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Comment by amsilprotag | Hacker News Reader

I challenge "easily printable." This way of writing sheet music is vastly more space inefficient. Each beat requires an entire row of space, whereas a beat in sheet music might require 3 square inches at most. Having many pages of sheet music, like in coding, makes it much harder to understand the song as a whole and navigate repeats.

I do like the fact that — unlike with sheet music - the 12 semi-tones are spaced evenly, as they are in reality. This allows for fast visual recognition of chord types and intervals.

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As long as you're playing tonal music, chord types and intervals will be strongly associated with the 7 note names, not just the 12 semitones. A perfect fourth will always be the same size on the staff, for example.

If it's "spelled" differently -- if an interval of that size is actually written as C-E#, for example -- then that's a sign that something weird is going on and you're not supposed to think of this interval as a fourth.

The fact that we write music using the 7-note diatonic scale is kind of like compression: it optimizes notation for the notes and intervals you're most likely to play. It's just not suited for atonal music, much like compression is not suited for random-looking data.

I know little music theory, but I've been playing instruments "by ear" for a long time and it made many things easier to me when I learned that if you're using diatonic scale, it's very unlikely that you'll use notes outside of the scale; e.g. if you're playing a song in C Major, most of the time you'll play C and D, not C# or Db, so if you need that note, it's easier to switch than having an almost unused line in the sheet.

This is exactly what standard sheet music does. A "C" chord can be C-E-G, which makes one shape on a piano keyboard. It can also be "inverted" to E-G-C or G-C-E. These form distinct shapes and it takes about a week to learn to spot the patterns and play them. Organists even do it with both hands while playing notes with their feet.

I remain firm in my belief that if you can touch type you can sight read music. I've seen five year olds learn to do it and I've seen 90 year old people learn to do it.

Actually, the semitones aren't spaced evenly here. The white notes on a piano keyboard are spaced evenly, and then the black notes are half-way between the white ones. So it's rather like conventional notation in that respect (the notes of the diatonic scale are equally spaced, as long as you're in the right key) but since it doesn't have a notion of key signature you can't arrange for that to remain true in (say) F minor.

This preference for some keys over others is pretty much built into the piano keyboard too, and the notation is specifically intended for keyboard music, so it's not obviously crazy. But it certainly doesn't have the property that the semitones are equally spaced.

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