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Comment by dekhn | Hacker News Reader

I have only familiarity with western musical notation, and it too me a while to get there. Tablature and track notation (digital audio workstation) both were completely intuitive to me. Is there anything that argues for learning Western musical notation- IE, does it help express some things eloquently/efficiently/naturally? Every time I ask classically trained musicians (who started with a piano and a music book) they look at me like I'm crazy and dumb.

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I like to think of western music notation as not the most intuitive choice for a lot of popular styles of music. But it's kind of like when people talk about X programming language "making hard things possible".

It's like math notation. There is a canon of work over a very long period of time that can be used as a foundation for expressing many different intricate ideas in a compact way. And in the 20th century tons of non-traditional notation styles have been thrown into the western mix.

DAWs and tablature editors mimic musical notation anyway. I suppose replication over the bars lines can be done more easily in DAWs that in tablature editors, but I still wanted a tool to generate the part from the "blueprint" rather than copy-pasting and double-checking all over the place.

What I want to do is to learn a bit more about Konnakol, which is the Indian musical art expressed in percussive syllables. I have an impression that building a bridge between Konnakol and western notation can really get the creative juices flowing.

yeah, I have a zakir hussein track where he does konnakol and it's quite impressive.

Music notation is like any natural language -- i.e. super fucking dumb dumb dumb, and yet, uniquely, it lets you communicate precisely with other musicians, which is awesome.

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