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Comment by riiii | Hacker News Reader

I sometimes wonder how western music notation would look like if it were designed from scratch today with all the knowledge we have today.

It feels like the current system is the Imperial system and somewhere ought to be the SI metric system.

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> It feels like the current system is the Imperial system and somewhere ought to be the SI metric system.

Any reason for that beyond “feeling?” And are you very deeply familiar with how the current system resolves differences between the single chromatic and 12 diatonic scales?

Full disclosure here: I’m a pianist who can generally sight read nearly anything (that’s well-edited) put in front of me, to the point of having music directed opera and theater for a living for a while, rather than using my CS and math degrees immediately after earning them from UNC.

I’ve also created an app, BeatScratch (https://beatscratch.io) that, among other things, attempts to resolve some of the challenges of editing (which I’d argue, again, really involves understanding how musical notation maps chromatic and diatonic scales between each other - ie “picking the best sequence of flats and sharps automatically to maximize readability”).

To me, a lot of these “musical notation is outdated” arguments seem the same as “there will soon be no need for programmers; AI can write all our code,” or those arguments insisting some “visual programming” paradigm should replace languages like Rust and Python.

That is to say… they’re arguments made by people who don’t really understand why the existing systems work the way they do and have done so successfully for decades (or centuries).

My comment was much more of a philosophical question than a hard criticism on the current system.

Yes I know why it is the way it is. But if you read your comment and your credentials you'll get the gist of what I'm thinking.

Do you think that your understanding of the current notation has influenced the way you think about music subconsciously? I assumed you learned the two together rather than in sequence.

It also seems to me that in practical terms, the amount of changing of synthesis parameters in the midst of a song is generally not that great and it’s not like we haven’t had the similar issue of notating pipe organ stops for a few centuries.

For that matter, it’s not like there aren’t centuries of alternative notation systems, whether it’s tablature, figured bass, or neume notation.

Usually, those are notated just with text placed either above the staff or between the staff lines (for a single organ stop). The normal stops only take a few characters to notate. More modern music for more complex organs will include a small amount of text indicating when to change between stop configurations or sets of manuals that are preset.

I can't imagine it would be that hard to notate such things for electronic music. Good old text sitting next to your good old staff works wonders.

The bigger issue for electronic music, IMO, is the notation of sounds that don't fit on a staff well. Modern classical composers (who use sheet music extensively in the creative process) have various notations for these sorts of things.

It's the worst system, except for all the others.

Props for the Churchill democracy reference. And so true. This notation problem definitely exists for all synthesizers, not just modular ones, and probably at some level for all new electronic instruments (which are synths under the hood).

Wonder no more; there's been a few attempts. Here's some from a quick HN search: Hummingbird (https://www.hummingbirdnotation.com/), Clairnote (https://clairnote.org/), and a thread with experimental music notation resources (https://llllllll.co/t/experimental-music-notation-resources/...)

I love all these attempts because I read the introductions nodding my head in agreement—yes traditional notation is annoying, yes we can use software to make better notations, yes it should be intuitive—and then I get to their actual proposal and it's just as inscrutible as traditional notation, and, often, uglier.

It turns out that notating the production of sound is inherently a very information-theoretically hard problem.

I would beg to disagree with you. Many attempts have been made to replace music notation as we know it, and all have failed. In fact, more cultures around the world are adopting "western" music notation than ever before. It turns out that the expressiveness and information density of the notation are hard to match with any other system.

In turn, the notation that we use has become more flexible than ever. There are rich notations for microtonal music, various playing techniques, clusters of notes, and many more things. If you took a score by a modern composer (see Saad Haddad's pieces on YouTube) and showed it to JS Bach, it would be unrecognizable to him. Music notation is a living language just like English is.

By the way, I have been an on-and-off professional in the music world, although it is a "side gig" to programming, including some composing, tuning, and playing.

However, it is undeniable that music notation is a system made for power users. It's not an easy language to learn. The ideas of "information dense" and "expressive" should remind you of the ideas behind the A programming language.

Obligatory (long-form) watch if you're going to continue wondering about this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eq3bUFgEcb4

"Notation must die" by Tantacrul

Today’s standard music notation has ecclesiastical roots. In part because there were incentives to standardize ecclesiastical performances. In part because for a few centuries monks were the Europeans most committed to writing.

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