Comment by InsidiousWombat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by InsidiousWombat | Hacker News Reader

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InsidiousWombat

> For example...in the key of aminor when you make the five chord major to create a resolution back to i (aminor) you raise the 7th scale degree. That means the G becomes G#...Ab is the same pitch but writing it that way is wrong. An EMajor chord is spelled E G# B, not E Ab B. Now if you spell that as 9 0 4 you have stripped all context out of the music. Musicians aren't just player pianos, they analyze the harmonic structure of the music the inform phrasing, shape, tone, volume, and pacing (acelarando, decelerando, ritardando, etc).

I feel like those are idiosyncrasies that feed into eachother i.e. you need to have 2 notations for same sound just because other decisions made it so there is no extra info passed other than in b vs #

So alternative notation could still make it clearer/"mathematic" but would essentialy need to include all of that, and for that as you said, you need people with wide experience about music and for them, they already are fine with standard notation so for them it wouldn't be an improvement because nicer learning curve doesn't matter once you learned it.

Classical keyboard layout is kinda similiar in opposite way here; beginner can just slap some white keys and get something musical and they can learn from there, while various chromatic keyboard layouts might have some nice benefits (chords being "same shape" regardless of where you play them), it is harder to start on it.

You need to have 2 notations because having 7 notes instead of 12 packs more information in less space. The scale is almost always made of up to 7 notes. Expressing each note as the difference from a default is essentially compression, as it lets you see both the position in the scale (important for harmonic relationships which help you memorize the thing) and the note which you have to play.

Sometimes you need G and the note to its right, so you want to call the latter a variation on A (A-flat). Sometimes you need A and the note to its left, so you want to call the latter a variation on G (G-sharp). They are the same note but they have a different function. It's not an idiosyncrasy, rather, when it works it's more efficient because it describes two things at the same time. It doesn't work perfectly for many cases: Misirlou, the Simpson's theme, anything in whole-tone or octatonic scale, but those are the exceptions in practice, just like some things compress better than others.

It is suboptimal even for the blues scale, but not too much and in fact that shows another benefit of giving two names to a note. The blues scale is mostly a variation on the pentatonic scale; the A#/Bb note in a minor E blues scale is used mostly as an intermediate note. So if you're going up to a B you can write that note A# because it is working like an A, while it you're going down to an A you will write it Bb because it is working like a B.

Likewise for chords. If I see E Ab B, E-A points me at a suspended chord, not a major chord, which would be wrong. Whereas if I see E G# B, it is clearly a triad.

The value of data compression is greatly reduced now that we have tablet computers. This gives us instant page turning, so there's no longer a requirement to pack as much information on a page as possible to minimize the disruption of page turning.

Having to learn a different notation system for every key is IMO no longer a good tradeoff.

G# and Ab are not the same sound.

They are the same pitch in well-tempered tuning, but that’s a small part of the picture. They are not even the same pitch if you’re singing or playing a fretless instrument, like a violin.

The reason is that the pitch changes slightly based on harmonic context, and the notation communicates the context.

G# typically conveys a tension in an ascending movement (assuming the key is Am or one of its neighbors). Ab can convey tension in a descending movement.

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