Comment by zebproj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zebproj | Hacker News Reader

These days, I'm so steeped in experimental music, that I was expecting something a bit more "out there" [0]. This feels quite tame by comparison.

I like the idea of a chromatic staff. Making notes visually more evenly spaced would probably make certain things clearer, and probably would provide some interesting insights from a musical analysis point of view. The fact that it still uses the same 5-line staff would make it easier to adopt. It's familiar, and you can use existing staff paper.

However, speaking as a reasonably proficient sight reader, I don't know how much more improvement this adds. From a readability point of view, this looks about the same to me (which I suppose is half the point). Maybe I'm just a jaded musician, but I just don't find music notation that hard to pick up.

Reading music is very similar mental process to reading text. Your brain quickly learns to chunk notes into patterns rather than individual groups, similar to how in reading you don't actually parse out every single letter.

0: https://llllllll.co/t/experimental-music-notation-resources

Quoting the this page [1] :

"One reason why none of these alternative notations has caught on is presumably that it takes a lot of time and effort to learn a new notation system. Not only professional musicians, but also musicologists (including music psychologists and music theorists) invest enormous amounts of time learning to read conventional music notation. Understandably, they don’t want to have to start again from scratch. So they tend to avoid the problem of conventional notation’s shortcomings and the evaluation of alternatives by regarding the problem either as irrelevant (“conventional notation obviously cannot be improved”) or impossible to solve (“it is clearly impossible to decide among the many possible alternatives”)"

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20200925170150/musicnotation.org/...

Whenever I see products on instagram or wherever that say things like "now anyone can play guitar!" I get annoyed. It's not that I don't want people to learn guitar—hell yes learn guitar!! But you can't skip the hard part. You can NEVER skip the hard part.

I suspect the authors of this idea know what they're doing better than I do, and I don't have a strong specific opinion on it. But when I see attempts at 'improving' well-established systems it makes me wonder if it's just someone who hasn't learned WHY the 'hard' thing is designed the way it is. Again—I am absolutely all for experimenting with every conceivable way of doing something, as this is how progress is made.

In this case, the first thing I thought of is that diatonic staves are the way they are because most (traditional 'western') music is in a single key. So it shouldn't be surprising that the notation optimizes for that. And if you change key, you just write down the new key and continue along. I don't personally see much need for a chromatic scale unless you were, I guess, writing 12-tone music ;)

I'm also a big fan of experimental musical notation and, googling around, it seems there isn't a single database of them. Shit, I already have too many side projects......

Bringing up 12 tone, when first exposed to this music, the first thing I did is rewrite it on a rearranged chromatic staff. It is so clear that it belongs that way. But it certainly isn't easier to play that way.

So I feel a "new" notation system that is easier to read, not that interesting, nor that helpful. But an "alternative" system that is optimized around composing in a certain way is interesting, and helpful, but when you're done it probably makes sense to write it in traditional notation if you are going to write it down.

Absolutely, there's always room for domain-specific languages (or notations).

> You can never skip the hard part

That's not true. Or else we would still be using Roman numerals

The hard part I'm referring to is the work of training your ears and fingers to do what you want them to do. Similarly, learning an entirely new orthography or notation is always going to involve training yourself, and you can't skip it. There are absolutely ways of making things easier on yourself: books, videos, gadgets, etc., but you still can't just bypass it. At least until we can learn kung fu via direct brain interface ;)

I'm slowly learning to play the guitar. I'm at the level of enthusiastic beginner and my main issue is finding time to practice (without my children joining in). With that said, reading the music never struck me as one of the difficulties. Building an understanding and intuition of how different notes and chords relate to one another however...

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