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Comment by vintermann | Hacker News Reader

We teach kids a lot of things they're not really going to use.

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.

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Most kids hardly encounter musical notation in their daily lives though. Reading music is like any other kind of literacy — it needs daily practice and a lot of work. Most people are not music literate just like most people are not calculus literate or chemistry literate or programming language literate — it takes a lot more than a few classes in elementary.

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.

For any kind of literacy, there's going to be a chicken and egg problem. If you suggested to an ancient mediterranean scribe that everyone should learn reading and writing, they'd probably say, "Pah, it would be a huge waste of time for most of them. Very little practical use. They get by with memorization anyway." And they'd be right, in a sense! We don't know beforehand what the fruit of universal literacy will be.

Right, to be able to sight-sing, you need either perfect pitch, or you need to 1) have a sufficient musical theory framework to describe what to sing without perfect pitch 2) need to know how to translate the notes on the page into that musical theory framework. With #2 being the hardest bit.

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.

It's telling you can only imagine "simplified" systems.

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.

Moveable do has nothing to do with notation, it's just a sight-singing strategy, and it's mostly the default one in the United States.

Of course it has. It's the basis for most of the alternative notation systems. The shape note systems of Sacred Harp are based on moveable do, for instance, and they were very successful in promoting music literacy in their culture for a good 100 years.

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.

> have a sufficient musical theory framework to describe what to sing without perfect pitch

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.

> But it didn't help me - or anyone I know - to be able to sight sing, for instance.

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.

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