Show HN: Simplified music notation
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People say this about many notations including the latin alphabet when they're first learning to read them. Mathematical notation is another one, and while some people have legitimate complaints I think they're usually much better off just learning the current notation.
> All I want to know is where to put my fingers. Note length, tempo, [...] is minor in comparison
NO!!! Music is the combination of rhythm and pitch. In many cases rythm is more important than pitch! A music notation without rhythm is like writing without vowels. Yes you can feel out the meaning of the sentence but it's ambiguous to the point that the meaning can also often become completely lost. This is my complaint with things like guitar chords; you can figure out how to strum along if you've heard the song before but it's not nice!
People learning with western music probably underestimate just how important rhythm is even in classical music but so much more in newer music. You can't just throw that away.
>This is written from the perspective of a clueless piano beginner who just wants to play.
I feel horrible saying this but, that wasn't surprising to read. Really, practice reading new pieces for a year or so and you'll be able to sight read, it really is like learning to read all over again and the confusion will slowly go away.
EDIT: you also have to keep in mind that music notation is meant to be used by composers as well as performers, the way this removes key signitures can make you think more chromatically which I would argue hurts beginner composers a lot (who should be thinking tonally IMHO.)
> NO!!! Music is the combination of rhythm and pitch. In many cases rythm is more important than pitch!
Lots of folks have jumped on this line, but surely if we put on our principle-of-charity hats we can presume that the author is saying rhythm's not important for the purposes of their notation - e.g. because it's meant for learners playing songs they're already familiar with.
They're presumably not claiming rhythm is unimportant period - nobody who's heard music thinks that.
The most efficient fingerings are often not obvious and feel very clumsy to beginners - which is why they're written into piano scores. If you do what's easiest you'll cripple your progress later.
And ideally you need some awareness of phrasing, context, and other elements of musicality, which some people will be born with, while others have to learn.
Your brain is translating a complex set of symbols into a complex set of movements, while being aware of context and state.
A different kind of notation will do very little to make any of this easier.
Can it? How do you learn a piece for which you only have a sheet? I would go even further and say that the most I learned about music was from handwritten notes on musicians or conductors[1] sheets.
Yes, I can figure out a lot myself just because of my background knowledge but give me something of an obscure era/modernist fashion and I am completely lost. Furthermore, I played the flute, so tempo, for example, dictates how to start a note (lacking the English term here) because there is a huge difference of what I can do to a single note when played larghissimo in contrast to prestissimo.
And especially with lots of modern music, composers resort to their own, additional notation because classical notation is not enough to express the music on paper.
Intonation perhaps? I often used the word "attack" to indicate the style of start of the note when I used to play flute, but I'd say thats far from proper terminology
I seem to recall a friend of mine having a single note on their three pages of music, everything else was rests... it was a crash cymbal part.
How would the crash cymbal player know where to play given this new notation?
To be fair, guitar players seem to manage. I truly cannot understand how, though. Most guitar tabs are oddly silent on the topic of what to do with your right hand, and yet everyone uses them.
(Note that there are a few tab formats that have rhythmic elements in them, but they're not very comprehensive.)
Is it? I'm musically stupid, so the fact that guitar is hard for me doesn't mean much. But isn't it truer and more relevant that guitar is a popular instrument for amateur and casual players, because a) it has a big role in popular music, and b) it's accessible, in the sense that guitars can be cheap and they don't require a lot of space?
There are plenty of relatively easy guitar pieces (especially if you're satisfied with using the instrument as an accompaniment to singing, or playing single-note melodies as part of a band), but that's obviously true of the piano too, and likewise both instruments have plenty of complex and technically demanding pieces. I'm genuinely interested in being corrected, but as far as I can tell the physical technique is at least as hard, and the possible musical complexity is no different. Is there any sense in which the guitar is actually 'easier' than the piano?
Guitars, like other string instruments, have multiple ways to play each note. Depending on the note progression, hand position needs to slide up and down the neck of the guitar to ensure the necessary groups of notes are all easily reachable from the current position. Tablature solves this issue by telling guitar players where to place their hands. Orchestral sheet music involving stringed instrument parts often include both the standard staff and tablature.
Of course, the simplicity of tabs also make it a great way for the community to spread knowledge. A simple tab can be written down in notepad in minutes and passed along freely, whereas sheet music requires specialized software and hours of time.
This makes it very attractive to beginners who aren't looking to become professional musicians, but simply want to mimic what they hear on the radio for their friends. I can either sit you down at a piano for two years and teach you sheet music, or give you a few weeks and tabs. Will you be playing perfectly? Of course not - but you'll be enjoying yourself.
Mind you, piano notes are already in a 1:1 correspondence with the staff, so hand placement is greatly simplified and tablature would be redundant. When the bar to musical literacy is to learn how to read a notation optimized for piano, it becomes a pointless question to ask why piano players achieve literacy.
And not only that, but different positions of the same note have different harmonic volumes and other properties (especially on acoustic guitar).
Also the regular layout of the frets makes improvisation much easier as you just find the right starting point to whatever song you want to jam over, and start going up and down the same pentatonic scale pattern.
Of course all this only gets you so far, but it's enough for a lot of teenage rockstar wannabes to have fun. No harm in that at all.
By contrast most of the songs people seek to first play on the piano requires a much steeper hill to climb. Even Fur Elise can be very challenging to play at tempo for a beginner. Moonlight, while slow, still requires catching a lot of notes at once and reading a dense score with plenty of double sharps and what not (and God help you if you want to try the 3rd movement). Outside classical, it's much more difficult to get a good sound by just banging out chords, unlike strumming on a guitar. Some sort of separate melody and baseline is almost always expected on the piano.
Now if you want to rip out some mad Eddie Van Halen solos or perform classical finger-picking songs then all bets are off. In fact I'd say mastering multiple melodies at once (some sort of counterpoint) on guitar is much more difficult than piano.
And yes translating standard notation to guitar fingering is much more challenging, because it makes no sense for the guitar neck, and you have to know not just to hit say A3 but where on the neck it would be best to do that given your current position.
The 3rd movement of Moonlight is a Diploma level (i.e. university, 10 years of playing at a bare minimum) piece.
Guitar is popular because it's the opposite of piano. You can get somewhere recognisable within six months or so. But many players plateau after that. Really good guitar isn't any easier than really good piano.
Yes of course! Classical guitar is on the level with all the other instruments. Those guitarists, of course, can all read music.
> some sort of counterpoint
Could you even write counterpoint in tab? Would it make sense? It'd be so much harder to read and write than just regular music at that point...
Edit:
> find the right starting point to whatever song you want to jam over, and start going up and down the same pentatonic scale pattern
This is very not true. It's only true for the simplest chord changes. And it's equally true and false for every other instrument. But... at the risk of being misunderstood again... guitarists are lazy and guitar affords many shortcuts.
If you are talking about picking, then that's simply a matter of picking the string. Both notations are adequate for annotating specific picking techniques. In my opinion, some muting techniques are a bit easier to read in tab notation.
That word you are looking for is "articulation" and of course it's part of traditional notation as is everything else, which is the point you are making.
Every second spent on this type of project should be spent practicing. Music notation is hard because theory is complicated and performance is nuanced.
People won't admit it... but we're all looking for shortcuts. Learn music the hard way. Or just be an amateur, but don't try to reinvent the kick-ass wheel we've been using for millennia.
Imagine if the only programming language available was C and all you wanted to be was an amateur script kiddie. It is nice to have beginner friendly languages we can start people off in, allow them to build real solutions in, but then slowly shift them out of into more nuanced code once they are ready.
Tab solves part of that problem for entry level guitarists, but there is a bit of a void in the staff.
I'm not saying that I don't like the staff - as someone who is literate, I agree, it works. I'm just saying that a simpler notation with a smoother learning curve might serve as an easier entry point for beginners who can make the jump to the full-on staff when they are ready.
(I'm not saying I like OP's project either, I think that's missed the mark too.)
From my perspective, excluding length and rests is problematic for this notation, though. Even lead sheets had these. Rhythm is such a huge part of music. This would be a difficult system to convey even a simple melody line to a musician unless the person also hears the song. (If this is intended to be more like tablature where this is typically what happens, then yes, it's fine.)
I think I prefer Hummingbird’s approach to OP’s because it makes deciphering the notes way easier with its symbol mnemonic, and I think deciphering the notes is the hardest part.
After reading the "docs" it was easy to read the notation but for some I struggled with transcribing it. Maybe it'd be easy to first write classical notation and then change it to hummingbird.
Also just noticed that even in the toggle example on the home page "natural" symbol is missing (flat/sharp reset).
Yes. But, also from the toggle example, you can notice that each note that is sharp or flat (even if that is part of the key) is individually indicated. Thus, there is no need to keep track of the "state" of sharpness or flatness.
I think this is kind of cool but I would need some time to learn it. Not that I've found traditional notation ever constraining.
picking up sight reading, I've also felt like there could be a better way. But at the same time, i was never sure what would be worth changing because everything mattered.
Not mentioning the pain of making these little shapes & accurate-length-strokes all by hand if you consider writing it.
All in all I'd say yes, you changed _where_ the basic information gets encoded, but does it really make it any better?
Hmm.. Would you just leave a space there instead of a rest? That actually seems harder than the current system.
This started as a fun challenge/side project, nothing too serious. Not trying to replace modern notation, just testing an alternative.
The notation is more intended for piano beginners who want to play songs they've already heard. Within that context, here are some (perhaps wrong) assumptions the project is based around:
- Most people know what sounds good
- Most people don't care about about recreating songs "perfectly", they just need a little bit of help
- Most people can already hum the songs they want to play
- Improvisation is fun (and encouraged with this sort of trimmed-down notation; letting loose is better than constraining)
And some of the issues I faced when trying to read and play music:
- Key signatures require constantly scanning left-to-right
- Hand positioning is different for different scales
- Rest symbols bring little value considering the visual noise they add
- At any reasonable tempo, 1/16th, 1/32nd, etc. note symbols bring little value considering the visual noise they add
- Inconsistent symbols
Will keep working on this. I'm no musician and would love to learn from those more experienced than me.
Thanks for the interest!
Visual noise is an area that I think is worth fiddling with. I’ve played around in various contexts with reducing the opacity of less interesting staves, staff lines, rests—in particular circumstances, you can dramatically improve a score. (e.g. if sight-reading a score with two choir and two piano staves per system, you can sometimes accidentally jump to the wrong place after the end of a line; if “your” staves are black and the others are grey, it’s much easier to go to the right place.)
Similarly with libretti I’ve played around with things like reducing the opacity of stage directions; it can improve things. Or producing a variant of the libretti for each part with other parts only grey, effectively doing the job of highlighting the script which people will often do.
Things like these weren’t possible traditionally in printing: your ink was on or off; it was theoretically possible to use two ink colours, perhaps one lighter than the other, but it was more expensive and so wasn’t done. People would just annotate it with a pencil, or more recently a highlighter. But experimenting with these sorts of things now is quite interesting.
Such notes are commonly quite heavily used in classical music. Whether they might be better doubled in length with the tempo doubled, is another matter.
It can go the other way, too: if you look in hymn books from the 19th or early 20th century, you may also find hymns that use whole and half notes, with the occasional breve and quarter note; whereas if you look at a later edition of such a hymn book, you may find those notes got halved, to use half and quarter notes, with the occasional whole and eighth note. I certainly find the latter easier to play.
The lack of visual noise from the sparser notation, hollow note-heads etc. is rather pleasing compared to some later music where you're into demisemiquavers where you could have just had semiquavers. We see semiquavers in my viol consort we know they're going to be teeny little notes in most pieces. There's just less ink on our pages!
I don't really understand why it shifted to shorter values. I guess it probably wasn't deliberate though. These things usually aren't, they just... happen.
ETA: maybe the increased visual grouping of beamed quavers and smaller notes was considered valuable for conveying the composer's intentions with regard to phrasing, especially as printing technology became increasingly capable of properly reproducing them.
"Stem length denotes note duration"
If only my eyes were 20 yrs younger. This hurts to read :-(
As the creator says in a post here, if it is intended to be used by beginners to play music they have already heard before, can't they simply play it from memory? Why do they need to struggle reading the notation? They already know the song. I mean, what's important for a musician, at any level, is to develop an ear (or mind?) for notes and rhythm; everything else is bells and whistles. So, can't beginners simply play by learning the black and white keys and their octave ranges?
If this is meant to be used to play songs previously unheard, thus by sight reading, then all music written in established notations must be mass translated to this notation. Not impossible, but just a tremendous amount of work, dare I say wasteful, overall. Investing some time to learn the existing notations instead has more ROI.
When I started playing guitar in college, and got introduced to western music (I learnt Carnatic violin as a schoolboy, the notation was mainly for notes aka 'svara'), I quickly gave up trying to sight read since not only was I not a professional, it was also much simpler, and more natural, to just play instead of multitasking. Note(ha!) that I can read music, but I can't do it in real time.
You'll be comfortable with reading standard notation relatively quickly compared to how long (forever) it takes to get your fingers to move to the right keys at the right time.
Standard notation may not be ideal for many instruments, but it is perfect for piano. It was designed off of the keyboard layout after all. I've sometimes been asked if there is an equivalent of guitar tabs for piano. Yes, I say, there is, sheet music.
I've seen suggestions such as ditching accidentals and just giving every note their own line or space, but that would make it much harder to recognize common chords or shapes in different keys.
Really the problem is the piano layout itself. It's designed to make playing C major easy and everything else hard (though many experienced players would say they prefer a scale with lots of black keys such as B major because those are easier to hit accuratley).
Of course there's already an answer to that, the Janko keyboard[1], which has been available for well over 100 years. It has a regular layout for easy transposition, and allows each hand to reach a wider range of notes without large jumps. Perhaps music notation would have evolved differently if this type of keyboard had been prominent.
Alas we got what we got, and have a massive catalog of music designed for it, and already experienced piano players certainly are not going to try to help change that.
We face the problem that people differ in what they think the features should be though. Ideally we would have a method to deduce what's the best symbolism for maximising input/output speed to human's minds. Some kind of scientific voodoo.
Beyond me what that might be.
In my view there are two huge barriers:
First, sight-reading of traditional notation is a widely shared working skill that nobody's going to give up. It's too much of a productivity booster and ensemble management tool. If you write in nonstandard notation, nobody will play your stuff.
Second, the huge bulk of existing written music is in non computer readable form, so it can't be re-notated without considerable effort. My band has well over a thousand "charts" most of which were printed before the age of the personal computer.
Dealing with the second issue might help with the first. If there were a decent OCR for sheet music, it would create a bulk of "source code" for printing in modern notation, and perhaps give readers a choice. For me, since my brain is hard wired for traditional notation, that's what I would choose. But for someone learning to play music, they could choose a more intuitive system.
I make Soundslice (https://www.soundslice.com/), which syncs music notation and real performance audio/video.
I've seen several "alternate" or "simplified" music notations come and go. While I applaud experimentation, I've gotta be honest: if you do the work of learning to read traditional music notation instead of inventing a new notation, many more doors will be opened to you.
You'll be able to jump in and read hundreds of years' worth of music, you'll be able to communicate better with fellow musicians, and it'll help develop your music theory knowledge.
I say all of this as somebody who began as an amateur guitarist, reading only ASCII tabs. I know what it's like on both sides of the notational divide. :-)
As long as you're changing the staff, why not use a chromatic staff? http://musicnotation.org/
He told me that this was how Chopin had communicated his music, and this the only true medium that he (and many other composers) had to get their works and musical ideas to present day.
I still feel like classical notation can be a undue burden in many cases, but it also feels like studying an older dialect of a language so that you can attempt to most accurately translate the meaning
How would that work? If I see 3 notes with a length of 1/4 each in a 4/4 bar, how do I know where the rest goes?
If you're going to use height to indicate note duration then why not put a bold crossing line to make it more clear.
16th and 32nd length notes are going to get a bit unwieldy in the OP's scheme. I'm not sure length of tail is preferable to having flags on the stem and suspect it's worse.
Leaving out rest symbols and encoding note duration by stem length are two choices I feel would make sight reading harder, not easier.
+1 to side-by-side samples
Well I mean, it's not. Presence of a learning curve isn't a problem.
It's like guitar tabs, but for piano.
Keep working on it!
[1]: http://www.simplifiedmusicnotation.org/instructions.pdf
I wonder if the author thought about triplets.
...and what about quintuplets? They do appear prominently in some music.