Alternative Music Notations | Hacker News Reader

Alternative Music Notations

musicnotation.org

22 pointscassepipe17 comments

These days, I'm so steeped in experimental music, that I was expecting something a bit more "out there" [0]. This feels quite tame by comparison.

I like the idea of a chromatic staff. Making notes visually more evenly spaced would probably make certain things clearer, and probably would provide some interesting insights from a musical analysis point of view. The fact that it still uses the same 5-line staff would make it easier to adopt. It's familiar, and you can use existing staff paper.

However, speaking as a reasonably proficient sight reader, I don't know how much more improvement this adds. From a readability point of view, this looks about the same to me (which I suppose is half the point). Maybe I'm just a jaded musician, but I just don't find music notation that hard to pick up.

Reading music is very similar mental process to reading text. Your brain quickly learns to chunk notes into patterns rather than individual groups, similar to how in reading you don't actually parse out every single letter.

0: https://llllllll.co/t/experimental-music-notation-resources

Whenever I see products on instagram or wherever that say things like "now anyone can play guitar!" I get annoyed. It's not that I don't want people to learn guitar—hell yes learn guitar!! But you can't skip the hard part. You can NEVER skip the hard part.

I suspect the authors of this idea know what they're doing better than I do, and I don't have a strong specific opinion on it. But when I see attempts at 'improving' well-established systems it makes me wonder if it's just someone who hasn't learned WHY the 'hard' thing is designed the way it is. Again—I am absolutely all for experimenting with every conceivable way of doing something, as this is how progress is made.

In this case, the first thing I thought of is that diatonic staves are the way they are because most (traditional 'western') music is in a single key. So it shouldn't be surprising that the notation optimizes for that. And if you change key, you just write down the new key and continue along. I don't personally see much need for a chromatic scale unless you were, I guess, writing 12-tone music ;)

I'm also a big fan of experimental musical notation and, googling around, it seems there isn't a single database of them. Shit, I already have too many side projects......

Bringing up 12 tone, when first exposed to this music, the first thing I did is rewrite it on a rearranged chromatic staff. It is so clear that it belongs that way. But it certainly isn't easier to play that way.

So I feel a "new" notation system that is easier to read, not that interesting, nor that helpful. But an "alternative" system that is optimized around composing in a certain way is interesting, and helpful, but when you're done it probably makes sense to write it in traditional notation if you are going to write it down.

Absolutely, there's always room for domain-specific languages (or notations).

> You can never skip the hard part

That's not true. Or else we would still be using Roman numerals

The hard part I'm referring to is the work of training your ears and fingers to do what you want them to do. Similarly, learning an entirely new orthography or notation is always going to involve training yourself, and you can't skip it. There are absolutely ways of making things easier on yourself: books, videos, gadgets, etc., but you still can't just bypass it. At least until we can learn kung fu via direct brain interface ;)

I'm slowly learning to play the guitar. I'm at the level of enthusiastic beginner and my main issue is finding time to practice (without my children joining in). With that said, reading the music never struck me as one of the difficulties. Building an understanding and intuition of how different notes and chords relate to one another however...

Quoting the this page [1] :

"One reason why none of these alternative notations has caught on is presumably that it takes a lot of time and effort to learn a new notation system. Not only professional musicians, but also musicologists (including music psychologists and music theorists) invest enormous amounts of time learning to read conventional music notation. Understandably, they don’t want to have to start again from scratch. So they tend to avoid the problem of conventional notation’s shortcomings and the evaluation of alternatives by regarding the problem either as irrelevant (“conventional notation obviously cannot be improved”) or impossible to solve (“it is clearly impossible to decide among the many possible alternatives”)"

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20200925170150/musicnotation.org/...

Site's dead right now, probably the HN hug of death...

"Many people struggle to learn to read and play music, and many give up before they become proficient. Could a better notation system make reading, writing, and playing music more enjoyable and easier to learn? We think so."

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:c2PdCem...

I would much prefer music notation where time - the duration of notes and rests - was indicated by space, rather than symbols.

That would be one less thing to decipher.

(This website does not appear to cover that option, considering this undesirable)

This quickly becomes intractable and useless for most musicians, as all it does is waste space, and in many cases is impossible to even use. If you can remember the duration of notes based on a few different symbols (which is partly systematized anyways), you can remember the duration of rests based on a few different symbols. Think of it this way: different sized spaces work semiotically the same way, but are much harder to read. Could you tell the difference between 31 and 32 1/32 rests?

> different sized spaces work semiotically the same way

Actually I'll nitpick myself about this. They aren't the same, semiotically, because traditional musical notation is purely symbolic (the signs have literally nothing to do with the signified) whereas white spaces would be somewhere in between indices and icons, which do share some semblences of some kind with the signified. In this case, width of space maps to duration of time, which is a fairly basic embodied metaphor in the George Lakoff sense.

I agree that it wastes space to represent time on one axis, if space is a resource that you want to conserve, and I see how that has historically influenced music notation. But, I have a digital screen that can scroll at a specified pace, so I don't find it necessary to conserve space.

> If you can remember the duration of notes based on a few different symbols

I can do this but I find it a heavy cognitive load to translate symbols into duration while I am also reading/playing music: that was my point.

> Could you tell the difference between 31 and 32 1/32 rests?

Yes, if there was an adequately marked time scale/axis. There are already bars: just turn them back into the equal areas they are already abstractly representing. (I'm not suggesting that you notate a rest with only blank space - you can still explicitly notate a rest).

I think Chinese numbered notation does something similar: https://web.stanford.edu/group/scme/cgi-bin/wordpress1/chine...

Notes longer than quarter look like `1`, `1-` and `1---` which creates visual spacing between notes.

That seems challenging with fast, complex rhythms. I don't know if I'd want to eyeball anything with a lot of syncopation.

I generally hate most new ways of writing music. All way of writing makes the initial year or so of learning music easier at the expense of anything remotely advanced.

This does not fall into that trap, and is pretty much compatible with most kinds of new notation there is.

I don't think it will catch on though. You brain is amazing at chunking. If I am in F major and I see a long noodle of notes I look at the general structure, rhythm and my brain usually fills the gaps (I work full time in a symphony orchestral). Most of the time that is enough. This seems to remove some of that.

An all chromatic notation removes the need for accidentals or even keys. Which is nice, but accidentals and key signaturew alre also an amazing tool to let you actually read LESS music. The few times I play wrong notes it is because whatever I am playing looks like it is in one key, but is in fact another. I am not alone in this. Most musicians connect your inner ear and some music theory with how we read music. Reading is slow. Relying on previous knowledge when reading music is what makes you a good sight reader.

Having implicit information is hard at first, but has benefits in the long run. I would be interested to see if someone reading this kind of chromatic scale would gain something similar, and whether it would actually be worth it.

I have long thought that math notation is in need of an overhaul, but I mostly just have a general sense of dissatisfaction, not specific proposals or even specific complaints.

Does anyone else feel this way? Do better notations already exist? Or am I just too picky?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com