> Also, this notation has a slight problem. That problem is that sheet music is terrible. > This has got to be some of the worst jargon and notation for anythi

> Also, this notation has a slight problem. That problem is that sheet music is terrible. > This has got to be some of the worst jargon and notation for anything, ever. I hear it bandied around in these articles that music notation is awful. Can someone explain to me why? I'm not much of a musician, but I can work my way through sheet music if necessary, or write it when I want to. I don't remember what it was like to learn to read and write music so I'm not going to understand why it's so bad just by thinking about it. First of all, the lines and spaces make a ton of sense to me. When you're playing, reading, or writing a piece, you spend most of your time in a key with a diatonic scale. Maybe you're thinking about the chords: I, vi, ii, V7. The lines and spaces are great for giving you that kind of information. I guess this "completely obscures the relationship between the pitches". I guess that's the case if you forget what key you're playing in. The alternative would be to make the staff fully chromatic, but that sounds like it has a bunch of disadvantages for most music. The chromatic staff (http://musicnotation.org/ http://musicnotation.org/) looks terrible to me, since it spreads out the notes farther. I've already memorized all of the diatonic scales, and now the diatonic scales are jumping around, and the staff covers a shorter interval so you get more of those 8va or 15ma. Hummingbird (http://www.hummingbirdnotation.com/ http://www.hummingbirdnotation.com/) seems like classical notation, just with more redundancy and the symbols changed around a little bit. Maybe it's better but it's a minor improvement at best. Clairnote (http://clairnote.org/ http://clairnote.org/) looks the worst of them all, with half-steps being half-way between lines and spaces. It looks like a recipe for making mistakes and misreading music. I'm not about to say that it's easy to read music notation, just that the notation seems to have a reasonable amount of logic to it. The idea that somehow it's the notation that's terrible and music itself would be easier to understand or play if we just had better notation--I don't buy it. Maybe someone could convince me. (Addendum: If you think the chromatic scale is the "right" scale for notating most music, as in "Chromatic staff" or "Clairnote", as an exercise... why do you think that the chromatic scale is correct? Is it because it represents both sets of keys on the piano or the frets on a guitar? Is it because of the mathematical relationship between the notes? My counterargument, against the chromatic scale, is presented by Bobby McFerrin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ne6tB2KiZuk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ne6tB2KiZuk)