Hacker News Reader

Comment by warfangle | Hacker News Reader

As someone who's played with sheet music, I can pretty confidently say that functionality would be extremely annoying.

Imagine reading along with a marquee. Yeah, it's that annoying. I'd much rather it flip virtual pages than scroll along.

View on HN

Okay, picture a roughly paper-sized screen with sheet music on it. Each "page" has 8 lines on it, say, but the screen has room for 10. At the top and bottom are the last line of the previous page and the first line of the next.

Pages "turn" by scrolling up, and there's a reminder of the previous page at the top.

Whaddaya think?

I play music too and would like the scrolling score. Maybe it's more of an issue of it's less comfortable now but far more comfortable later.

Perhaps, but think of it this way. There's a reason typography focuses on line length in written text - it's easier to read something if you have a decent reference point [1]. A long line makes it easier for your eyes to get off track.

The same thing happens in music. Dividing things into measures and lines allows our brain to "chunk" it. Part of the chunking mechanism is returning your visual focus to the beginning of the next line.

Part of reading is the connection of eye movement to new information. If you no longer need to move your eye to get a new measure/phrase/note, it's patently more difficult to notice the change. That's why marquees are useful for short lists of phrases that repeat often - and not entire articles. Maybe scrolling music might be decent for karaoke or games like guitar hero - but the information encoded into one bar of classical staff is orders of magnitude greater (and one of the reasons I despise, say, piano rolls in most digital audio authoring software).

Disclaimer: I have only been reading sheet music for two decades; this may or may not qualify me to comment on the benefits or detriments of an autoscrolling marquee of sheet music instead of paginated sheet music.

[1]http://www.maxdesign.com.au/articles/em/

I just wanted to add on more to your thoughts: when I play piano with sheet music, I "chunk" as you mention, but I also look ahead anywhere from like one measure to an entire page to refresh my memory and see what I need to play next, and/or how I should transition from one section to the next. I also find that these definite divisions by lines and pages of music help memorizing and visualizing what to play. I would love it if there was an app that listened along and flipped/shifted pages over automatically, but marquee scrolling would be disastrous to the way I read sheet music.

(Disclaimer: I've been playing piano for over 15 years of my 21 year existence on this planet, is that enough to comment on my personal preferences? ;) )

On the other hand, throughout the years I spent singing in choirs and with specific situations like guitar hero, a marquee style method of presentation never posed a problem as long as I could see at least a measure or two ahead at a time. Likely because of the information density you mention - singing and guitar hero never felt as demanding as playing piano.

Oh, absolutely. To be able to play nontrivial pieces without looking ahead two-to-three measures is nigh impossible.

Reading music seems to be very interesting - after you truly know a piece, the notes seem to simply be reminders for muscle memory. It's not like reading a book - you do that when you learn the book. Sight reading is fairly difficult!

As for duration of experience, it's not necessarily the length of time.. but whether you've ever truly learned a piece.

Ok. I think we're both right. A middle ground is for the app to scroll vertically. One of my favorite guitar tab sites does this and it works beautifully. I thought at first that it was just the scrolling but now you've made me realize it is the scrolling combined with a fix width so I can still chunk.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com