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Comment by vitaly-pavlenko | Hacker News Reader

the main problem that i'm solving is that a standard notation mostly obscures structure. it's good for sight reading because people use it (like QWERTY or Chinese characters), but it's a suboptimal way to make underlining structural laws, patterns and symmetries of Western music visible

i ranted about it here: https://x.com/vitalypavlenko/status/1771820942680830417

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> the main problem that i'm solving is that a standard notation mostly obscures structure

Can you expand on this? I’m a hobbyist that’s learned how to sight read, and one of the coolest things was when I stopped seeing individual notes and began to see structure, as in chords and progressions. I’m not sure how sheet music would obscure the structure because that’s all I see in it now.

I have a detailed write-up in this thread: https://x.com/vitalypavlenko/status/1771820942680830417

Basically, you can somewhat see chords in sheet music. Like, you can easily see a C major chord in a treble clef.

1) How many milliseconds does it take you to understand that the entire bar you're looking at is just a C major chord arpeggiated in different octaves?

2) What if it's a bass + treble clef? What if it's an orchestral score?

3) How fast can you verify that a treble clef is active now? That it's not a C-sharp major or a C major chord?

4) Do you actually care that it's a C major chord or rather should you care that it's a I chord (a tonic major chord)?

5) If you care about relative chords (Roman numerals), does it mean you should learn 7 to 12 times visual cues of what's going on now?

These are just the beginning questions, where the end questions that I care about are:

101) What are the backbone structures making a list of midi pitches played suddenly a tango? A ragtime? A malaguena? A Bulgarian horo?

102) What are differences between styles (languages) of specific composers? How do I rapidly see what's different between Nobuo Uematsu and Koji Kondo? Between Chopin and Schumann? Between (tonal) Copland and (tonal) Debussy?

103) How do I imitate any of those or any fusion of those? How do I make sure that I don't miss any structural feature when I analyze and decompose their style and their pieces?

Literature: https://github.com/vpavlenko/study-music

Thanks for the response! I think it would be cool to see if a different notation lends itself better to these questions, but I do believe that the classic notation we already use satisfies most of these questions. I feel like reading a natural language has a lot of similarities. When you first learn to read, you often identify individual letters, then syllables, then you begin to read words, and finally one day you can compare the stylistic similarities between two different authors.

Music has a lot of the same steps and it just takes time to get to the different stages of comprehension. At the stage I’m at now, it’s fairly easy to look at sheet music and determine if it’s ragtime or swing or jazz. I’m sure I’ll be able to pick up more nuance as time goes on too.

But, I think it’s cool that you’re exploring different approaches! I don’t want to take away from that, I just wanted to put out a challenge to the presumptions your making that classic notation is insufficient in some of these areas :)

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