Hacker News Reader

Comment by scrozier | Hacker News Reader

Interesting, well thought out, and well-presented. Just not sure that it solves a problem. It certainly isn't radically easier to learn than traditional notation. And despite other comments here, huge numbers of young people learn traditional notation all the time, with little stress. Maybe, as is true with spoken languages, it becomes harder to learn musical notation as we get older?

All the "problems" that this notation "fixes" are essentially non-issues for musicians who already know traditional notation.

View on HN

Well, it says it fixes visual representation of intervals and huge inconsistencies between how similar notes are notated.

Meaning new students would have a much easier time learning naming notes and where they are - in my experience the typical child that has taken lessons for a couple of years is still scarcely capable of naming notes outside perhaps the 6-10 they're most comfortably with. Accidentals do not help.

And everyone would benefit from visual support for the intervals.

Here's an anecdote: I have been playing piano for many years but recently discovered, because my son is learning to play cello, that I have trouble taking his cello scores and playing them with my right hand. I can play bass clefs no problem in piano music with my right hand, but my brain is apparently trained to do the translation in that context. Without it, I have to focus to not accidentally read his single system scores as a G clef.

Similarly, I've seen his teacher, a cellist giving concerts, get temporarily confused over a G-clef violin score.

Yes, these are not huge problems, but I'm personally willing to believe we could have something better.

Good points. I haven't thought a lot about it, but I still don't see how this new system is radically easier to learn. Looks like I have to be concerned with notes partially on lines, an irregular staff, two notes occupying the same "space" on the staff, etc. Then there are clefs with numbers...now I have to remember what "number" octave I'm in. And for piano, you lose the white key/black key distinction, which is obvious with accidentals in traditional notation. (This is specific to piano, and maybe not terrible.) I just don't see any tremendous reduction in cognitive load.

> you lose the white key/black key distinction

I'm not sure what I think about this new system but the "black key = accidental" association is probably not very helpful to anybody playing on/after an intermediate level as there are cases where accidentals mean white keys (for example f flat or g double sharp). It might be helpful if you're a beginner though.

While we certainly run into Fbs or G##s, they are relatively rare. I don't think they undo the visual cue of seeing G# and knowing that's a black key. But you might be right. After all, if we're playing in the key of E, G#s are not notated other than in the key signature (and some other exceptions that don't really matter here). So yeah, maybe accidentals <-> black keys isn't such a big deal.

Huge numbers of young people learn traditional music notation all the time, yes, but I wouldn't say with little stress. Music notation evolved much like English, and much like English it's widely recognized to be full of kludges and unnatural constructions. And similarly, changing it would resemble switching to Esperanto.

To add to your point, many people already use other systems. Tablatures are very, very common for guitar. Lead sheets are used in jazz, and they do away with many of the problems of regular notation (notably, the legibility of chords, and different clefs) by only using it for melodies. In a way, traditional music notation is really only used in classical music. And they're never ever going to adopt another system. The people who wanted another system have already split off.

> traditional music notation is really only used in classical music

And jazz and pop and rock and.... It is a universal language that allows musicians from many backgrounds to come together and play a tune together. Jazz is the most obvious example--where musicians often sightread a tune together. (Although, to be fair, a substantial part of jazz notation is chord symbols, which are not (directly) a part of traditional notation.)

tabulature is really just used for starting out on guitar in my experience and it works because the alternative is SO approachable and SO instrument specific.

lead sheets are solving a whole different problem and almost ALWAYS have the melody in traditional notation in addition to the chords. some lead sheets assume you already know the melody and can transpose to whatever key is relevant.... but still a lead sheet is there to give you hooks in order to aide improvisation.

jazz musicians have not "split off", they have added some chord notation above the traditional stuff.

Yeah, I had the same reaction. I can’t really imagine this would be any easier to learn, and doesn’t seem to solve any problem I’ve ever had with standard notation (this is with 20 years of music experience across several instruments).

I mean, English isn't hard to learn if you grew up with it either, but it's still three languages in a trenchcoat with a ton of weird things.

I mean, pronounce all of these words that have the same combinations of the letters "ough": though, through, rough, cough, thought, bough, plough, ought and borough. The notation is the same, but it's clearly not adequate to express the difference between pronunciation. If you grew up with it, you Know how they're pronounced, but as a non-native you wouldn't.

This isn't a parallel argument. There are no ambiguities in standard musical notation that parallel the pronunciation issue you point out in English. Further, there are no non-traditional-music-notation "speakers" trying to learn musical notation. One is (almost) always learning it anew, unless perhaps you're coming at it from a different notation system, which is a different discussion.

Intervals are ambiguous on the staff in the traditional system. They're disambiguated by reference to the clef and key signature. The whole point of this new system is to remove that ambiguity so you don't constantly have to keep the clef and key signature in mind when analyzing intervals.

Fair point. I can see how that might be nice. I will say that, if you play music a lot from traditional notation, that ambiguity completely disappears into the background.

> English [is] three languages in a trenchcoat

I love it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com