I highly recommend this video [1] by the Head of Software at Muse who had a big part in the development of Audacity 4.0. Some great insights and really fun to watch!
> Many people feel that western notation makes it unnecessarily hard to read music. If we want to sight read, learn music theory or just practice an instrument, surely there's a better way? Right? This has been a hot topic for almost 1000 years... AND I PUT IT TO BED RIGHT HERE!
Fighting notation is like fighting piano keyboard which is also extremely convenient thing to play compared to other stuff, even to grid controllers.
Use freeform text; it's a standard part of musical notation. Just because most of what you see on a score is some form or another of shorthand doesn't mean everything is.
How do you think Tom Lehrer was able to indicate a tempo of "Pornissimo"?
https://tomlehrersongs.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/smut-m...
The only real problem is guitar always has several different ways to play the same notes all over the neck and instrument tuning isn't always specified either.
Standard tuning may not work and tabs sometimes aren't there alongside the staff. If you're trying to sight read, you'll guess alright for a while until you are suddenly forced to make heroic leaps to the other end of the neck or painfully contort your fingers just so you don't miss a beat.
But also, really, I was always taught that unless the composer specifies something specific, you are free to figure it on your own. Like there are only so many contexts where the timbral differences between two unison, fretted notes is going to matter probably, right? Also, how you play some part might be informed by where you are after the preceding part etc.
Tuning point though is kinda interesting and not all my wheel house. But they do call the default one standard for a reason!
With regards to tuning, fingerstyle will often feature an arbitrary tuning unique to only a handful of songs. Timbre absolutely matters because you're playing multiple parts on one fretboard simultaneously.
Here's an example of all three genres in one performance! Kent Nishimura covering Steely Dan's "Peg" in fingerstyle. He does have a book available. It combines ordinary sheet music with tablature.
probably a standalone Italian word would be fine, or some special < like we have for gradually increasing volume
Interestingly, the current form of a piano keyboard isn't only way keyed instruments have been laid out.
My mind was blown when I first saw a harpsichord with separate flat and sharp keys for example because I never considered the concept. I grew up with pianos so in my ignorance I never really thought about them being different.
With regard to the piano keyboard, again not terrible, but it definitely is a compromise to fit the mechanical needs of the piano. I really like the design of the chromatic keyboard(ever see an accordion with the big hex grid of buttons, this is a chromatic keyboard), it has the advantage that whatever key you play a song in it has the same fingering, on a piano every key has different fingering, so there is a big skill barrier to changing keys that interferes with employment of such a critical aspect of playing.
The majority of music uses a system of intervals called the major scale, which is seven notes with a particular spacing that is determined largely by psychoacoustics (that is, we didn’t just make it up). That spacing can be shifted around to any point on the underlying 12-note system, which gives different keys/modes. On any single piece of music you’re typically using only one of those, so those seven notes are the “skeleton” underlying it all. This is what it means to say “this piece is in D major”. (BTW, a fifth is the fifth note in the major scale, so yes, there is a 5!)
Standard notation privileges these modes of the major scale, which means (assuming you know how to play all the major scales on your instrument) there’s a 1:1 mapping from places on the staff to scale degrees. That means most of the time you’re reading straight off the score into the scale your fingers have memorized.
The key signature is what makes this work. You can even instantly transpose by ignoring the written key signature and reading in another key. Chords are also made readable because they’re usually based on thirds, which happens to be the interval that makes the notes stack up exactly next to each other, so a triad, seventh chord, etc. is instantly recognizable.
So basically the notation is optimized for the common case (the music is using notes from a mode of the major scale) and makes exceptions (accidentals) stand out.
And yes, pianos are a pain because all the (musical) keys are different on the (physical) keys. However, pianos are great because all the octaves look exactly alike (so finding all the Ds on the keyboard is trivial). Stringed instruments like guitars or violins are the opposite: all the (musical) key fingerings are the same, but you have to memorize the positions of all the notes because they all look the same. Pick your poison.
In fact, this is true for all diatonic scales, which are the foundation of Western music and have been for centuries. The major scale is just the ionic, the minor is the aeolian. There’s also dorian, phrygian, lydian, etc., and all of these are in active use in popular music.
(Shout-out to our often overlooked friend, the lochrian scale. IYKYK. Practically unheard outside of Gregorian chants and metal.)
Actually the parallel minor does not share the key signature with the major; it is simply the minor with the same tonic.
The _relative_ minor shares the key signature with its major; and its tonic pitch is a minor third lower.
Bjork did have a pretty big song in Locrian that one time. :)
guitar is a percussion instrument :D
The answer to why people don't use a chromatic scale is also in there. Very roughy, it's harder to sight read intervals between notes.
Standard music notation is a like a London Underground map, it's symbolic rather than literal.
Being more symbolic gives standard notation many advantages once you learn it.
The video does a much better job of explaining that than I've given. It really is very good.
For example, if you number the tones and have a piano style instrument with alternating white and black keys, then you can have a 6 line stave where spaces are always white keys and black keys are always lines.
When sight reading chords pianists, for example, don't really think about every note in the chord.
Instead if you recognise the intervals between the tones and the root you can just place your hand without thinking about it too much.
Since most of the time you're in a single musical key you don't need see every tone separately. You can still flatten, sharpen or normal and you can represent key changes too.
There are other details such as beginners often already using numbers to indicate preferred fingering. I guess that's not a big thing but if you use numbers as part of an alternative system you have to cover all of the edge cases and extensions.
Oh, just remembered another reason. Having a more compact staves means you can represent more musical parts on the same page which is important in orchestral situations where you might want to see what others are doing as you play.
Many people have tried to replace standard notation, over several hundred years, and no one has yet come up with a compelling alternative. So it's probably a very difficult task. Systems that are evolved over a long time, like musical notation, are often far more robust than those that are designed from scratch.
If you're really serious about proposing an alternative I would probably start by considering why other competing systems have failed.
I'm not really serious about replacing it, more like writing your own OS: it's fun to do and you get a better understanding of why the existing systems work.
The problem with linnstrument and similar things is exactly equality of any note, it's not easy to think like "ok, here we move to another key, so we have to add one sharp here" on a controller like that. For me, even on a guitar I have to "see" the notes to play well and understand what I'm playing, so I had to learn "white keys" on the fretboard, and on top of that, learn octave numbers for each note, only then it really works for me and it's still hard compared to the keyboard where you see all sharps and flats and can treat them as you like. That's more important than using the same muscle memory imo
*7 note system
It's called an "octave" because the 8th note is considered another instance of the 1st.
I learned to read sheet music as a kid by my mom taking me to piano lessons. I cannot play the piano but I know where the notes are that correspond to the sheet music. I parlayed that into learning to play woodwinds when I got older. Even that was just enough to have fun. Nothing about it was me being serious about being a musician. So when other students would talk about 5ths and 3rds, I was totally lost. Then someone just said transpose the note up/down 5 notes (or 3 or whatever). They said it confidently, and they were first chair, so I went with it. I've never needed to know it, as I just play the notes as written on the sheet. I've never gigged where I had to play different keys.
But yeah, the fifth nomenclature confused the hell out of me too
The transition from absolute to relative pitch is like moving from basic arithmetic to algebra, once it clicks. Except that relative pitch is way easier to understand without notation, pick a reference and go from there.
Fifth (ordinal), not fifth (fraction).
That's why a whole tone is called a "second", not a "half".
Ultimately standard notation is still the best we have.
Interestingly this is a strong thing to fight because there are pieces of music that are physically inaccessible to many players, particularly people with hands not wide enough for the intervals. No amount of practice or stretching can overcome it and you can't exactly travel with a piano or keyboard everywhere.
There some cool things like the Janko keyboard that seem strictly superior to the traditional 12 keys but it's kind of an uphill fight to build conversion kits cheap and light and good enough to travel and perform with.
Written music involves a symbiosis between the composer and the performer. You have to find people who are willing to do both of those jobs, in sufficient number to make performances happen. If you choose a new or idiosyncratic notation system, nobody will play your stuff.
In the future one could imagine automating the process of converting from one notation to another. But a lot of sheet music is still not in computer readable form. From what I've read, OCR'ing sheet music is still an unsolved problem.
His other videos are awesome too. He is an expert in making great software AND a great video creator.
- Reason (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PFRyONURSo)
- Sibelius (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKx1wnXClcI)
- MuseScore (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hZxo96x48A)
- Dorico (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-3wEC6Fj_8)
These days most people just Adobe Podcast Enhance and forget and, from what I've seen there isn't an open source GUI based tool for automated voice processing out there.
Must add that it's so awesome to have an open source Qt based audio editor on KDE Plasma that does not look like shit!
So the guitar tabs website which had then recently acquired Musescore offered him a job. Not just a job, but basically to be boss of the whole thing. Then they bought audacity, staffpad and Hal Leonard too. Then they bought out their private equity backer.
I can't think of any other time something good has come out of a private equity roll-up. They haven't enshittified it (from my perspective as a user anyway). It seems in the end these people just loved music more than they loved money.
Just remember bad news sells. I'm reasonably sure there are a number of other cases where this happens, likely most. However they are not big news and not memorable so I can't cite them.
Certainly I'm able to think of plenty of terrible results from private equity take-overs from my own personal experience as an employee or as a customer.
And as a quick edit: none of these examples I have were of failing businesses. Each of the owners had their reasons, but none was due to it being necessary for survival. PE on hackernews tends to focus on software/bigger purchases, but so much of the damage in my opinion is on the local and smaller scale.
Let's say you make an app for first responders. Being a former first responder, you know exactly what your users need and what the workflows should be like. Your app becomes a brand name in the community. You charge enough to survive (if that), because your app is a labour of love more than anything else.
Eventually, family and other responsibilities get in the way, and you just no longer have the time or motivation to maintain the app any more. You sell to "we so swear we are not private equity" Applause.
As soon as you do that, the app gets taken over by financiers and developers who are experts at "revenue optimization", with little domain knowledge about what first responders need. They calculate (probably correctly) that they can milk their customers for a lot more if they move to a subscription plan, gate some features behind expensive premium packages, stuff the app full of upsell pop-ups and fill it with analytics SDKs that tell them which features are worth spending development time on, and which can safely be removed.
The Applause thing is absolutely real though.
As a public, well-known example, Dell being taken private in 2013 seemed to work out.
e.g. simply keeping the company afloat via PE cash.
If I recall correctly, this is what happened to Hilton Hotels. They were collapsing during the housing crisis.
A slightly different scenario but Hertz is a PE success story. It was owned by Ford and bought by a private equity firm. Now it's a standalone company making mint.
Most enshittification I am familiar with is because I read it in the news, therefore if non-shittification does happen it is likely I do not hear about it. I suppose the same holds true for other people.
If you were correct and people just had to hear about it then people wouldn't go around worrying about violent crime, because of always seeing on the news, despite it having fallen to historic lows. Instead people should be just walking around talking about how safe and non-violent the streets are nowadays.
It was more of a partnership regarding Hal Leonard than ownership of Muse.
It seems after the Native Instruments fiasco, they (Francisco Partners) just decided to quit music altogether.
EDIT: I know a lot of people from Muse and Native Instruments and that's the impression a lot seem to have.
This site is a lot like how I remember ultimate guitar, being that you can look up tabs and access them. I hope people keep uploading more tabs because ultimate still has a larger volume
Well he said that Sibelius was the best for serious musicians, it just had a horrible UI.