Whenever I teach key signatures this is the biggest thing I try to impart: key signatures are more than just accidentals, they define the roles each pitch plays.
sight reading is hard because of the cognitive work involved with translating, say, eight notes at a time into the appropriate finger-patterns, rhythm and pace; or translating fewer notes but at a faster rate. i don't see this making it easier.
i'm not sure why they would bother. anyone who finds sight reading too tough, might not really ever need sheet music, whether they do it by ear, or just listen to music. my friend has a disklavier - incredible. robot plays the piano better than i ever could. it makes me wonder why i still bother to try and play, and then i remind myself that every feeble attempt i make is intrinsically satisfying to me, so i keep trying.
I wonder if a suitable analogy would be like underlining all capital letters in a selection of prose - useful for the neophyte, chaff for the slightly experienced onwards.
robot plays the piano better than i ever could
Apart from the personal enjoyment angle, robots also can't detect the mood of the audience (yet) and play to suit.
The one place I could see pitch symbols being slightly beneficial is when notes are either way above or way below the staff. But even then, after some deliberate practice these can be recognized pretty quickly as well.
Regarding relative position. On a piano the relative position of notes on the staff almost directly correlates to position on the keyboard. On a stringed instrument this is VERY far from the case. As i proceed up the scale on a simple instrument like the bass i will proceed right on the neck on one string, then drop down a string, shift left, proceed right on that string, drop down a string, shift left, proceed right on that string. So you've got back and forth, and up and down motions to keep going in one direction tonally. On a guitar the strings aren't all tuned evenly so the back and forth on the neck changes depending on which strings you're switching between. On the Ukulele the top string is higher than the string below it so you end up jumping UP strings rather than down, AND the strings aren't tuned at even intervals. So you've just got a big jumble of movements.
Don't even get me started on the totally unintuitive nature of woodwind fingerings or how they are almost totally disconnected from what's going on on the staff.
In short, the relative positioning of notes on the staff is good from a tonal perspective but crap from a finger perspective on most every instrument except piano.
That's not really a problem once you build the muscle memory, though.
It's the same thing as touch typing. With enough practice, you know that finger placement X will produce note y, the same way you know where the keys on the keyboard are.
I felt exactly this way learning to read music. The score just didn't present enough information fast enough for me because I hand't learned to build the context in my head and spot the relations. I fumbled about with alternatie notations, extra notations etc. I finally settled on colors. I wrote a small program to color the dominant, subdominant etc. and then printed it on my color printer. This helped me immensely and I didn't take the dead end road of learning alternate notations that would shut me out of all written music everywhere.
Some windmills should be tilted at, some should just be left alone.
About hummingbird, it's amazing. Really, I found it strange in the first minute. Then I got it
Why? My major peeve with traditional notation is the lines above and below. And I never know what are they talking about after adding some lines above the stave.
About the key signature, 100% agree.
As pretty much all students, I thought the key signature just meant which notes are always sharp or flat ("oh these guys want us to use more black keys - BORING")
It took me some time to get it. It's not about flat or sharp, but as they said it, it's 'G Major mode'. Then you feel everything is clearer. It's like going from understanding words in a phrase to understanding the phrase.
What the particular notes in that key do (their role, as you put it) is a property of that key.
It's all about recognizing when to build tension and when to resolve tension.
Yes, the roles that the notes play is defined by the key, but if you don't mentally make the switch, you'll often perform things poorly because you don't anticipate where things are going correctly.
Or at least that's how it works for me, at any rate. Take anything I say with a grain of salt. I can't sight-read much at all.