Interested to see where this goes. The 5 blogs/books cited at the end look especially interesting. I never thought about music notation until i learned guitar

Interested to see where this goes. The 5 blogs/books cited at the end look especially interesting. I never thought about music notation until i learned guitar. Previous to that i was "gifted" years of lessons in piano, woodwinds and percussion, and reading treble clef was easy. I never tried to read sheet music in guitar books because i never had to, i just read tabs and played. Besides some classical books and jazz books by Berklee profs and others (Leavitt, Martino, Goodrick), there's very few guitar books that don't have tabs. So you could argue that's a notation. You could also say that FL piano rolls and renoise timelines (what OP is trialling) are notations, as are lead sheets and chords charts in Nashville format (the Roman numerals like ii-V-I you see all over the place). They're sufficient for people to play music, they happen to be dynamically typed and GC'd vs static typed and manually alloc'd