Music Software and Bad Interface Design: Avid’s Sibelius (2018) [video]
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I find the world of music notation software to be fascinating in its diversity of design philosophies. Something about music notation — its complexity, plus its worldwide ubiquity, plus the business reality that there's (relatively) not a ton of money to be made in its software industry — creates a situation where many interesting ideas bloom and there is not one clear monopoly.
Yes, Sibelius and Finale are the longtime popular applications, but Dorico recently came on the scene with a genuinely new philosophy, and there are lots of less popular apps, mostly one-person-show kinds of things, with different approaches to how editing music should work.
My own attempt is with Soundslice (https://www.soundslice.com/notation-editor/), which has an entirely web-based sheet-music editor and lots of tools for music learning/practice.
That's 100% true for classical, jazz, marching band, etc. musicians, but also for musicians in "pop" genres.
Even folk/ethnic musicians around the world, with a few exceptions, are more common to use western notation than their historical notation (if available). If they gig and work with studios and orchestras, that's almost a certain.
What relevance their comment has is beyond me- perhaps making a point about the relatively niche market of "people who want to write music"- but who knows.
Well, that's true in the sense that non-musicians don't care for it, but that's also irrelevant (and something everybody already knows).
If the parent was making that statement, I'm not sure why they felt it needed to be said :-)
I can think of sample-based music (MPC/Decks/Acousmatic tradition/Ikeda/Microsound/Chartier/Field-recordings), improvised music, as well as the most obvious modern development of MIDI data and the piano roll which is not an interchangeable format with a "score".
If we aren't exclusively talking about "notation" in a more general sense, we haven't even touched on the wealth of folk/traditional music out there with literally no recorded symbolic formats or concept of a written history such as australian aboriginal music.
midi is pretty much a piano-oriented subset of western music theory in terms of expressive power
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kr3quGh7pJA
I know the title will set people off in a place like this, but it's not a 2014 Tumblr-level "kill white people" style analysis. Totally worth the time.
Well, if you felt the need to "lol", let me LOL back at you :-)
No PhD, but as someone with years of music training, who has travelled all over the world, and with a couple of professional musicians in the family, coming from a country with its own ancient music notation and millenia of musical history, and who has non-western modes and tradition, I can't even imagine the pedantry of your comment.
Musicians all over the world:
(a) playing westernized music (which covers about most of the charts everywhere, from Asia to Latin America and Africa), and western music directly
(b) playing western music directly (classical, jazz, rock, blues, etc)
(c) playing other genres with traditional western notation and even influences (tango, samba, and so on)
deal predominantly with western music theory, notation, and instruments -- and which cover a huge chunk of global musicians.
But
(d) even traditional "folk" (ethnic) musicans adapt to westernized versions of local music, with few exceptions, and use standard western notations (or notation hacks, like tablature and chord charts) in the studio and the concerts.
Heck, our traditional music is modal and microtonal, but it's mostly translated and played in your run of the mill western scales and keys. And I've seen the same all around the world.
You might have in mind places like India, China, Indonesia, etc, but still most pros will use western style music theory and write with western notation than not. To the point that the exceptions are more folkore than actual every-day chart music.
>I've also rarely worked session musicians who aren't orchestral who use anything other than charts and an enormous amount of the music we consume in the west is produced in a DAW or whatever without ever touching notation...
Which is neither here, nor there. The Nashville number system, for example or a piano roll is still based on western music theory and norms (even if not notation), and those musician will still 99% use the typical major/minor/etc scales.
The problem with a deep knowledge of musicology in this regard is that it makes it very easy to lose the forrest for the trees, and e.g. know 1000s of local / oral etc traditions, etc, but not see that those are nonetheless niche and very much not the norm in the day to day music of a country, and difficult to even find in the radio/charts in most countries.
The rest are as representative as e.g. jazz is in 2021 US musical tastes, charts, sales, and so on...
These things are not the same, and given your earlier comment:
>Western notation is used throughout the world, even more so than local notation systems
I have assumed we're talking about notation, rather than tonality. In which case, of course someone can be using Western tonality while not using Western notation- this is a decent part of my point. I could be playing the original Renaissance organ tablature or whatever and not be using Western notation in the sense that you mean. No one is saying that Ariana Grande is operating in a non-western mode of music but I'm fairly sure you could find people who worked on her recordings who aren't working from sheet music. Your example of piano roll or NNS are also the kinds of things I am talking about, as is you know, a baroque ensemble whose lutenist is using tablature. This is because you absolutely can't say that charts and tablature are notation 'hacks'- they are, like the western notation that you're talking about, sets of instructions that tell you to varying degrees of clarity how to physically carry out a harmonic or melodic sequence. Thinking that chart=notation=tablature is similarly inaccurate as saying Western tonality=Western notation, and therefore me bringing up DAWs is entirely relevant- so is bringing up oral traditions and other contemporary modes of writing pop (etc) music that doesn't use notation.
Secondly, since we're basing our points on our experiences, here is my relevant experience: I work in professional orchestras in several countries, I've played in orchestras and sessions alongside bands, supervised students teaching modern and traditional instruments, performed in the improv circuit, worked with experimental composers and in education projects with children. The only one of these settings where I haven't encountered people who do not use western notation (the notation that you and I are talking about, with key and time signatures, staves and barlines) is professional symphony orchestras. Of course western notation is relevant given the historical dominance of western culture, but by no means is it as ubiquitous as you think it is. My colleagues teach songwriting and electronic music/sound design to hundreds of pupils without it. People teach instruments without it and make performing careers without it. I think you possibly can't see the forest of non-notated musicking that occurs for the trees and think that everyone making music everywhere is reading off a western notation score.
Sure, I mostly write electronic music myself, with some small piece/band music thrown in, and I only use full notation for the latter.
But the chord names, mode names, tablature, chord diagrams, piano rolls in a DAW, tunings, chord tracks, arpegiators, etc, are all still western music notation, nomenclature and theory (and usually tonality), they're not some local ethnic tradition.
So "My colleagues teach songwriting and electronic music/sound design to hundreds of pupils without it" is kind of strained to my opinion. They do use it, and what other stuff they use is still 100% westernized, they just don't hand out the typical orchestra score sheet.
Most music production software (Ableton, ...) doesn't even support Western notation.
https://old.reddit.com/r/ableton/comments/jsqfvx/a_small_det...
First of all, music production is only a small part of music. There are tons of people out there who play musical instruments, and a much smaller number of people who do music production.
Almost nobody who plays an instrument will use piano roll notation, because piano roll notation just fucking sucks. It’s the shittiest way to read music. Nearly everyone who reads music in some way reads a score, reads tablature, or at the very least, reads the chords.
Second, when you look at music production, there are big chunks of it done with scores. You know why Cubase and Logic are so popular? Partly because they have decent notation systems in them. They’re not competitive with Sibelius/MuseScore/etc., but they work. That’s because people writing scores want to know, “What chord was that? Should I change the chord? Should I revoice it?”
I use Pro Tools to mix and Logic to compose for this very reason. I don't use Ableton for this very reason.
Logic is certainly a mainstream DAW. :) Same with GarageBand.
EDIT: Doesn't Cubase also do this? ...like I am pretty sure there are quite a few apps that support this?
Another musical notation program which has quite some fans in Germany is capella:
https://www.capella-software.com/us/index.cfm/products/capel...
Is Dorico's UI more consistent? Does it address many of the issues of this video's criticism?
Or put another way, does being a green-field software project allow the freedom to create a sane UI? Or did it have to deliberately copy may of Sibelius' faults so migrating users can quickly get up to speed with Dorico? (Analogous to MS Excel copying Lotus 123 buggy leap year of 1900 to be more compatible.)
EDIT -- just noticed same uploader also made a 1 hour video about Dorico[2] but not sure if answers my questions.
It's worth pointing out that when Sibelius was first released, it was hugely nicer to use than the industry-leading product at the time (Finale).
IIRC the most valuable feature is the ability for the engraver to quickly and deterministically escape the set of behaviors that the software provides to ease the act of engraving exactly what they want to see.
Score and Finale have been the gold standards because there is a way to escape the default behavior, to draw whatever they want on the score. In Finale's case, these ways are all explicitly documented so that even a relatively new user can (slowly) find each escape valve. Finale even has a shitty, black-and-white Microsoft paint for the user to paint whatever articulation, shape, or even notehead they need to accommodate whatever notational style or concept is needed.
That's all to say-- the power user is going to live in the escape valves for a substantial amount of time. (How else could you explain people still using Score when Finale had been around for decades?)
Historically, competitors to Finale/Score simply did not have the adequate number of escape valves. In those cases good interface design was irrelevant because professional engravers couldn't get the control they needed to engrave scores, which meant they couldn't use those programs to make money. Either that, or the software would do a really good job at, say, jazz engraving, and then imply that it was good at all style of notation when it wasn't.
Somebody at Musescore should do a kickstarter to cross-reference the current Finale documentation against the escape-valves present in Musescore. In the domain of engraving, is Musescore feature complete with all of Finale's escape valves? If so, it's worth advertising that because it's a really important achievement.
(Note: I'm reticent to mention specific engraving problems for fear that a neophyte will take my 10 seconds of examples as a complete set and declare Musescore feature complete. But if someone wants examples and promises not to do that, I'll give them.)
Edit: clarification
> I'm reticent to mention specific engraving problems for fear that a neophyte will take my 10 seconds of examples as a complete set
I could not agree more. Correctly engraving music is hard! If someone wants to get a sense of all the things that a professional-grade tool would need to handle, Gardner Read's "Music Notation: A Manual of Modern Practice" is kind of the gold standard here. 453 pages that solely cover how to correctly notate music. I've been doing this for years and I still consult it fairly regularly.
Does anyone have any recommendations for a _real_ alternative they've used?* I took a look at MuseScore a couple of years ago and the impression I got was that it was fine for casual usage and for producing fairly simple scores, but lacked a lot of features. (I found that to be the case LillyPond as well.) Dorico looks more promising, but I'm curious what people who've used it heavily think.
I didn't even know that Finale was still around, but that was the first notation software I learned. Ironic that the reason Sibelius was able to trounce Finale in the marketplace so many years ago was mainly because the UI was so much easier to use and more intuitive. And now it's succumbed to the same problems.
*Features I'd like to see: parts generation, graphical score options, midi-based entry, and something that offers good default engraving behavior out-of-the-box but also lets you tweak everything to your liking. I typically sketch things out on on paper first, so I care less about "composition features" and more about being able to produce scores that are correct and that allow me to notate everything I would want.
Dorico has great out-of-the-box defaults and the people behind it genuinely care about great engraving.
Perhaps Dorico has better graphical score engraving by now, but it didn't when it came out. I personally don't have much use for that, so I haven't followed.