Show HN: XY Music Notation | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: XY Music Notation

music.xy.dev

77 pointsjmole68 comments

I've been playing around with a new kind of isomorphic music keyboard that uses a base-12 notation, and wanted some sheet music to learn some new music for it.

The idea is to represent each note in 12-TET as a number, so N ∈ (0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,X,Y).

I used codex to build a music score rendering backend based on MuseScore with custom note heads that display the pitch class of each note.

I've found it pretty helpful for learning how to play my own instrument, so wanted to share in case anyone else was interested.

Open articleView on HN

The issue unfortunately always falls back to familiarity - It's like spelling reform or DVORAK keyboards. You can create a thousand compelling arguments why new system X is better than the old clunker we're all forced to use but the fact of the matter is that you'll still have to read music the old way to interact with the rest of the world. Millions of musicians, including myself, read music as naturally as reading the written word. It's a functionally impossible ask to change that paradigm. Even learning bass clef for me as a previously treble clef only player took several years of focused and targeted practice to attain equal facility with both.

This is a system that indicates the lack of information about why the current system (which, admittedly is a mess) is the way it is. This is removing Chesterson's fence without understand why it's there.

A point: one improvement to this system is if the tonic note is always 1. I don't hate the idea of number inside the notes, but as it is currently, its not only useless, but actively making things more difficult to parse.

Having the tonic, the 3rd, the 5th, the 7th... that might make things easier to sight-read. Might.

The current notation is a hodge-podge of compromises of rhythm, legibility, page to music ratio (efficiency of page turns), pitch range, and dynamics. Nothing in music can ever be 'perfect' (the cosmic joke). And without the history of how any why the current system came to be, 'disrupters' are just people who don't know their own ignorance. Even still, sometimes there is value added. Rare as that is.

Two big things I'd fix - 5 undifferentiated lines can be difficult to parse. Just visually changing the centre line would help structure the whole thing. Also, why force someone learning piano to learn two different clefs? Just use Treble and Sub-Bass.

I suppose for me, some of the time I'd be thinking about start/stop times rather than durations, and I'd find it unintuitive that when a note starts is determined by the way the notes before it look rather than the way it looks, but fixing that would be a much bigger change with more downsides.

> Also, why force someone learning piano to learn two different clefs? Just use Treble and Sub-Bass.

Because the two clefs are symmetrical around middle C. Line "6" of the bass clef is line "0" of the treble clef. They are not two different clefs, the are two halves of the same 11-line staff.

> some of the time I'd be thinking about start/stop times rather than durations

It's actually a combination of both. Bar lines give you a bigger multiple, beams give you a smaller one (typically 1/4 or 2/4). Only within each 1/4 or 2/4 do you have to think in deltas.

>They are not two different clefs, the are two halves of the same 11-line staff.

This is actually another reason to use an isomorphic/"chromatic" staff. If you prioritize data compression (traditional notation), you have 7 notes per octave + modifiers. If you prioritize linearity (isomorphic/"chromatic" notation), you have 12 notes per octave.

12 is an even number, meaning you can stack octaves and have consistent notation for each one. With traditional notation, you always have to keep track of which octave you're reading and adjust accordingly.

To be fair this is just adding extra info to the existing musical notation, which at worse you ignore. That makes it better than almost all other proposals.

Well given it's LLM-generated, I'm not surprised

> which, admittedly is a mess

Why is the current system a mess?

Some parts of it are not super orthogonal. Intervals aren't visually consistent, for example (E -> F vs C -> C#).

Having to read notes that are up in the ledger lines outside the clef kind of sucks. You just have fewer visual landmarks to hang off of.

This is partly a consequence of the physical instruments we have and their natural ranges, but clefs as a general concept are annoying to deal with when you have to juggle them constantly.

IMO it doesn't do a good job of communicating dynamics and expression. The notation used is vague (accelerando... okay how much faster, over how many measures, etc).

Maybe I'm holding it wrong, but recently I transcribed some of my friend's songs and managing repeats that don't neatly fit into a rigid song structure is difficult without writing very "WET" music that takes up a lot of space.

In a more meta sense, most sheet music is garbage. There is no inherent pit of success when it comes to creating sheet music, and writing a very good, readable score is something only well-trained musicians and composers can do. Look at free sheet music or read notation written by amateurs, you'll see missing key signatures, misspelled chords, etc. Sheet music doesn't make any concessions for people who understand music as sound first, you have to adhere to tradition and theory to produce good sheet music. Lots of musicians with decent ears cannot do this.

IDK, this is me trying very hard to come up with reasons to hate on sheet music.

Great video by Tantacrul about all the other previous attempts at "fixing" music notation, well worth a watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eq3bUFgEcb4

Good video. The colored sheet music examples were quite interesting to see.

I like the use of base 12, but IMO it's somewhat wasted on a diatonic staff. This is basically just traditional notation with special coloring to make it easier to read. To better match the keyboard, I'd rather use an isomorphic staff (a.k.a. "chromatic staff", although I dislike that name because it implies diatonic music as a default).

There's a web site you might be interested in with many examples of isomorphic notation at:

https://musicnotation.org/

The whole premise makes no sense. The site asks "When you listen to the scale, which staff best represents what you hear?" to which I answer "When you listen to music, does it sound anything like a chromatic scale?"

When I listen to a diatonic scale, I hear irregular spacing between the notes. (If you have difficulty hearing this, try singing portamento glides between them.) But the traditional staff represents this with regular spacing on the page. The premise of the site is designing notation where there's a direct linear mapping between position on the page and note number, without the need for a key signature to decode it. A C major scale should not be written with regular spacing on the page because the notes are not regular.

The problem is not the disruption introduced by page turning, that you hint to in another comment. You're ignoring that notation is optimized for both melodic and harmonic content and how quickly you can grab both; and music is not constructed from notes, it's constructed from scales.

Irregular spacing is a feature, not a bug, unless you're playing Schönberg and friends, because being able to quickly separate thirds, fourths and fifths is much more important than being able to grab octaves and even more important than identifying individual notes.

Your brain anyway doesn't have to work on "it's on a line therefore it's one of C D E F# G# A#", it very quickly learns to work on "it's on adjacent lines therefore it's a third apart" when you read sheet music. Two notes both on lines or both on spaces are part of a triad; "two notes very far apart, one on a line and one on a space" is almost always an octave, and you can grab that intuitively in standard music notation even without reading the two notes one by one; whereas smaller intervals are simply too far apart on isomorphic notation.

Same for understanding when your scale is changing or you're deviating from the normal fingerings (key signature vs. inline accidentals). And all this ignores the fact that G# and Ab aren't even played the same on some instruments, at least at an advanced level, and chromatic notation cannot capture that.

>it very quickly learns to work on "it's on adjacent lines therefore it's a third apart"

The problem is "a third apart" means different things depending on where on the diatonic scale that third is. What I actually care about is how many MIDI note numbers apart it is, because that's what corresponds to the finger positions on the instrument.

>G# and Ab aren't even played the same on some instruments

Seeing as we've freed up the sharp and flat symbols, we can repurpose them to mean adjustments by whichever comma is relevant.

Wow, I wish I had this when I learned to play. Keys, clefs, and accidentals felt like a hazing ritual, completely accidental (hah!) complexity. I always hated that I couldn't read the treble instrument parts at sight-reading speed simply because the sheet music used a different clef.

People who know Nashville system are gonna struggle with that.

Am I understanding correctly that it always starts on C (C==0)? Seems like key changes will be hard without computer assistance, I mean, you could have your chart update on the fly if you're using a tablet, but paper charts will be hard to transpose on the fly.

I do think now is a prime opportunity to get away from traditional notation for folks that want it, since transcription to a new notation is trivial now, even for paper charts, where it once required a lot of human effort. And, isomorphic is very appealing.

But, this feels like it doesn't come from the perspective of a musician who plays from charts? Musicians think in relationships, not absolute notes, and this kind of obscures those relationships. I'm not really arguing that traditional notation is optimal, it takes a lot of knowledge and practice, and I've never invested enough time to be good at it, but I don't think this really resolves the pain (you still have to know traditional notation to be able to read it) and adds something that isn't based on musical relationships and maybe even makes those relationships harder to see for a trained musician. To a musician the numbers they know are scale intervals; a "7" here is a "5" (perfect fifth) to a trained musician and a "4" is a "3" (major third), but only in the key of C, otherwise it's not a relationship you can memorize, you gotta do math.

It's fun to tinker, of course, and I'm not trying to shit on your idea. Just pointing out why I wouldn't find it helpful. As a musician, who isn't all that great at reading traditional music notation, I find the numbers distracting. It adds to an already noisy and difficult to read thing, one more thing my brain is trying to translate into something my fingers know how to do.

>Nashville system

Is there anyone still using this who hasn't realized they remade grade school intro to music theory? Or has no one told them?

lol, what? Far better musicians than you or I use Nashville number charts every day. In country and some gospel, rock, and pop, session musician circles, it's extremely common.

What do you think working musicians are using? I mean, other than classical (traditional notation) and jazz (fake book style charts, probably).

Bro, almost all professional musicians use it and literally all jazz musicians do.

I'm not a musician, so my question may have an obvious answer, but... what problem does this solve?

I'm thinking back to when I was in band as a kid, and the idea of having to recognize tiny number inside the notes seems to make it more difficult to read, not easier. Even if not trying to read them, the visual is noisier.

Is the idea it offers help to new musicians, but experienced musicians can ignore it? Someone good enough to sight-read sheet music can disregard the new noise?

I really enjoy all the alternative music notation projects that popup on HN. Based on the comments, I think this one could use a page explaining the notation and instrument before diving into sheet music. Also looks pretty difficult to use with pen and paper but I'm probably in the minority there

It took me a while to understand what the numbers were actually trying to indicate (in part because I'm used to numbers in sheet music being suggestions of which finger should play the given note). If I understand correctly now, are you numbering zero-indexed with C as the beginning (0) and B as the end (Y), as a proxy for remembering which key notes are meant to be played in?

That's right - so a major triad in C would be (0-4-7), or a B-flat minor triad would be (X-1-5).

It's not required that the pitch notation is absolute though, e.g. you can transpose the numeric notation to any key (e.g., use A == 0 instead of C ==0)

I think you’d be better off with something compatible with an existing system. Perhaps start with nashville numbering and add accidentals?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nashville_Number_System

1-indexing in music is as much a mistake as 1-indexing in programming languages. The traditional interval names are mostly 1-indexed too, which just adds pointless complexity you have to compensate for whenever you're adding or subtracting. Only exception I can think of is the tritone, which is inconsistently 0-indexed (and in a different scale).

It's IMO crazy that going up seven scale degrees makes an "octave".

How often are you doing calculations though? Using the same names as everything everyone else seems more important.

So many software nerds get nerd-sniped into trying to invent their own music notation. I have almost succumbed to that temptation myself. Someone should make a version of https://www.mcmillen.dev/language_checklist.html for this.

Looks like you've either come across or independently reinvented pitch classes! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_class

I'm solving a similar problem: to build a 12-TET isomorphic music notation: https://rawl.rocks/

I was working on a similar idea, I grabbed 2x PartyKeys and I was going to map each key to a finger ( left-pinky = orange ), but the API is such that -- if you have two boards (72 keys) and send a msg to a single board ( 1st key = orange ) -- it lights up both 1st keys (there's no way to address a single board). Was disappointing.

relatedly does anyone have a tool to generate piano synthesia videos from sheet music, maybe with or without AI? They seem fun to play along with. (I'll just look it up, commenting to share the idea too though)

It didn't take more than one month of solfege practice to be able to look at any chord or note on the grand staff in traditional western notation and be able to say what the chord is, what the intervals are, etc.

I still practice the piano 2 hours/day most days. The challenge of playing music isn't reading the notes, it's getting from one note to the next one. 99% of what I practice is simply hand positions, grouping notes, fingerings, voicings. Reading notation is such a trivial part of musicianship, mastered easily with just a few months of study.

Can we make a simpler thing: staff and durations same as before, but put solfege syllables (relative to current key signature) inside the note heads?

Edit: it seems a bunch of people already had this idea, it's even in Musescore. It might need some more work to make it readable at small sizes, though.

Uhm, why not writing the degrees of the scale at hand? 12-TET is irrelevant for modal music.

In a similar vein, I sometimes line the root of the scale with a red felt tip pen if I am struggling reading a piece.

I love this video and it's explanation of music notation, attempts to improve music notation, and a long history of failure. TL;DR Efficiency, high context, and compact notation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eq3bUFgEcb4 The video is excellent.

Just learn to read music dude. It's not "your own instrument" right now if you can't fucking sightread the first mvmt of the Moonlight Sonata. Detach yourself from AI horseshit and woodshed a bit.

What does "isomorphic" mean?

Iso - same, morphic - shape.

Basically it uses a regular pattern of keys, instead of staggering keys into pentatonic and diatonic scales, like a piano does.

This makes it harder to "find" the diatonic scales, but easier to transpose between different keys.

You can see an example here: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/kMD1qXtDAdg

It's also easier to learn because there's one consistent mapping between notes on the page and the sound, instead of many different irregular mappings specified by "key signatures".

But traditional notation is more compact, and for music based around diatonic scales, implies information about the harmonic function of notes that could be useful for interpretation.

It's harder to learn because fingerings are based on key notes and transpositions around that.

If the key is G you don't start with your hand on C and move it up to G, you start on G and move it relative to that root.

This matters because over/under moves usually happen at certain scale points. So if you learn the scale you have good chance of defaulting to the most efficient movements with muscle memory.

If you're referencing everything to C you'll never understand the scales and their different fingering patterns.

Anyway, here's Martha Argerich playing Prokofiev's Toccata. (What happens around 3:14 may be illegal. But here we are.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0fv5HKYn7k

But on an isomorphic keyboard you can just move your hand up or down and use the exact same fingering. You only have to learn how to play the scale once, not a different way for each key. You don't reference it to "C", you reference it to the first degree of the scale, and the key doesn't matter. IMO, the traditional keyboard has been obsolete ever since the Jankó keyboard was invented:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jank%C3%B3_keyboard

> If you're referencing everything to C you'll never understand the scales and their different fingering patterns.

If you watch someone play a Janko keyboard (1) then you'll notice that there is only one fingering pattern for each tonality or chord, you just shift up or down based on the tonic. Kind of like a guitar, where there are a handful of scale/chord/arpeggio shapes that are picked for efficiency (aka, "economy of motion") and aren't tied to the particular key.

(1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_POoaGecU9w

The piano keyboard optimizes the keys for either reachability (white keys are wider) or feeling (black keys are narrow but have edges and can be pressed from the side). The Janko keyboard optimizes for neither, all keys are equal. It has all the disadvantages of the guitar with almost none of the advantages (the range for one hand is smaller than the guitar's, and there's no bending/sliding/vibrato)

I like the technical fun of it, but no musician is ever going to give a crap about this. We have hundreds of years of the evolution of music notation and it is pretty comprehensive. Just because there are only 12 unique notes in western music doesn't mean base-12 to notate it makes sense....that completely strips out context of what you are playing.

For example...in the key of aminor when you make the five chord major to create a resolution back to i (aminor) you raise the 7th scale degree. That means the G becomes G#...Ab is the same pitch but writing it that way is wrong. An EMajor chord is spelled E G# B, not E Ab B. Now if you spell that as 9 0 4 you have stripped all context out of the music. Musicians aren't just player pianos, they analyze the harmonic structure of the music the inform phrasing, shape, tone, volume, and pacing (acelarando, decelerando, ritardando, etc).

Whenever I see something like this trying to reinvent standard notation I feel like it is usually from somebody who can kind of play an instrument but can't read music or can't read it well because they haven't put the years of work it takes to be a proficient sight reader and they haven't studied harmony/music-theory.

One of the most important things about musical standard notation is that it is - standard - you can hand it to any musician on any instrument and they can make sense of it quickly. It is a skill that takes a lot of practice but it is what allows musicians who have never met each other to be hired for a gig and show up and play together without ever rehearsing.

This approach won't teach you to "see" music either. It forces pure mechanical number memory....you won't see harmony and be able to quickly notice that - for example - a line is just moving the chord up in inversions and since you know harmony and your chords you can sight read that part without ever even reading every individual note.

But still a cool idea from a hobby perspective.

I actually was typing up a similar response -- as a very basic example, if I'm playing and I see a ii-V coming up, that's communicating information about what scale I'm likely going to be choosing from to inform my playing. By just giving me tuples of data disconnected from key centers I'm losing all the harmonic information about a tune, which honestly is the most important information for me as a piano player.

The notation isn't just showing me what buttons to press and when -- that's almost the least important part of the notation. What it is showing me is how everything is moving in a tune, which allows me to make decisions inside of it, and I'm not sure a base-12 notation like this is even capable of expressing that.

It's totally understandable for a beginner to want to make something like this though, because that context of harmonic analysis doesn't really come into play until years later.

Did you look at the rendered score? All the old information is still there.

It just adds the numbers inside the notes.

I give a crap about it. It looks like tablature for an isomorphic keyboard, which seems kind of useful for learning, assuming you have like a Lumatone or a Janko Piano keyboard. There's similar keyboard challenges for instruments like Bandoneon that benefit from learning apps like, like https://bandoneon.app/. For my own current work, I've switched from Classic to Modern Notation in Dorico because there are so many alterations in jazz voicings with a constant stream of key changes that it just seems easier to wipe the key signature clean and alter everything. Also, I've heard that's what they do in movie scores where it's important to get things right in as few takes as possible. Blargh, now I'm rambling. I'll allow it.

Does modern notation just mean no key signature and all accidentals?

Yeah, that's basically it, and I guess it's called "Modernist" in Dorico. I'm not in front of my music workstation, and am striking out on finding a link to the documentation right now, but it's available from I think it's called the Notation Options Library. There are a few more Modernist options available having to do with courtesy accidentals. I've yet to get one of these scores in front of an actual group to get feedback, so obviously use your judgement.

Okay, that makes sense. I play bass in a Big-Band, and some of our newer charts are this way, including some Metheny arrangements.

I'm fine with it, and might even lean towards saying it's easier to sight read, but on the other hand, I've spent decades reading traditional, so I'm used to that too. And on a jazz chart, I can ad-lib if needed to keep the show going if I get confused by something. My hands will usually gravitate to the right place even if my brain is wrong.

Tab for a harmonic table layout instrument would be pretty nice.

I would think the reason for keys on staff notation is to have less accidentals to write by hand so it seems like getting rid of this makes perfect sense in 2026.

This main post though I don't really understand without seeing the keyboard.

>An EMajor chord is spelled E G# B, not E Ab B. Now if you spell that as 9 0 4 you have stripped all context out of the music.

True, but it's not a fatal flaw of the notation, because you can annotate it with written chord names above the notes. This is common in guitar tabs (which are almost isomorphic in standard tuning, and fully isomorphic in regular tunings).

> One of the most important things about musical standard notation is that it is - standard - you can hand it to any musician on any instrument and they can make sense of it quickly. It is a skill that takes a lot of practice but it is what allows musicians who have never met each other to be hired for a gig and show up and play together without ever rehearsing.

Lifelong musician here and I agree. New standards of music notation are the equivalent of Esperanto: cool, but ultimately not super practical. That being said, I enjoy alternative ways to think in terms of music theory, so I still think this is a neat project from an abstract point of view.

I think about this any time a software engineer thinks they're helping Deaf people when they build some AI thing to see/speak finger spelling thinking they're interpreting ASL. Like just ask your customers what they want

> For example...in the key of aminor when you make the five chord major to create a resolution back to i (aminor) you raise the 7th scale degree. That means the G becomes G#...Ab is the same pitch but writing it that way is wrong. An EMajor chord is spelled E G# B, not E Ab B. Now if you spell that as 9 0 4 you have stripped all context out of the music. Musicians aren't just player pianos, they analyze the harmonic structure of the music the inform phrasing, shape, tone, volume, and pacing (acelarando, decelerando, ritardando, etc).

I feel like those are idiosyncrasies that feed into eachother i.e. you need to have 2 notations for same sound just because other decisions made it so there is no extra info passed other than in b vs #

So alternative notation could still make it clearer/"mathematic" but would essentialy need to include all of that, and for that as you said, you need people with wide experience about music and for them, they already are fine with standard notation so for them it wouldn't be an improvement because nicer learning curve doesn't matter once you learned it.

Classical keyboard layout is kinda similiar in opposite way here; beginner can just slap some white keys and get something musical and they can learn from there, while various chromatic keyboard layouts might have some nice benefits (chords being "same shape" regardless of where you play them), it is harder to start on it.

You need to have 2 notations because having 7 notes instead of 12 packs more information in less space. The scale is almost always made of up to 7 notes. Expressing each note as the difference from a default is essentially compression, as it lets you see both the position in the scale (important for harmonic relationships which help you memorize the thing) and the note which you have to play.

Sometimes you need G and the note to its right, so you want to call the latter a variation on A (A-flat). Sometimes you need A and the note to its left, so you want to call the latter a variation on G (G-sharp). They are the same note but they have a different function. It's not an idiosyncrasy, rather, when it works it's more efficient because it describes two things at the same time. It doesn't work perfectly for many cases: Misirlou, the Simpson's theme, anything in whole-tone or octatonic scale, but those are the exceptions in practice, just like some things compress better than others.

It is suboptimal even for the blues scale, but not too much and in fact that shows another benefit of giving two names to a note. The blues scale is mostly a variation on the pentatonic scale; the A#/Bb note in a minor E blues scale is used mostly as an intermediate note. So if you're going up to a B you can write that note A# because it is working like an A, while it you're going down to an A you will write it Bb because it is working like a B.

Likewise for chords. If I see E Ab B, E-A points me at a suspended chord, not a major chord, which would be wrong. Whereas if I see E G# B, it is clearly a triad.

The value of data compression is greatly reduced now that we have tablet computers. This gives us instant page turning, so there's no longer a requirement to pack as much information on a page as possible to minimize the disruption of page turning.

Having to learn a different notation system for every key is IMO no longer a good tradeoff.

G# and Ab are not the same sound.

They are the same pitch in well-tempered tuning, but that’s a small part of the picture. They are not even the same pitch if you’re singing or playing a fretless instrument, like a violin.

The reason is that the pitch changes slightly based on harmonic context, and the notation communicates the context.

G# typically conveys a tension in an ascending movement (assuming the key is Am or one of its neighbors). Ab can convey tension in a descending movement.

Also G# = Ab is only true on a modern piano. It's neither true for a lot of other instruments, nor for singing.

> nor for singing

It is if you're singing with a piano or fretted instruments. Which is most singing.

Came here to say this but top comments got to the point. It’s funny how non musician programmers think they can just reinvent things without realizing centuries have gone into this. Might as well reinvent Arabic numerals and calculus notation.

yes but perhaps we should improve society somewhat

You also unintentionally made a very compelling argument against vibecoding and treating software as a means to an end!

Go to fucking college for music theory or leave it alone. Dilettante shit at correcting all those snobby college boys about their passion has always been fated to fail. Congrats you really showed those first year conservatory students what's what. Thank god they are the real elite of the US or else this would come across as pointless bullying

Site is illegible on mobile.

Sorry about that, it's fixed now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com