> The reason is simply that a certain number of musicians have developed the skill of sight reading ...
It's moer than just that though. The inertia to overcome also includes pretty much all sheet music ever printed, all the schools that have adopted the current system, all the educational materials... etc. etc. the list goes on.
In addition to all of that, the new system needs to convey most of (if not all) the information that the current system has. I have seen a few attempts at improvement, but they all fell short of the current system, which let's face it has been in development for several hundred years.
Once we get off printed paper, computerized notes should solve much of the inertia. problem
Displaying a song in whatever notation the musician/reader prefers should be as simple as setting a preference on your hyperPad.
That still leaves the difficult task of figuring out better notations, but it can be done incrementally. You don't need to convert the whole world or the entire notation at once.
> Once we get off printed paper, computerized notes should solve much of the inertia. problem
I don't know...ebooks still look a lot like treebooks.
The one example I've seen of what you're describing is I've seen jazz musicians play off ipads. This give them access to very large catalogs without lugging around giant binders, and also they can transpose their sheets into any key.
(That's more important than it might sound at first, because different instruments "play" in different keys -- if a pianist thinks the piece is in C major, the clarinetist thinks the piece is in Bb major. So now you don't have to have separate books for the different instruments in the band.)
But the music as written down in these electronic fakebooks is a lot less complex than your average classical piece, so it's a much more tractable problem.
I have those electronic materials. They come in two varieties. There's something called iRealB, which contains thousands of tunes, but is just chord changes due to a quirk of copyright law -- the melody and lyrics are copyrighted but not the harmony. That's the one where you can transpose tunes. But you don't get the melody.
Then there are large PDFs where somebody ran the old paper fake books through a scanner, but they are just images and are not in an actual computer readable format, so they can't be transposed.
So the computer has not solved the notation problem, yet.
Myself, I've memorized most of the standard jazz repertoire.
In fact I suspect that most of the written music repertoire that exists today will never be translated into computer readable form, because it's just too much work. And not enough new music is being composed to form a critical mass around some new notation system or computer format. When somebody composes a tune (I play in one band that does original jazz compositions), they send out a PDF.
Maybe software will eventually automate the process reliably enough to be useful.
It should be, but there's the problem of demand. Somebody has to be motivated to do it, meaning that they are probably equally passionate about music and image analysis.
Also, a lot of the written stuff is handwritten, not typeset. So it's a subset of the handwriting recognition problem.
It's pretty bad for the bassist, since the bass part is usually the second to last part to be copied, meaning that the copyist was probably drunk. ;-)
It's moer than just that though. The inertia to overcome also includes pretty much all sheet music ever printed, all the schools that have adopted the current system, all the educational materials... etc. etc. the list goes on.
In addition to all of that, the new system needs to convey most of (if not all) the information that the current system has. I have seen a few attempts at improvement, but they all fell short of the current system, which let's face it has been in development for several hundred years.