8 ms·

Reading this over again, it seems like the author's not yet fully wrapped their mind around "big picture" stuff like keys, chords, basic compositional structure

• ksml 10y ago
  I don't think the author was necessarily proclaiming that it's absurd, only that it seems absurd from his/her beginner perspective. He/she was very up front about not having much experience, so I think this is totally reasonable (and expected)
• coreyp_1 10y ago
  Yes, it's like some of my students who wonder why I won't let them use a GOTO in their programming assignments. I tell them that, if they are using assembly, then it is fair game.
  • mjevans 10y ago
    It can also be worth it, in very specific limited circumstances, when you're emulating constructs not present in the target language. Emulating a multi-level break statement and error handlers come to mind as examples.
• blake8086 10y ago
  If a beginner can't immediately grasp musical notation, isn't that evidence that it is, in fact, absurd?
  • asmdb 10y ago
    I'm curious, did you immediately grasp the syntax of every programming language you've ever learned?
    • UweSchmidt 10y ago
      Well, in our programming world new languages seem to come out every week, trying to find better ways to write programs. By this standard a new way to encode music is long overdue.
      • fenomas 10y ago
        In that metaphor, coming up with a new way to encode music is like releasing a new programming language and then asking everyone to write their own compiler for it. Not impossible, but it would have to be a hell of an encoding!
      • shiro 10y ago
        Maybe not as many as programming languages, but new notations do appear time to time. It's just that none has ever got as popular as the traditional notation, I guess.
    • pwdisswordfish 10y ago
      Can't speak for the parent, but as far as I can recall, I did. Well, maybe not literally immediately, but to me, the syntax was generally the easiest part of learning a programming language. (It probably helps that they are often very similar to each other.) The only things that were hard were forgetting to write semicolons after statements in C (I have previously mostly written Pascal), and C declarators — but even the latter were easy after I learned that "declaration reflects use".
      • zhemao 10y ago
        Yes, but did you learn your first programming language immediately? Because that's closer to the author's situation.
    • dahart 10y ago
      Programming languages are a lot easier to grasp. ;) The oldest programming languages are only 50 years old, whereas the oldest music notation is at least 4000 years old. Most programming lanuguages haven't crossed any spoken languages, but modern music notation & terminology has been heavily developed by countries all over Asia and Europe. This is a big reason why musical notation seems so weird at first, especially to engineers, because it is a legacy that comes from a different time, a different context, in a different language. The people who developed musical notation had different math, different logic and different musical motivations than we have now. Think about this for a while and it starts to feel like a miracle that musical notation works at all, not to mention how well it works. Programming languages were developed by people nearer to us in every way, and made to be logical and simple, so it makes sense that they're easier to grasp quickly.
  • theseoafs 10y ago
    A beginner can grasp musical notation; its rules are simple and consistent, and the conventions are well-documented and reasonably straightforward. This blog post should be evidence of that: the beginner who wrote it clearly has the basics of notation down, and there are no inaccuracies at least with regard to the notation. A beginner can't grasp the motivations behind the design of musical notation, and I don't expect a beginner to grasp the motivations behind the design of any complex system. That does not make the system absurd.
  • lmm 10y ago
    Maybe the notation is optimized for efficiency for experts, at the cost of beginner-friendliness. Maybe it's representing something genuinely hard. Absurdity is possible but not the only possible reason.
  • rodgerd 10y ago
    So if you can't read Italian after a half-arsed effort to learn it, is this proof Italian is broken?
    • technomancy 10y ago
      Not as badly as English is broken. I mean, it's generally agreed that English as a language has accrued so much historical baggage that it's shed any elegance or coherence it may or may not have once had. It would honestly be surprising to me if the same thing didn't happen to musical language.
      • rodgerd 10y ago
        > it's generally agreed Buy people who know nothing about how languages and linguistics work, I can only assume.
  • Sharlin 10y ago
    If a beginner can't immediately grasp mathematical notation, or a programming language - or a native language for that matter - is that evidence that it is, in fact, absurd? The musical notation has evolved (toward some local optimum) to be useful for practicing musicians and composers, at the expense of having a learning curve.
  • rtpg 10y ago
    well a beginner can't really grasp shorthand or kanji either, right? A beginner not being able to get things means that the learning curve is higher. Most musical notation is meant for non-beginners, right? And a lot of the beginner confusion is from features that are useful for advanced users. So there's a tradeoff. There might, of course, be changes to be had. But a lot of beginner confusion is because the higher-level abstractions are needed. A good example in mathematical notation is order of operations. Why not just do left to right? Or just going with Polish Notation? Standard order of operations work well for people working with large formula, because they allow you to write many common things without many parentheses. But mandatory parentheses + left-to-right only would be easier for beginners.
  • bitwize 10y ago
    Ah, the hipster programmer attitude to learning, based on the idea that because something is: a) hard (it takes more than a day to understand the complexities) b) incredibly old the community should declare it obsolete and immediately begin work on a replacement (preferably based on JavaScript).
    • mkd1964 10y ago
      HA! This made my day.
• dfabulich 10y ago
  Is there an article/book/video anyone can recommend that explains the advantages of modern staff notation in terms that beginners can understand? In particular, I think everyone would agree that it's it's much harder for beginners to hunt and peck sheet music in modern staff notation than it is for a novice typist to type words on a QWERTY keyboard. (At least when the sheet music is written in any key except C major, since the configuration of black/white piano keys corresponds to C major.) This prompts beginners to ask, "why is this unnecessarily hard?" The general advice I see (especially in the comment thread here) is to just spend years practicing and then you'll "get it;" you won't just learn how to play, but you'll understand why staff notation is awesome. Can the beginner's question be answered, except by saying, "uh, trust me, it's great, just keep practicing"?
  • theseoafs 10y ago
    I'm working on a blog post now which I hope will answer that question (at least, in very general terms).
  • lmm 10y ago
    I don't think you can explain it to someone who can't play music, because it's a notation for music. You could teach someone to play an instrument the old-fashioned way, person-to-person without any sheets, and once they understood music (i.e. what patterns of notes sound good or don't) ask them to come up with a way to write it down, and they'd come up with something much like staff notation. But that's a very labour-intensive way to learn. Hunt-and-peck is always going to be hard on an instrument that supports multiple modes, because each mode only uses some of the modes. At my school music classes were taught on the xylophone/glockenspiel, which you configure for your piece at the start (putting the correct bars on for the mode/key you're working in), which is probably easier for beginners, but it's not a popular instrument (and nor is the harp, which is the only other example I can think of of that approach).
    • buzzybee 10y ago
      I think a lot of the favoring of staff notation comes down to what the instrument does well. A majority of acoustic instruments are monophonic(voice, wind, brass, many strings) and have some form of linearity in pitch, and the staff accommodates them optimally - the beginner's sheet music always starts out by accompanying the staff with fingerings for each note, to help you get some confidence that you are actually playing right notes, and then after that it's pretty straightforward to extend your knowlege to read more notes. Chord structure just isn't even touched in most of these instruments, at least in classical performance, because they aren't capable of polyphony! That only becomes a topic as one starts moving into, e.g., jazz improvisation, where knowing how to recognize and play around a root is critical. Piano is exceptional here, since finger independence and chording practically define that instrument. On the other hand, guitar tabs are a Big Thing in part because guitar chords transpose very well, so you don't have to learn too many unique fingerings to start accessing the others - and then if the song is defined as a sung melody plus rhythmic chord backing, as a lot of popular songs are, you don't need more than a tab and hearing the tune once to have a shot at covering it competently. Guitar's 2D layout favors isomorphism - this is what gives it this extra power to transpose. Guitar is conventionally not tuned isomorphically, but some forms of accordion like bayan, and alternative keyboard layouts such as Wicki-Hayden, Harmonic Table or Janko, are fully isomorphic. In that case, you don't have to mode set or learn any unique scales or chord fingering per key: Learn any set of intervals(chords or scales) and you can reuse them in every key by moving your fingers over. This is wonderful for learning theory and doing composition, but it doesn't make the instruments a 1-to-1 replacement for similar instruments as in performance the distances are usually much smaller, fingerings can get tangled, it can be harder to find your place or maintain tempo, etc.
• crottypeter 10y ago
  If you are mathematically literate but a beginner in music most texts on music won't tell you the simple stuff in here. And most music students can't tell you what an octave means (i.e. frequency doubles) besides something wooly like "(a C an octave up from another C) is the same note but a different pitch". This text is what it claims to be: music theory for nerds (just not necessarily music nerds!)