Composer’s Sketchpad – Rethinking Musical Notation | Hacker News Reader

Composer’s Sketchpad – Rethinking Musical Notation

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50 pointsarchagon7 comments

This looks pretty cool, and would be really useful as a kind of scratchpad to get ideas down without having to deal with the hassle of opening a Finale file or finding some scratch paper around.

Is there (or are there plans for) an export to traditional notation? I'm sympathetic to the benefits of a modified piano-roll notation, but if you want to have your little ditty for saxophone, English horn, and piano performed by human beings, they're not going to be able to do so without a lot of practice.

Traditional notation (although perhaps "antiquated" for some uses) is remarkably efficient from the perspective of information density, and musicians could easily sight read the two bars of music there without thinking about it at all. It's also widely known by most musicians, and able to deal with lots of things you'd need if you wanted to hear your music performed. (For example: presumably your composition is written in sounding pitch; your wind players would need to transpose from concert pitch or have transposed scores somehow.)

Well, the problem is that since you can plop down notes anywhere you like and drag them out to any length, the notation algorithm has to be very good at quantization. (Did you really mean to put a dotted thirty-second note triplet in there or was it just sloppy writing?) Also, each instrumental layer in the app is polyphonic, and notes can overlap each other any number of times. It's not always possible to cleanly assign notes to discrete voices, which traditional notation kind of demands.

I realize it's probably not a satisfying answer, but the way I see Composer's Sketchpad fitting into people's lives is that they use the app to work out their rough drafts and then recreate the finished, pristine pieces by hand in their preferred notation software or sequencer. Still, it's definitely on my potential feature list.

(Technically, you can already convert your pieces to notation by exporting to MIDI and importing it into a DAW like Logic, which supports traditional notation as one of its views. MuseScore also allows for MIDI import, and I think it does a bit of a better job.)

I completely agree that traditional notation is the way to go for live performance and certainly not antiquated in that regard. However, you're not going to be reading guitar solos off a sheet of staff paper, either! I mostly designed the app with interactive composition in mind, not performance.

Nice piece of software - just toyed with it, and it's very fun. It's way ahead of what the industry is used to in practicability for the composer - even if readability suffer a bit from it (I mean in the context of sight reading while playing), although this can be easily solved if this is ever needed by the exporting mechanism. I can see this getting lot of use, especially with Audiobus, Ableton link or other way of controling third party software - maybe, why not, even live compositing in the future ?

From the motivation to the way it seems to be executed, this is exactly what I've been looking (and have considered to develop) for a long time. If there were ever a Linux version of something like this, I'd buy it instantly.

For now, I'm using Guitar Pro for persisting ideas, which does work for my purposes but is much too cumbersome to keep a creative pace - it does work nicely for putting down drums and helps a lot in multi-voice stuff, though.

This looks like amazing fun, I hope you take the approach of charging a bit of money, it would be great to see you have the funds to keep on developing this, maybe a crowd fund thing?

Thanks! I'd actually love to crowdfund an Android version, but I think I need to grow my userbase a bit first.

Cool. Maybe this will convince me to by my wife that iPad she's been wanting. Excited to check it out.

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