rgent0rdr
Although may be easier for moons, it takes up too much space to be practical
for pros.

------
PepeGomez
How is it anything else than sheet music turned by 90°?

------
m3andros
You are a genius! Thank you!

------
ianamartin
Just a few observations in no particular order from my point of view
(classical violinist and pianist--performing professionally for 28 years, and
a music theorist studying the structure, composition, and history of the above
for about 20 years.)

1\. This, and all other similar modern attempts, is interesting in that it has
so much in common with the very earliest forms of music notation. We have as a
basic, "this is me telling you how this is supposed to sound" example as far
back as the 7th century, in which you had written words with markings above,
below, and around that are meant to guide chant practitioners about where to
go next to shape the musical phrase. This is also the origin of modern
punctuation in written language.

These attempts are remarkably similar in my mind to the early attempt to guide
people. They strike me as memory aids more than anything. As in, I've heard
this before, I know how it is supposed to go, I just need a little help here.

When I say origin above, I'm talking about the western tradition of music. The
eastern tradition of music evolved very differently (both in terms of music
notation and the notion of punctuation), and you can trace early concepts of
music notation back a couple of thousand years b.c. But I'm not talking about
that.

2\. The history of music notation roughly follows the history of the study of
music theory in a cycle: is the point to understand and describe what happened
in the past, or is the point to prescribe what should happen in the future?
People have been fighting this battle for centuries (again, there's a parallel
here between language and music), and we continually go back and forth.

Notation methods carry that same problem with them. What are you trying to do?
What problem are you trying to solve? I'm not going to say that modern
standard music notation is perfect, but it's a good balance of both
prescription and description.

3\. Speaking of balance, there's another element that's been mentioned
already: creation vs. performance. A good method of notation has to be easy to
write, not just easy to read. It has to be specific enough that composers who
want to care about details can clearly define them, and I think this method is
sorely lacking in that regard.

4\. Re: ledger lines. These are a modern, notational "convenience" that was
brought about by printing technology making it reasonable. And because
performers hated music without them. Music before the 18th century did
something that is much more reasonable in my mind, but in practice is
difficult to manage. The clef symbols used to be moveable. They sort of still
are. The difference between alto and tenor clef is that the c is on a
different line.

In pre-Baroque music, there were only 4 staves instead of 5 and the clefs
moved all over the place to accommodate the fact that there were no leger
lines. The clefs would switch to a different line in the middle of a phrase or
just change completely from a c-clef to a g or f clef.

This kind of shifting around is, needless to say, extremely taxing on the
performer. But very convenient for the writer and publisher. Leger-lines were
originally an acquiescence to the needs of the player, believe it or not. But
you know, give someone an inch, and they'll write Strauss.

5\. These kinds of visual aids have existed forever in music. But they are
only useful for the performers. Writers of music have to consider vertical
relationships between notes. I mean, they don't have to, but we're stuck in a
musical rut where we've collectively decided that the successful music is
going to be based on some permutation of I-V-I. And that's even more true of
modern i.e., popular non-classical music since about 1940) than it is of
modern classical.

You need to understand the conventions, and visually seeing "difficult"
intervals is key to helping you write music that conforms to those norms.

In my opinion, modern standard notation is almost as good as a syntax
highlighter in terms of seeing parallel 4ths, 5ths, octaves. It's not quite as
good, but it's close.

The proposed redesign is . . . not so great at that.

6\. Portability has been addressed by others, but I haven't seen the
scalability argument yet. Let's say this works well for one person playing
alone. What happens when you try to get 4 people to play together? What about
100? What about 1,000? Someone has to look at all of that and figure out what
is supposed to be happening and then lead the group and know when things are
going wrong. (I've conducted concerts with 8 harpsichords playing at a time.
There is no way this style of notation would work.)

7\. I just don't think this is viable as a redesign of piano music. A learning
aid? Maybe.

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tehchromic
fascinating. nice work.

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organplay292929
EUREKA! 1.)learn from what U know - Vim, Zshell, Python and engineering
2.)more MATURE so learn the ORGAN not a piano! 3.)go jazz, play from radio,
never bought a book on circle of 5ths 4.)some are slow, tool over 6-12 months
to coordinate left and right hands. playing off syncopate all the time.
5.)CLICK! read the book. Eureka! suddenly some of it works. 6.)ORGAN is more
expensive but MUCH easier can hold down key, change the instrument,etc.

7.)have not looked at sight read, since either jazz or direct composition. I
USED the simple method. tap the beat with feet. use basic drumstick to sound
melody with pots whistle the 2nd part, etc. 3 piece band?

8.)hobby only, not stress tested like real code

9.) the auto transfer from guitar chord trellis to ORGAN can be useful.

QUESTION: better to go deep first? and be a genius on organ for Tchaikovsky?
or just go radio plus jazz and make it up HACKER STYLE as U go?

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kingmanaz
Rather than just addressing sheet music, the piano keyboard itself could be
improved. See the Jankó keyboard for an example:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jank%C3%B3_keyboard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jank%C3%B3_keyboard)

