Hexnot: an experimental musical notation
federicopereiro.com
federicopereiro.com
My biggest issue is that traditional notation does a lot more to show flow, relationships, and basic shapes. All of that is invisible in this notation without reading and understanding it. There's a lot of cognitive overhead not present in standard notation.
An editor that had live conversion to standard notation might be pretty boss, though.
Thanks for checking it out!
I definitely agree; traditional notation is quite more suggestive, though I don't know how much this is because of previous exposure to it.
The long term question here, I believe, is whether the cognitive overhead of using hexnot can converge to the cognitive overhead of using traditional notation. When you learn it, a notation should make things as easy as possible; so I'm interested in finding out empirically if hexnot has actual value as a notation for memorizing, interpreting and composing.
As for an editor, I am considering the idea of writing a parser for hexnot, which could also generate some other kind of output, but not at this moment :). And, of course, if you're interested in experimenting with this, I'll be glad to be of help.
Cheers!
Humans are visual creatures (by and large). The memorization of played music is generally proprioceptive; while the music may still be read, it has more to do with relating structure to the playing appendages once you know the piece.
Hexnot seems to draw more on the formal and perhaps also linguistic parts of the brain. I also find very reassuring the 1:1 relationship between the numbers and the actual notes, which lets them stand a little bit more in the realm of a symbolic ideal, and less dependent on a position in the staff.
Thank you for commenting!