It's fine to acknowledge there is a barrier to entry and there may be better DSLs specific to particular use cases but it's also a shame that we have this one language that has captured so much of existing music already
Is the purpose of music notation to be something you can set in front of a musician and make them play the music the way you want? In that case it performs pretty well, though it varies widely by instrument (both the ability to let them perform, and the actual notation).
But if the purpose is music literacy, letting regular people read a score and be able to hear the music in their head, then it's not working well. Even experienced musicians (like I assume OP is) usually associate notation not with sound, but with finger and lip positions first, the means needed to reproduce it. And only then, sometimes, from finger positions to sounds. I remember the band kids in ear training classes in high school wiggling three fingers, playing an imaginary trumpet, in order to be able to sight sing.
The reason I'm interested in alternative notation is that I dream of being able to read music like I read text. Who wouldn't want that? And despite having learned to sight read on some instruments and to sight sing reasonably, I don't feel like I can do that.
> Reading a score mechanically is not difficult after a few not-especially steep hills are climbed.
If it's so easy, why aren't we teaching everyone, like we teach them reading?
For the same reason we don't teach everyone the Greek alphabet -- because they're not really going to use it unless they're going to be reading Greek?
And it fact it seems we try to teach kids music notation - at least I had group recorder lessons in elementary school, and I thought this was pretty common?
But we fail. On each step in my school career from elementary to high school, they assumed we hadn't learned anything in the previous level. Which was, for most people, true.
A few, including me, learned to read traditional music notation well enough to play recorder pieces we weren't supposed to. But it didn't help me - or anyone I know - to be able to sight sing, for instance. It wasn't possible to build on for anything, except maybe becoming a better recorder player.
Having a "simplified musical notation system" might enable many more casual people to be able to sight-sing. But how useful is that, practically speaking? After all, you can just ask your musician friend to play through the melody a few times and then you know it well enough that the full musical notation system can remind you.
In fact, one simple option would be to teach people basic music theory based on C being the root, then write the vocal parts transposed into C and on a C clef. No need for super fancy new notation.
But such a system would have the opposite issue if anyone wanted to play it on a real instrument -- then they'd need to have enough musical theory to be able to transpose whatever they were looking at into the specific key they were supposed to be playing.
Furthermore, if you're looking at music, you're almost certainly going to be playing with an instrument anyway; in which case, you ideally want to practice in the same key the instrument is going to be in. In which case, it's probably better to just teach singers enough piano to be able to plunk out the tune on the piano when practicing privately until they "get" it.
On the whole, it's not clear that any possible improvements to the current system of "Have the people who can't sight-sing listen to the instrument until they get the idea" will be worth the extra costs.
That's just solfège (Do-Re-Mi) and kids do learn it traditionally. Translating from sheet music to solfège is trivial once you know the piece's key, since both are based on the diatonic scale.
We've had alternative systems for more than 150 years, and they have been undeniable didactic successes. So-called "moveable do" systems incorporate the "music theory framework" as you call it. But conservatories are refusing to build on it, all these things get accepted only as stepping stones to "real" music notation, not as something potentially transformative.
The arguments you make could easily have been made against the teaching of regular literacy too, once: it would certainly not have been obvious before the fact what the fruits of "everyone mastering this" would be.
Chinese notation is also moveable do. So is Roverud's cipher notation which I mentioned above (I think it has a common root with the Chinese one). So is the Kodály method. All these systems have been really successful in teaching where they were applied, but they always fall for the push to graduate to the "real" notation system.
I took many more music classes than required and sing/read hymns regularly and I feel fairly musically literate. It just needs regular practice like anything else, especially singing. Another thing to keep in mind is that musical literacy is of limited practical use and most people get by with performing by ear just fine.
I remember asking my mother how she could sight sing so easily (she got her degree in music). She told me you have to practice it intentionally like you practice playing your instrument. It's always difficult at first. Blew my mind. I was hoping there was a lazy way to learn, so I would just automatically become a sight singer from practicing my instrument, but alas, no.
I think they mean "audiation".
Chinese is spoken by 1.7B people and ostensibly most of them can read Chinese.
If you listened to accounts of Western learners' experiences learning to read and write Chinese, you'd probably believe it's some insurmountable and elitist language. They don't use an alphabet, how cruel and complex for newcomers.
Immersion and necessity enable us all to accomplish really astounding things. When I consider my own personal journey - I learned how to code after a career switch, and if I were to enumerate all the things I have since internalised with respect to programming and software engineering, it would have seemed absolutely impossible looking at it from day one.
From an education perspective, I wonder whether we lack the mechanisms to and culture to develop the tenacity to get over the initial learning barriers of difficult stuff.
I love how YouTube is now finding more creative ways to show how music theory is relevant. Eg how contrapuntal music theory was critical to making music for Pokémon on the GB due to the very limited sound making capabilities.
We use notation for the same reason they use Chinese characters in China: partly for cultural prestige reasons, but primarily because it would be such a hassle to switch, with a billion people having invested so much in learning it and so much being written in it.
(It's interesting that China should go the exact opposite way of cumbersome inherited complexity in their own music notation system, which as I've noted elsewhere is an undeniable pedagogic success but struggles to get accepted as more than a stepping stone to "real" notation)
In the UK we call them quavers, so we don't have this misconception. The time signatures are the same though - fortunately. They have to be represented somehow, although I'm sure we could do it better than we are it does the job.
3/4 is definitely meant to be 3/4, as it tells you are three beats in the bar, and those beats are represented by crotchets/quarter notes. They're not quarter notes because they're a quarter of the bar, but because you need four of them to make up the duration of a whole note.
You can just as happily have a piece in 3/2, or 3/1, or 3/8, although in most genres all of those would imply different things about exactly how the rhythmic emphasis works.
I do think we could do better around compound times like 6/8 and 9/8 vs simple times like 3/4 and 4/2, but we seem to manage okay. You do need genre knowledge to read music correctly, there's just no getting away from that. Any system which is capable of recording every nuance required would be unreadably dense.
Although we have sound recording now, lucky us, so we can just use that...
How many per grouping(/bar) is what is important, not conformance to some symoblic notation in which 4/4 is much more popular and recognisable and forcing it into other less easily divisible circumstances.
I agree with those carrying on about rhythmic importance over time signature notational importance. da-da-da-da-da-da. Everything is relative to everything else, and not to some explicit concept of an 'eigth note'.
- Why have a bass and treble cleft be different? We could just standardise one. It wouldn’t matter much for professional musicians but would make a massive difference to people learning music.
- It’s unnecessary to have the second number in a key signature. Just standardise on / 4 - at least for beginners. 2/4. 3/4. 4/4. 6/4. Having different key signatures be denoted using different types of notes confused the hell out of beginners for seemingly no benefit.
- So many music names are stupid. It’s not an “oct”ave. An “octave” has 7 or 12 notes depending on the scale. Seeing +8ve / +15ve drives me nuts. It’s +7/+14. Learn to count.
And so on.
Intel assembler is also a battle tested notation that has stood the test of time. But we don’t use it much. I understand that classical music notation is a good system for professional musicians. But that doesn’t mean it’s good for beginners. We don’t teach rust to high schoolers who’ve never programmed before. We start them off with something easier and they can learn rust later if they want.
Even the video says piano roll notation is useful while composing. Why shouldn’t beginners use that?
I get that it’s a hard problem. I know I don’t have all the answers. But surely there is room for improvement here. There’s no way this is the best music notation humanity will ever invent. We should celebrate the explorers, not demonise them. If they come up with something good, we all benefit.
There’s no specific reason to have 8, or 12, or 7, we just decided that way, same as we decided to count intervals not notes, and to start with 1 not 0.
You could just as well say “let’s divide the frequency range between x and 2x by 10 instead of 12”. Or we do something between x and 3x instead. We just don’t.
For what it’s worth, most guitarists (probably the largest group of amateur musicians in the west) use tab notation to begin with and many never graduate to standard notation.
As others have said, music notation is often not much more than a “paint by numbers” - experienced musicians can “paint” the picture without reading every single number.
The reasons for this are much much more complicated than "we just don't", and include "we sometimes do". The history of tunings and the emergence and dominance of 12-TET is fascinating and rooted in both math and myth.
Double counting the root note is ridiculous. Thats like saying there's 11 numbers in decimal - 0, 1, 2, 3 all the way to 10. You end up with weird distortions like "8 notes in 1 octave, 15 notes in 2 octaves". It makes way more sense to just admit there are 7 notes in each octave (in diatonic scales), and then we can just multiply like we do everywhere else.
Also, thats not what "interval" means - at least not in common parlance. An interval implies we're measuring the gap between 2 things. We usually measure intervals by subtraction. The interval between 10 and 15 is 5. The interval between 12:10 and 12:15 is 5 minutes. Likewise, we should count the interval between two notes by subtraction. The interval between the tonic and itself is 0. The interval between the tonic and the "major 2nd" (ugh) is a gap of 1 (diatonically) or 2 (chromatically).
In music's defense, I think the notation system might predate the number 0. But keeping and defending the status quo seems ridiculous. There are clearly real improvements to be made.
This has been tried, the sub-bass clef is just the treble clef two octaves down. But then the notes sit too high on the staff, with too many ledger lines. Most musicians find that learning a different clef is doable with a bit of effort. The meaning of relative intervals on the staff is the same, only the actual pitches are different.
> It’s unnecessary to have the second number in a key signature.
3/4 has different style implications than 3/8, same with 6/4 wrt. 6/8 or even 2/4 wrt. 2/2. These distinctions are quite convenient, that's why they're kept around.
An octave or etc. has seven or twelve distinct pitch classes, but if you want to linearly write out a full octave in sheet music in a way that can be heard clearly, you need eight notes--similar for other intervals. It's useful to be aware of both notions--the written-out 'interval' one usually finds and the zero-based 'distance', which is what you reference here.
I suspect the ideal notation for beginners might be different from that of professional musicians. Thats certainly the case in programming, where we have different languages which are better suited for different use cases. We don't write webpages in assembler, or operating systems in Squeak.
I've only been playing for 18 months at this point. I don't understand the subtle style implications of the time signature being 2/4 or 2/2. Is the best way to express those style difference really swapping crotchets for quavers in every measure? Seems a weird choice. Why not just have more marks at the top of the song naming how it should be played? Then beginners can ignore that mark and experts can play accordingly.
But what do I know? I'm just a beginner with a beginners' perspective. If sheet music isn't designed to cater for my needs, well, honestly thats a bit crap.
The politics of music are what makes it a hard problem. Staff notation is the notation of music written for clergy and kings. So there are banal incentives to premise arguments about music on the idea that staff notation notates everything that is properly/fully/truly music.
And the politics of music is so pervasive we don't even think about it as politics. So pervasive that describing the music we listen to is often a shorthand for deeply describing ourselves...and perhaps describing the music we do not listen to, even more so.
To put it another way, there are very well-established financially-backed conventions for what constitutes an informed opinion about music, and a corresponding canon of compositions.
The "second number in the key signature" is actually in the time signature, and it's pretty important. Although we didn't always have it - some older music just says "3" and you have to figure out 3 whats by looking at the music. Or go earlier than that and you'd have a circle, a broken circle, or one of those with a line through it. And no bar lines. I think most musicians agree the current system is an improvement on these in general. But take modern convention, look at how we write out English traditional music and you'll see that the 3/4 or 3/2 distinction is quite important as the first one is a waltz and the second is a hornpipe. You might not care about that, but anybody trying to dance to that tune will.
If it helps, intervals are named in a 1-based system not a 0-based system. They're called octaves because you go to the eighth note in the sequence, not because you add seven. And yes I know there are actually 12 notes in an octave in Western music, but you're usually operating in a key or mode that has picked out eight of them to be used in that moment, because that's how Western harmony works.
Of course we can improve music notation, and we will - it is still changing. Composers need to write down things that haven't been written down before, so they come up with a way to represent it. If that thing catches on, the notation will become standardised.
Time signatures, which you called out, have changed completely over the centuries. You used to get a circle, a broken circle, or one of those with a line through it. That was it. They'll probably change again when someone has a really good reason to do it.
Even our conventions for what note values to use have changed. There's a reason the semibreve - a whole bar of 4/4 - has a name which means "half a short note". Yet many musicians today don't know what a breve or a long or a longa even look like, because there's been a shift towards using quavers, semiquavers, demisemiquavers and so forth. The whole US system for note naming kind of enforces that, with the idea of a semibreve being a "whole note" as if 4/4 is somehow special (it's not).
There are actually even more clefs than just those two, but those two are by far the most common. A while back I was curious why guitar music is written transposed up an octave and why it is written on the treble clef instead of using both bass and treble clefs like piano music.
One of the thing I found when searching for the answer to that is that piano music is written using two clefs at least partly because the hands are largely independent on piano so it can essentially function as two instruments. Music that for strings might take two instruments to play, such as cello and a violin, can be played on one piano with one handed taking the part for the bass instrument and one taking the part for the treble instrument.
It thus makes some sense to notate the left hand part with the same clef common for bass instruments and the right hand part with the same clef common for treble instruments.
The answer I found for why guitar uses just one clef and why it is transposed is that (1) using the transposed treble clef was cheaper and faster back in the days when printing music was expensive and hard, (2) guitar doesn't have the hand independence piano does.
Here's where guitar in EADGBE tuning would fit without transposition on the piano bass/treble clefs, on just the bass clef, and on just the treble clef:
Actual Actual Actual
Grand Bass Treble
--E- --E- --E-
D D D
--C- --C- --C-
B B B
--A- --A- --A-
G G G
---------F- --F- ---------F-
| E 12 E 12 | E 12
---------D- --D- ---------D-
| C C | C
---------B- --B- ---------B-
| A A | A
---------G- --G- ---------G-
| F F | F
---1st---E- 1st --E- ---1st---E-
D D D
middle --C- middle --C- middle --C-
2nd B 2nd B 2nd B
---------A- ---------A- --A-
| 3rd G | 3rd G 3rd G
---------F- ---------F- --F-
| E | E E
---4th---D- ---4th---D- 4th --D-
| C | C C
---------B- ---------B- --B-
| 5th A | 5th A 5th A
---------G- ---------G- --G-
F F F
6th --E- 6th --E- 6th --E-
Still, most guitar music is going to mostly stay below that 12th fret. Given that, it fits pretty well on the piano style bass/treble clefs. If music had been cheap and easy to print, and we didn't get hung up on the guitar not having the hand independence of the piano, I think notating guitar without transposition on the bass/treble clefs like piano would have worked out fine.
If that's too hard and expensive, then it becomes clear why it gets transposed. If it was notated just using bass clef you'd need ledger lines for everything on the top two strings, which is often most or all of your melody. When your printed music involves hand typesetting on primitive equipment that is annoying.
Even worse would by untransposed on the treble clef. Now almost everything played on strings 3-6, and much of string 2, would need ledger lines.
Transposing up an octave gives this:
Transposed Transposed
Treble Bass
E E
--D- --D-
C C
--B- --B-
A A
--G- --G-
F F
--E- 12 --E- 12
D D
--C- --C-
B B
--A- --A-
G G
---------F- -F-
| 1st E 1st E
---------D- -D-
| middle C middle C
---2nd---B- 2nd -B-
| A A
---3rd---G- 3rd. -G-
| F F
---------E- -E-
4th D 4th D
--C- --C-
B B
5th --A- ---5th---A-
G | G
--F- ---------F-
6th E | 6th E
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