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Comment by shmageggy | Hacker News Reader

> And these concepts can only be understood and visualised by using notation.

That's not true at all. One can have a deep understanding of all the elements of music you mentioned without knowing any traditional notation. Maybe it's understood in terms of modular arithmetic and fractions and visualized as such, or visualized in terms of a piano or an abstract spiral structure or not even visualized at all. Traditional notation is only one possible representation (an a fairly arcane one at that); others are certainly possible and don't preclude deep understanding.

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I am well aware that Western notation is not the only one, however, I cannot see how music theory works without any notation. Whatever form of notation you choose to encode information in will still have to be decoded, i.e. read. The reason why some notations have been more durable than others is the relative amount of information that can be stored.

Tabs for guitar and bass are just one example of a deficient mode of notation, since they cannot provide all information necessary to play something.

If you want to forego all notation, however, understanding theory becomes even harder than with a deficient notation. For that, you'd have to solely rely on somebody's ear in order to explain roots, scales and afterwards more complex topics. The only other option is teaching visually, which ist somewhat possible with a guitar, and somewhat possible with a piano, but is not transferable to another instrument afterwards.

All forms of notation are deficient. If you want proof, just listen to a muzak (elevator music) cover of your favorite pop song. It is correct according to a professional transcriber's notation, but it loses nuances and imperfections that classical music notation doesn't cover.

You are right that tablature by nature does not cover rhythm and that is a gap that won't even get you to muzak. However, there is nothing about classical music notation that makes it an ideal form for representing all forms of musical sound. How would you notate a Jay-Z or Skillrex song?

those are actually pretty easy. The only issue with skrillex would be identifying an instrument to play the notes, but other than that he's low on the polyphony scale (pun intended).

When I clicked this I was hoping for a notation that describes midi values against timbre (filters, distortion etc), and blends it with traditional notation, I think that is a missing link between old and new - but rewriting accepted notation for generations? That's like replacing a-Z with some sort of base 26 number and saying its easier to learn.

I was hoping for a notation that describes midi values against timbre

Dream on. You could show controller automation lanes as digital audio workstations do, but those are only as informative as they are consistent with some scheme like General MIDI and a standard sound architecture. Once you start resampling or using modular routings any kind of timbral notation schema goes out the window.

I've seen attempts at this, and if you email I'll try and dig you out a reference but the particular book I'm thinking of is in a box in my attic right now. However I can't say I've found them very informative. When I think about timbre I think about the whole synth architecture and program it in my head, for many timbral ideas it's just a matter of walking up to the synth later and dialing it in.

Most electronic musicians stick with simple diatonic scales or within modes, at most switching in and out of relative minor. Harmonic complexity and timbral complexity don't go very well together.

I would absolutely love if you could post the reference of this book here - and I'm sure a couple of other folks would as well! It sounds quite interesting. Thanks a bunch.

I went up and had a look, but haven't turned it up yet. I'm supposed to be getting new shelves in the next week or so and getting all those books up onto them, so I'll keep an eye out.

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