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I always wondered why musicians keep up with the conventional musical notation system, and haven't come up with something better (maybe a job for a HNer?). I m

I always wondered why musicians keep up with the conventional musical notation system, and haven't come up with something better (maybe a job for a HNer?). I mean the conventional music notation represents tones in five lines, each capable of holding a "note" (is that the right word?) on a line, as well as in between lines, possibly pitched down and up, resp., by B's and sharps (depending on the tune etc.). Since western music has 12 half-tone steps per octave (octave = an interval wherein the frequency is doubled, which is a logarithmic scale so compromises have to made when tuning individual notes across octaves) this gives a basic mismatch between the notation and eg. the conventional use of chords. A consequence is that, for example, with treble clef, you find C' in the top but one position between lines, and thus at a very different place than C (one octave below) visually, which is on, rather than between, an additional line below the bottom-most regular line. I for one know that my dyslexia when it comes to musical notation (eg. not recognizing notes fast enough to play by the sheet) has kept me from becoming proficient on the piano (well, that, and my lazyness).

lprubin 10y ago
Many non classical musicians use other notations. For example, many guitarists and bassists use tab notation. It's simply a visual representation of the strings and a number for which fret to play. It's not as expressive but is far easier to get started with.
- H1Supreme 10y ago
  MOST guitar players I know use tabs. Personally, I'd rather see the chord type and root string. Ie. 6th string AMin, 4th string GMaj7. Tabs are almost as confusing because I memorized the notes, not the fret number.
  - Double_Cast 10y ago
    I memorize chord progressions in terms of interval-number. E.g. {F# m; B dom7; E Maj} becomes {ii; V7; I}. I've memorized which intervals are major chords and which intervals are minor chords. So if I can figure out the tonic, then I can figure out the key. And if I figure out the key, I need only remember a pattern of ordinals (modulo non-triads).
    - troncheadle 10y ago
      This is a great illustration of how we grapple with the abstraction of scales and key over time. First, you have tabs, which describe the physical position of the notes on the instrument. Then, we have root / chord type notation, in which we describe the starting position and shape of the notes on the instrument, and the musician must translate that information to the physical position of the notes, on the fly. What is important about this second stage is that the musician has a pretty good grasp on how to play, and can usually sight read a piece and get a pretty decent version of it just by tracking chords, or in the case of the piano, just chords and the melody on the other hand, or a small pattern. Finally, we come to roman numeral notation, which describes the chords based on their relative position to the root note of key, not the chord. This is a powerful abstraction. It provides incredible insight into the relationships between music, notes, chords, and progressions of chords at a level divorced from the 'root' of that key. A 9th played over a minor 7th chord is going to give you a very similar sound in any key. This is a great skill for songwriters and composers, who need to have a strong working intuition about things like what chord will sound good in this progression, or what notes we want to appear in our melody (which is related to the chords beneath it).
  - teilo 10y ago
    Yes, thank you. This is particularly frustrating when you play with an alternate tuning such as DADGAD. Tabs are pretty much useless then.
- lightedman 10y ago
  "It's not as expressive" Have you ever used Guitar Pro or Tux Guitar? It can be INSANELY expressive. Grab a MIDI of Van Halen's "Jump" (IIRC The best one was about 76kB) and import it into either of those. Guitar Pro will be noticeably more expressive vs TuxGuitar. Inside of that MIDI, the solo is 100% dead-on note-for-harmonic-for-slide-for-hammer. Both programs output the exact same tablature. You will get the solo perfect. Most people that have read tablature haven't read the guitar-specialized notation found in Guitar Pro or TuxGuitar. It's far more instructive.
  - anjc 10y ago
    MIDI isn't tab though. It requires note velocities and durations for a start, which tab doesn't. You can go from MIDI to tab but you couldn't go from tab to MIDI.
    - lightedman 10y ago
      "MIDI isn't tab though. It requires note velocities and durations for a start, which tab doesn't." This is entirely incorrect. You can get velocities (Mezzo-forte, mezzo-piano, etc.) and such is expressed if you hover over the note itself in Guitar Pro or Tuxguitar. Sure they change the granularity of it, but the general range remains the same and for all practical purposes sounds the same if played properly.
aoeusnth1 10y ago
Agreed, but reading sheet music is a very small part of playing piano proficiently (say, at the 97th percentile). Once you get past knowing the notes in a piece, there's the much more difficult task of being able to manipulate the force that you exert from your fingers to create the right volume balance. For example, your untrained thumb will naturally play notes much louder than it should, and it takes a lot of practice to be able to play notes with it at the right volume; the opposite is true with your pinky and ring fingers. ...Not to mention the even more difficult task of knowing what you want the piece to sound like in the first place. A novice playing a piece at 100% accuracy sounds nothing like a concert pianist playing the piece. There's a world of depth to music beyond just learning the right notes. Here's an example: listen to this performance of Debussy's "Reflets dans l'eau" by Arturo Michelangeli, one of the greatest pianists of the 20th century: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLbpQl1cCl8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLbpQl1cCl8 And then listen to this student play it (she is still a high-skill player, just not world-class talent): https://youtu.be/l2gJSVOdaG8 https://youtu.be/l2gJSVOdaG8
- drblast 10y ago
  I don't know a whole lot about concert piano, but I don't think you could have picked two better videos to illustrate your point. That student is obviously very practiced and skilled but there's just no comparison.
  - aoeusnth1 10y ago
    Thanks! When I learned this piece, I listened to that recording on repeat. Michaelangeli is simply amazing.
  - tylercubell 10y ago
    The student asks, "how?". The master asks, "why?". That's why you feel a difference in the two performances.
drblast 10y ago
Think of it as data compression that shows you the notes you're most likely to play, without taking up space for notes you probably won't. If there's a piece in C, for example, in most traditional Western music you're unlikely to play off-key notes. So why take up valuable space for those when you can denote that unlikely event with a sharp/flat symbol? Traditional music notation made no sense at all to me until I realized this. Edit: For those that don't know, in most western music you're only going to use 8 out of the 12 possible notes most of the time. This is not universally true especially of modern non-pop music, but traditionally if you played off-key notes people thought you might summon evil spirits so it's easy to understand why things would be written down this way. Not only is it space efficient, but you wouldn't accidentally summon the devil. To summon the devil you have to really want to and write a flat or sharp in there.
- calflegal 10y ago
  This is a really great answer! This is also a big part of why different instruments read different clefs.
- areyousure 10y ago
  > Edit: For those that don't know, in most western music you're only going to use 8 out of the 12 possible notes most of the time. You mean 7 notes. Traditional music notation and terminology is confused in many ways, one of which is a fencepost-counting error. As a result: octaves are actually seven notes apart in a scale, two major seconds make a major third (2+2=3?), and two octaves make a fifteenth (8+8=15!?).
- harrumph 10y ago
  >Traditional music notation made no sense at all to me until I realized this. Can't thank you enough because your characterization is the first one I've heard that adequately explains the foundation of the visual system as one of condensation. I've been shrugging my shoulders about this for many decades!
breadbox 10y ago
> I always wondered why musicians keep up with the > conventional musical notation system, and haven't come > up with something better (maybe a job for a HNer?). Before starting down that path, I would recommend familiarizing yourself with the wide range of music notations that already exist and continue to be used, and then the ridiculously varying plethora of failed alternative music notations that have been invented over the centuries, and why they failed to see wider adoption. And, of course, it's fascinating to study the evolution of the existing "standard" music notation, and see the changes that have been adopted, and the ones that weren't. For all its apparent stasis, it has definitely evolved over the centuries, in response to the changing needs of musicians.
- ascendantlogic 10y ago
  That doesn't jive with the "I can do better" mantra around these parts. I say that both sincerely and sarcastically.
  - Pyxl101 10y ago
    They are not saying you cannot be better. They're just saying to respect what came before and learn from it as you devise the better scheme.
  - Moru 10y ago
    https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/
    - mejari 10y ago
      Closer to this: https://xkcd.com/1831/ https://xkcd.com/1831/
  - erikpukinskis 10y ago
    Jibe means to be in accordance. Jive is a dialect and a dance. FYI. I realize we will probably lose these words, but for now.....
  - breadbox 10y ago
barryfandango 10y ago
shameless plug :) lightspeed, the sightreading flashcard game. http://buzzcola.github.io/lightspeed-music/ http://buzzcola.github.io/lightspeed-music/ Requires windows and a MIDI keyboard.
ganonm 10y ago
I have played piano and guitar (piano for almost my entire life and guitar for several years) and have used both tabular sheet music and traditional sheet music. Tabular sheet music is much easier to read initially as it provides a one to one mapping between the visual representation and the physical location of the notes - i.e. 5 frets along on this string. However, from my experience there is a cap on the 'bandwidth' at which you can sight read this. It is just too hard to mentally parse a bunch of numbers on lines and turn that into notes when playing at speed. (For non musicians, 'sight reading' means to read the notes and play fluently at the same time) Traditional sheet music has a steeper learning curve, however, I've found that reading this music becomes much more subconscious with practice and the bandwidth at which you can parse the notes is much higher. Also, it is much easier to notice patterns in sheet music - i.e. a major 7th chord in the key of the song is visually obvious no matter what the key.
- criddell 10y ago
  I wonder if you had been a guitar + tablature player your entire life and picked up piano a few years ago, if you would come to the same conclusion. I've tried learning guitar a few times and when I've asked accomplished players how they get by with tabs, it's been explained as tab music establishes a minimal framework that you play within. It's a lossy compression scheme (and traditional sheet music is less lossy). Would you agree with that?
  - TylerE 10y ago
    Totally disagree. Tab is LESS lossy than traditional sheet music because it encodes the string as well as the pitch. A given note could be played in as many as 5 different places, and they will ALL sound different. An open A (5th string) will sound different than the same A played on the low E string, 5th fret. (This is completely unrelated to the woeful quality of most of the tab floating around on the net. You can write down a piss-poor transcription as sheet music too.)
    - criddell 10y ago
      > Tab is LESS lossy than traditional sheet music because it encodes the string as well as the pitch. But it doesn't encode the note type, right? All the tab books I've bought don't differentiate between whole notes, quarter notes, etc... So that seems pretty lossy. Look at any guitar fake book for an example. Plus, I never looked at tablature as a literal transcription. That's why I would describe it as a more of a framework. Like you say, a note can be played in a lot of different places. Once you internalize the fretboard logic, when you see an A in the tab, you play the one you think will sound right or is physically accessible.
fefesafaea 10y ago
There are a lot of books on the subject, but the short answer is that it's just the most common standard at this point. Yes there are some things about it that don't make sense, but for whatever reason it seems to be the most coherent way for musicians to communicate using a common language. It's popularity also has to do with what sounds pleasing to the ear (and brain) on a biological level. A number of people have come up with alternative scales and notations systems over the years, but none of them have really stuck for one reason or another. Nonetheless, they are pretty fun to read about. here's the whole history of notation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_notation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_notation Also, if you aren't familiar with John Cage, you should check him out. His music and writing deals with a lot of the stuff you just brought up, and it's also a really great jumping off point to find other interesting artists and musicians. Indeterminacy, a work he did with David Tudor is a great starting point https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lOMHUrgM_s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lOMHUrgM_s
almonj 10y ago
It is confusing at first, but once you memorize where all the notes are it is very good. Notation is based around the idea of key signatures, and once you have that down it becomes very intuitive and you can actually know what a piece of music sounds like just by looking at the notation. Western music has 12 distinct pitch classes, but typically the notes are used in scale groupings of usually 7 notes, with accidental "outside" notes being easily recognized by sharp and flat symbols. Doing it that way gives easy visual cues for musical "events" such as key changes, outside chords.. etc. There is a reason it has stuck around, it is a quite ingenious system.
nileshtrivedi 10y ago
There have been dozens of suggestions for alternative notation systems over centuries. Many documented here: http://musicnotation.org/ http://musicnotation.org/ I guess it's just inertia.
vitalus 10y ago
> I always wondered why musicians keep up with the conventional musical notation system, and haven't come up with something better (maybe a job for a HNer?). Is this supposed to be satire? Invoking Poe's Law on this one
ebbv 10y ago
I have mild dyslexia myself and I think any kind of notation is going to be a problem for us. The good news is you don't need musical notation to play music. You can play by ear. Don't let it stop you if you're really interested in music.
psyc 10y ago
I'm a classically trained pianist, and I basically agree with you. I read sheet music because that's what there is. As a young composer, I wrote in standard notation because I hadn't questioned it. As an old composer, I don't think there's anything great about it, and I have no need of it. I 'write' all my music on hardware or software synths. It's much easier. All I care about are the parameters. What note, when, how long, how loud, etc.
dahart 10y ago
> I always wondered why musicians keep up with the conventional musical notation system, and haven't come up with something better (maybe a job for a HNer?). You're not alone, this is a common reaction to music notation by engineers; a lot of people have wondered the same thing, even here on HN. For example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12528144 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12528144 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12085844 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12085844 I see some great responses, but I wanted to add that you have to keep in mind that tons of people have actually tried to make a better system, and nobody has succeeded. That should give you enough pause to ask why and consider the possibility that the system we have is really good in a way that you haven't recognized yet. I think the problem is that difficult to learn and bad are easily confused. It is difficult to learn. Also keep in mind that music notation has undergone many iterations, and it represents developments over hundreds and hundreds of years and covers every instrument under the sun - the breadth of what it has done throughout history and what can do might be hard to see.
- BookmarkSaver 10y ago
  >I see some great responses, but I wanted to add that you have to keep in mind that tons of people have actually tried to make a better system, and nobody has succeeded. That should give you enough pause to ask why and consider the possibility that the system we have is really good in a way that you haven't recognized yet. I think that this is the incorrect way of looking at it. I suspect it is less that the traditional notation system is highly evolved and effective, and more that getting a critical mass of musicians to transition/relearn/teach/translate into a newer system is incredibly difficult. For instance, while Imperial units aren't without some advantage, they are pretty generally inferior to the Metric system. But the US hasn't really switched because it requires a significant level of coordination and control that simply isn't easy to access. And getting musicians to learn and teach a brand new, objectively better system would be much much harder.
  - mbrookes 10y ago
    Music notation is to music as qwerty is to keyboards?
deckard1 10y ago
Well, considering this article on Ableton never even uses conventional musical notation and many working musicians sit in front of their DAW all day, I think it's safe to say that the virtual piano roll has largely taken over the roll of classic notation. I don't think too many people making rock music, EDM, or hip-hop has really touched classic notation ever.
dizzystar 10y ago
Music notation does take time to learn how to read well at, but it's no different anything else that takes time to learn and master. Once you get past a cursory "eff this" reaction, you start to see how downright brilliant notation is. The vast majority of music focuses on 7 notes at a time. If you alter a key signature, you are playing 7 other (non-distinct) notes. Music notation encapsulates this concept very well. That's only one example, but telling musicians their notation sucks and needs to be fixed because it's hard for a non-musician is akin to a musician telling a programmer that Python and Linux needs to be fixed because it doesn't look like a violin.
- kybernetikos 10y ago
  > Once you get past a cursory "eff this" reaction, you start to see how downright brilliant notation is. In this it reminds me of vim.
Johnny_Brahms 10y ago
Oven the last 800 years, hundreds of different systems have been proposed to the system that has evolved to be the one in use today. Generally it can be said that some have been better in a specific use case (klavar notation was pretty big in the Netherlands among those who didn't know regular notation), but they fall apart pretty quickly when you try to write Liszt or Rachmaninov in it. I might be a bit rigid (I have played bassoon professionally for most of my adult life), but I can't really see how it can be made much better and still keep the same utility. While chords might be not optimal today, we can still express things like enharmonics easily (which, at least for me, is something that can make sight reading easier as it allows for the notes to stay "in key"). As with the spoken word, music has an advanced coding system. Both coding systems are flawed in their own way (as someone with a different mother tongue than english, I have a hard time spelling just about anything), but they have also stood the trial of time.
Double_Cast 10y ago
One advantage of the 5-Line Staff is use of both lines and spaces. It's compact, easy to print, and easy to stack notes vertically. Another advantage: each note of a diatonic scale is mapped injectively. Cf. representing each line (or space) as a whole-tone, which leads to hash-collisions (e.g. "is that a G or a G#?"). Each note on a line (or space) on which collisions occur would need an accidental. Which defeats the purpose of key signatures. A diatonic scale contains an odd number of unique notes. The fact that C lies on a line while C' lies on a space is an unfortunate artifact of representing a 7-note scale with alternating lines and spaces.
hellofunk 10y ago
I think that you are approaching the notation from a very left brained kind of logical point of view. Once you learn to recognize the patterns in musical notation, none of these concerns actually matter. Musicians just see the pattern and play it, and then focus on the stuff that is really difficult, which is the musicality.
Kiro 10y ago
DAWs don't use the classical notation system, neither does this tutorial, so I don't understand the context of your comment.
- teilo 10y ago
  Well, technically some DAWs have a notation view (Logic and Sonar, for example), but it's pretty much useless.
a_lieb 10y ago
I'm a programmer/musician and I can read on guitar and piano. I'm somewhere on the middle on this debate. I really dislike conventional notation but I also agree that the alternatives have some big downsides as well. My biggest objection to conventional notation is that it gives a profoundly misleading picture of how music and harmony really work. It defines one reference key (C Major/A Minor) with a certain pattern of steps and gaps, starting on a certain note. Then for all of the other keys you add more and more sharps or flats until you get into ridiculous keys where all 7 notes are modified. The truth is that there's just one evenly spaced set of 12 tones, and all it means to be "in a key" is that you've picked a certain note out of the 12 to start the pattern on. There's nothing special about C. We could have chosen the key we call F# as the reference key and named it C, and everything would work the same. It's hard to overstate the damage from this. Lots of musicians I know—serious players, people who took music in college—still think of "complicated keys" and "easy keys" and are only vaguely aware that the keys are actually all the same and they're just being tormented by the notation and terminology. I'm teaching guitar to a friend who was first trombone in high school and it blows her mind that she can play the same scales starting anywhere up and down the fretboard and it sounds the same. It all comes from the design of the keyboard, where the notes of C major are evenly spaced (white keys) and the sharps/flats are stuck in between. There's also the fact that in the past the 12 notes weren't evenly spaced, so the different keys really did all sound different back then. Conventional notation does have one big advantage, though: every line or space represents one note in the scale. This is more how musicians think: you don't care that much about the notes outside your key, and having the other ones "tucked away" in between makes it easy to see what's going on. That's why it's so quick to read once you know it. Out of the hundreds of alternative notations, I haven't seen one that's both key-neutral and also makes it easy to see things in terms of scale degrees. (One idea I've had is a 12-tone staff with Sacred Harp-style shaped note heads to show you what scale degree you're playing. Not sure if that's ever been tried.)
- elihu 10y ago
  I agree with your main point -- standard notation is basically just piano tablature and it tends to confuse as much as it enlightens about how music works. However, I disagree about the "there's just one evenly spaced set of 12 tones" bit. This is a simplifying assumption of standard notation that makes it hard to express the idea of notes that are outside of the well-known 12. Even in the key of C major, this is a problem in just intonation. Say you want to play a G major chord, so it's made up of G, B, and D (3/2, 15/8, and 9/8). Later in the song you want to play a D minor, so you play D, F, and A (9/8, 4/3, and 5/3). That doesn't sound right, though. It turns out that the D you want is actually 10/9, which is just a bit flatter than 9/8. In standard notation, you can't distinguish. It's possible to get around this by adding non-standard modifiers to notes aside from the usual ones (sharp/flat/natural), but unmodified standard notation misleads people into thinking that those two notes are the same. Which is another example of your main point, that "standard notation gives a profoundly misleading picture of how music and harmony really work".
ninjakeyboard 10y ago
piano rolls are used instead in production. (source: I make lots of music - http://www.soundcloud.com/decklyn http://www.soundcloud.com/decklyn)
boomlinde 10y ago
Since music notation is a form of communication, wide adoption is a huge factor in what is considered better. We could come up with more precise and effective languages than the ones we naturally speak, as well, but the good-enoughness of the ones we already have and the fact that others around us are very likely familiar with them is more important. Utility trumps quality, and worse is better. That said, if all you want is a different notation system for you to use personally or with small groups of other proponents, there are plenty to choose from. ABC and MML variants use letters for notes and numbers for note lengths, for example. Probably not optimal for sight reading, but maybe better than staff notation when writing or transcribing music. There's also trackers and piano rolls. Neither is very good for quick conprehension, but maybe lay things out in a way that makes more intuitive sense.
avodonosov 10y ago
Roman numerals may seem simpler than arabic, but turns out arabic are more convenient for complex operations like multiplication.
MandieD 10y ago
I wonder how many of us "skilled musical technicians" there are - people who can read music really well, produce those notes on our instruments predictably enough to play in a group, but just aren't that "musical" - we're boring to listen to on our own and have trouble singing. I'm a competent flute player, but it's a good thing I was just as interested in computers as a teen.
pishpash 10y ago
It's clear that current music software is poor for conveying information when compared to editors for many other tasks. It is easy to blame musical notation for that, but in fact in most music software there are several equivalent views (tracks, piano roll, notation), and you'll find that notation is the _most_ efficient of those. Consider this: In this system, your most complex Classical scores for an entire orchestra are written, and present day trained composers continue to work efficiently in it. That tells you about its expressive power. It is in fact not stupid, but very well tuned to a lot of music theory. Other than complex timbre manipulation (and even that), you can do probably everything you want to accomplish with just software that does nothing but notation. Instead, what most music software lacks is in the organization department. The organization of non-linear ideas, their programmatic (as in music) occurrence, the automation of repetitive tasks, and the completion of obvious intent. Tracks and loops are probably not the right view of musical structure, at least far from a _complete_ view. There needs to be a better bridge between musical phrases and ideas at the local level (for which musical notation is perfectly suited) and the organizational structure of a complex piece at the macro level (for which tools are very lacking). There also needs to be a better bridge between some conception of events (for which musical notation is slightly ill suited, being restricted to notes) and the microscopic world of timbres, effects, and transformations. Until music software makers recognize that what they should be helping with is neither engraving, nor mixing console simulation, but a non-linear creative task, music software will continue to suck.
amai 10y ago
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_notation#Other_systems_and_practices https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_notation#Other_systems...
tylercubell 10y ago
Speaking as a classical pianist, I think the conventional musical notation system is actually pretty good. My only issue is having to memorize Italian, French, and German phrases to be able to read music properly. IMHO, music notation should be localized.
JusticeJuice 10y ago
They actually disucss that in this course. They talk about pelog scales and 19 note divisions of octaves (not 12) https://learningmusic.ableton.com/advanced-topics/pelog.html https://learningmusic.ableton.com/advanced-topics/pelog.html
globuous 10y ago
> I always wondered why musicians keep up with the conventional musical notation system, and haven't come up with something better (maybe a job for a HNer?). Me too. But you think about it, all you really is a graphical representation that describes the pitch of sounds relative to each other as well as their duration relative to the beat. And the conventional notation is not bad at it ! The current system is essentially: a dot on a coordinate system representing the pitch, duration, and position of the sound in a sequence of sounds. - a horizontal position axis: you draw an invisible x-axis representing the position of the note in its ordered sequence. It gives no indication on its duration. - a vertical pitch axis defined by western notes (do, re, mi, etc): You draw your pitch lines, y-axis with y=Do, y=Re, y=Mi etc. - a duration axis (let's say it points towards you): We can't draw it for a 2d representation of music, so we'll project this coordinate on the time-pitch plane which is your staff. We'll decorate the dot representing the note w.r.t. to it's duration coordinate: say it's duration is half a beat, the the dot is a black filled circle; if it's a full beat then it's a white circle; it's its a 4th of a beat the it'll be a black filled circle with a hook. Etc etc etc. And then you start making all the addition of music notation: blank for 1/2 beats, vibrato, tempo, etc Now there is this choice not representing note position and duration on a single axis. That may very well be so it's easier to standardise and read probably. You could also choose to represent the duration coordinate with colour, would that make it easier ? :) Maybe the problem doesn't come from the notation, but the system in itself. The half step between B and C, the 12 notes but really it's more, etc. That's why solfeggio is hard ! I think some greeks considered the study of harmony to be at least as intellectual as that of counting ! I wonder if there's an algebra for harmonie. An H-Algebra why not ? But really, it's not the only notation: guitar tabs, guitar chord representation, etc
acjohnson55 10y ago
I once thought the same thing, but after months of studying our music system and our way of notating it, I came to understand why it's so difficult to improve upon staff notation. First of all, Western music has complex structure both horizontally and vertically. This makes it rather difficult to encode and visualize, right at the outset. You need some sort of matrix visualization, like a staff or piano roll, to capture all of the nuance. What makes the staff so useful is that it also captures the tonal aspects of music in compact way -- those that relate to the key the music is written in. Every triad in the same inversion looks the same in every key. A triad is three consecutive lines or spaces. And then deviations from the standard triad for that tonal function are marked with accidentals. This turns out to be extremely useful for performers, because you learn to play an instrument by learning to play in all the keys, rather than learning what the 12 notes are and playing note by note. I realized this when taking piano class and doing exercises where we'd transpose to another key while sightreading in the original key. There are other notation systems that have been as successful as the staff, but they tend to be specific to particular instruments or styles. For example, most guitarists find tablature much easier to play than standard notation, especially if the tablature is augmented with note durations and rests. Also, although I've become a true believer when it comes to the staff, I have less rationale for why the traditional clef system has stuck around. It seems like something that is more regular as you go up and down the scale would be more helpful. There are systems that use things like note shapes or colors to help mark the note name. I guess we just haven't found a standard.
pklausler 10y ago
Tempered tuning indeed divides the octave into 12 half-steps, but a huge amount of music uses only 7 or fewer of them for long stretches (or entire pieces) with a few exceptions. So think of the lines & spaces as being a compressed representation that doesn't waste vertical space for the tones that a piece isn't going to use. Me, I love standard notation. Common chord voicings and interval patterns stand out as easily recognizable patterns on the page.

lprubin 10y ago

Many non classical musicians use other notations. For example, many guitarists and bassists use tab notation. It's simply a visual representation of the strings and a number for which fret to play. It's not as expressive but is far easier to get started with.

H1Supreme 10y ago
MOST guitar players I know use tabs. Personally, I'd rather see the chord type and root string. Ie. 6th string AMin, 4th string GMaj7. Tabs are almost as confusing because I memorized the notes, not the fret number.
- Double_Cast 10y ago
  I memorize chord progressions in terms of interval-number. E.g. {F# m; B dom7; E Maj} becomes {ii; V7; I}. I've memorized which intervals are major chords and which intervals are minor chords. So if I can figure out the tonic, then I can figure out the key. And if I figure out the key, I need only remember a pattern of ordinals (modulo non-triads).
  - troncheadle 10y ago
    This is a great illustration of how we grapple with the abstraction of scales and key over time. First, you have tabs, which describe the physical position of the notes on the instrument. Then, we have root / chord type notation, in which we describe the starting position and shape of the notes on the instrument, and the musician must translate that information to the physical position of the notes, on the fly. What is important about this second stage is that the musician has a pretty good grasp on how to play, and can usually sight read a piece and get a pretty decent version of it just by tracking chords, or in the case of the piano, just chords and the melody on the other hand, or a small pattern. Finally, we come to roman numeral notation, which describes the chords based on their relative position to the root note of key, not the chord. This is a powerful abstraction. It provides incredible insight into the relationships between music, notes, chords, and progressions of chords at a level divorced from the 'root' of that key. A 9th played over a minor 7th chord is going to give you a very similar sound in any key. This is a great skill for songwriters and composers, who need to have a strong working intuition about things like what chord will sound good in this progression, or what notes we want to appear in our melody (which is related to the chords beneath it).
- teilo 10y ago
  Yes, thank you. This is particularly frustrating when you play with an alternate tuning such as DADGAD. Tabs are pretty much useless then.
lightedman 10y ago
"It's not as expressive" Have you ever used Guitar Pro or Tux Guitar? It can be INSANELY expressive. Grab a MIDI of Van Halen's "Jump" (IIRC The best one was about 76kB) and import it into either of those. Guitar Pro will be noticeably more expressive vs TuxGuitar. Inside of that MIDI, the solo is 100% dead-on note-for-harmonic-for-slide-for-hammer. Both programs output the exact same tablature. You will get the solo perfect. Most people that have read tablature haven't read the guitar-specialized notation found in Guitar Pro or TuxGuitar. It's far more instructive.
- anjc 10y ago
  MIDI isn't tab though. It requires note velocities and durations for a start, which tab doesn't. You can go from MIDI to tab but you couldn't go from tab to MIDI.
  - lightedman 10y ago
    "MIDI isn't tab though. It requires note velocities and durations for a start, which tab doesn't." This is entirely incorrect. You can get velocities (Mezzo-forte, mezzo-piano, etc.) and such is expressed if you hover over the note itself in Guitar Pro or Tuxguitar. Sure they change the granularity of it, but the general range remains the same and for all practical purposes sounds the same if played properly.

aoeusnth1 10y ago

Agreed, but reading sheet music is a very small part of playing piano proficiently (say, at the 97th percentile). Once you get past knowing the notes in a piece, there's the much more difficult task of being able to manipulate the force that you exert from your fingers to create the right volume balance. For example, your untrained thumb will naturally play notes much louder than it should, and it takes a lot of practice to be able to play notes with it at the right volume; the opposite is true with your pinky and ring fingers. ...Not to mention the even more difficult task of knowing what you want the piece to sound like in the first place. A novice playing a piece at 100% accuracy sounds nothing like a concert pianist playing the piece. There's a world of depth to music beyond just learning the right notes. Here's an example: listen to this performance of Debussy's "Reflets dans l'eau" by Arturo Michelangeli, one of the greatest pianists of the 20th century: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLbpQl1cCl8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLbpQl1cCl8 And then listen to this student play it (she is still a high-skill player, just not world-class talent): https://youtu.be/l2gJSVOdaG8 https://youtu.be/l2gJSVOdaG8

drblast 10y ago
I don't know a whole lot about concert piano, but I don't think you could have picked two better videos to illustrate your point. That student is obviously very practiced and skilled but there's just no comparison.
- aoeusnth1 10y ago
  Thanks! When I learned this piece, I listened to that recording on repeat. Michaelangeli is simply amazing.
- tylercubell 10y ago
  The student asks, "how?". The master asks, "why?". That's why you feel a difference in the two performances.

drblast 10y ago

Think of it as data compression that shows you the notes you're most likely to play, without taking up space for notes you probably won't. If there's a piece in C, for example, in most traditional Western music you're unlikely to play off-key notes. So why take up valuable space for those when you can denote that unlikely event with a sharp/flat symbol? Traditional music notation made no sense at all to me until I realized this. Edit: For those that don't know, in most western music you're only going to use 8 out of the 12 possible notes most of the time. This is not universally true especially of modern non-pop music, but traditionally if you played off-key notes people thought you might summon evil spirits so it's easy to understand why things would be written down this way. Not only is it space efficient, but you wouldn't accidentally summon the devil. To summon the devil you have to really want to and write a flat or sharp in there.

calflegal 10y ago
This is a really great answer! This is also a big part of why different instruments read different clefs.
areyousure 10y ago
> Edit: For those that don't know, in most western music you're only going to use 8 out of the 12 possible notes most of the time. You mean 7 notes. Traditional music notation and terminology is confused in many ways, one of which is a fencepost-counting error. As a result: octaves are actually seven notes apart in a scale, two major seconds make a major third (2+2=3?), and two octaves make a fifteenth (8+8=15!?).
harrumph 10y ago
>Traditional music notation made no sense at all to me until I realized this. Can't thank you enough because your characterization is the first one I've heard that adequately explains the foundation of the visual system as one of condensation. I've been shrugging my shoulders about this for many decades!

breadbox 10y ago

> I always wondered why musicians keep up with the > conventional musical notation system, and haven't come > up with something better (maybe a job for a HNer?). Before starting down that path, I would recommend familiarizing yourself with the wide range of music notations that already exist and continue to be used, and then the ridiculously varying plethora of failed alternative music notations that have been invented over the centuries, and why they failed to see wider adoption. And, of course, it's fascinating to study the evolution of the existing "standard" music notation, and see the changes that have been adopted, and the ones that weren't. For all its apparent stasis, it has definitely evolved over the centuries, in response to the changing needs of musicians.

ascendantlogic 10y ago
That doesn't jive with the "I can do better" mantra around these parts. I say that both sincerely and sarcastically.
- Pyxl101 10y ago
  They are not saying you cannot be better. They're just saying to respect what came before and learn from it as you devise the better scheme.
- Moru 10y ago
  https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/
  - mejari 10y ago
    Closer to this: https://xkcd.com/1831/ https://xkcd.com/1831/
- erikpukinskis 10y ago
  Jibe means to be in accordance. Jive is a dialect and a dance. FYI. I realize we will probably lose these words, but for now.....
- breadbox 10y ago

barryfandango 10y ago

shameless plug :) lightspeed, the sightreading flashcard game. http://buzzcola.github.io/lightspeed-music/ http://buzzcola.github.io/lightspeed-music/ Requires windows and a MIDI keyboard.

ganonm 10y ago

I have played piano and guitar (piano for almost my entire life and guitar for several years) and have used both tabular sheet music and traditional sheet music. Tabular sheet music is much easier to read initially as it provides a one to one mapping between the visual representation and the physical location of the notes - i.e. 5 frets along on this string. However, from my experience there is a cap on the 'bandwidth' at which you can sight read this. It is just too hard to mentally parse a bunch of numbers on lines and turn that into notes when playing at speed. (For non musicians, 'sight reading' means to read the notes and play fluently at the same time) Traditional sheet music has a steeper learning curve, however, I've found that reading this music becomes much more subconscious with practice and the bandwidth at which you can parse the notes is much higher. Also, it is much easier to notice patterns in sheet music - i.e. a major 7th chord in the key of the song is visually obvious no matter what the key.

criddell 10y ago
I wonder if you had been a guitar + tablature player your entire life and picked up piano a few years ago, if you would come to the same conclusion. I've tried learning guitar a few times and when I've asked accomplished players how they get by with tabs, it's been explained as tab music establishes a minimal framework that you play within. It's a lossy compression scheme (and traditional sheet music is less lossy). Would you agree with that?
- TylerE 10y ago
  Totally disagree. Tab is LESS lossy than traditional sheet music because it encodes the string as well as the pitch. A given note could be played in as many as 5 different places, and they will ALL sound different. An open A (5th string) will sound different than the same A played on the low E string, 5th fret. (This is completely unrelated to the woeful quality of most of the tab floating around on the net. You can write down a piss-poor transcription as sheet music too.)
  - criddell 10y ago
    > Tab is LESS lossy than traditional sheet music because it encodes the string as well as the pitch. But it doesn't encode the note type, right? All the tab books I've bought don't differentiate between whole notes, quarter notes, etc... So that seems pretty lossy. Look at any guitar fake book for an example. Plus, I never looked at tablature as a literal transcription. That's why I would describe it as a more of a framework. Like you say, a note can be played in a lot of different places. Once you internalize the fretboard logic, when you see an A in the tab, you play the one you think will sound right or is physically accessible.

fefesafaea 10y ago

There are a lot of books on the subject, but the short answer is that it's just the most common standard at this point. Yes there are some things about it that don't make sense, but for whatever reason it seems to be the most coherent way for musicians to communicate using a common language. It's popularity also has to do with what sounds pleasing to the ear (and brain) on a biological level. A number of people have come up with alternative scales and notations systems over the years, but none of them have really stuck for one reason or another. Nonetheless, they are pretty fun to read about. here's the whole history of notation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_notation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_notation Also, if you aren't familiar with John Cage, you should check him out. His music and writing deals with a lot of the stuff you just brought up, and it's also a really great jumping off point to find other interesting artists and musicians. Indeterminacy, a work he did with David Tudor is a great starting point https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lOMHUrgM_s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lOMHUrgM_s

almonj 10y ago

It is confusing at first, but once you memorize where all the notes are it is very good. Notation is based around the idea of key signatures, and once you have that down it becomes very intuitive and you can actually know what a piece of music sounds like just by looking at the notation. Western music has 12 distinct pitch classes, but typically the notes are used in scale groupings of usually 7 notes, with accidental "outside" notes being easily recognized by sharp and flat symbols. Doing it that way gives easy visual cues for musical "events" such as key changes, outside chords.. etc. There is a reason it has stuck around, it is a quite ingenious system.

nileshtrivedi 10y ago

There have been dozens of suggestions for alternative notation systems over centuries. Many documented here: http://musicnotation.org/ http://musicnotation.org/ I guess it's just inertia.

vitalus 10y ago

> I always wondered why musicians keep up with the conventional musical notation system, and haven't come up with something better (maybe a job for a HNer?). Is this supposed to be satire? Invoking Poe's Law on this one

ebbv 10y ago

I have mild dyslexia myself and I think any kind of notation is going to be a problem for us. The good news is you don't need musical notation to play music. You can play by ear. Don't let it stop you if you're really interested in music.

psyc 10y ago

I'm a classically trained pianist, and I basically agree with you. I read sheet music because that's what there is. As a young composer, I wrote in standard notation because I hadn't questioned it. As an old composer, I don't think there's anything great about it, and I have no need of it. I 'write' all my music on hardware or software synths. It's much easier. All I care about are the parameters. What note, when, how long, how loud, etc.

dahart 10y ago

> I always wondered why musicians keep up with the conventional musical notation system, and haven't come up with something better (maybe a job for a HNer?). You're not alone, this is a common reaction to music notation by engineers; a lot of people have wondered the same thing, even here on HN. For example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12528144 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12528144 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12085844 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12085844 I see some great responses, but I wanted to add that you have to keep in mind that tons of people have actually tried to make a better system, and nobody has succeeded. That should give you enough pause to ask why and consider the possibility that the system we have is really good in a way that you haven't recognized yet. I think the problem is that difficult to learn and bad are easily confused. It is difficult to learn. Also keep in mind that music notation has undergone many iterations, and it represents developments over hundreds and hundreds of years and covers every instrument under the sun - the breadth of what it has done throughout history and what can do might be hard to see.

BookmarkSaver 10y ago
>I see some great responses, but I wanted to add that you have to keep in mind that tons of people have actually tried to make a better system, and nobody has succeeded. That should give you enough pause to ask why and consider the possibility that the system we have is really good in a way that you haven't recognized yet. I think that this is the incorrect way of looking at it. I suspect it is less that the traditional notation system is highly evolved and effective, and more that getting a critical mass of musicians to transition/relearn/teach/translate into a newer system is incredibly difficult. For instance, while Imperial units aren't without some advantage, they are pretty generally inferior to the Metric system. But the US hasn't really switched because it requires a significant level of coordination and control that simply isn't easy to access. And getting musicians to learn and teach a brand new, objectively better system would be much much harder.
- mbrookes 10y ago
  Music notation is to music as qwerty is to keyboards?

deckard1 10y ago

Well, considering this article on Ableton never even uses conventional musical notation and many working musicians sit in front of their DAW all day, I think it's safe to say that the virtual piano roll has largely taken over the roll of classic notation. I don't think too many people making rock music, EDM, or hip-hop has really touched classic notation ever.

dizzystar 10y ago

Music notation does take time to learn how to read well at, but it's no different anything else that takes time to learn and master. Once you get past a cursory "eff this" reaction, you start to see how downright brilliant notation is. The vast majority of music focuses on 7 notes at a time. If you alter a key signature, you are playing 7 other (non-distinct) notes. Music notation encapsulates this concept very well. That's only one example, but telling musicians their notation sucks and needs to be fixed because it's hard for a non-musician is akin to a musician telling a programmer that Python and Linux needs to be fixed because it doesn't look like a violin.

kybernetikos 10y ago
> Once you get past a cursory "eff this" reaction, you start to see how downright brilliant notation is. In this it reminds me of vim.

Johnny_Brahms 10y ago

Oven the last 800 years, hundreds of different systems have been proposed to the system that has evolved to be the one in use today. Generally it can be said that some have been better in a specific use case (klavar notation was pretty big in the Netherlands among those who didn't know regular notation), but they fall apart pretty quickly when you try to write Liszt or Rachmaninov in it. I might be a bit rigid (I have played bassoon professionally for most of my adult life), but I can't really see how it can be made much better and still keep the same utility. While chords might be not optimal today, we can still express things like enharmonics easily (which, at least for me, is something that can make sight reading easier as it allows for the notes to stay "in key"). As with the spoken word, music has an advanced coding system. Both coding systems are flawed in their own way (as someone with a different mother tongue than english, I have a hard time spelling just about anything), but they have also stood the trial of time.

Double_Cast 10y ago

One advantage of the 5-Line Staff is use of both lines and spaces. It's compact, easy to print, and easy to stack notes vertically. Another advantage: each note of a diatonic scale is mapped injectively. Cf. representing each line (or space) as a whole-tone, which leads to hash-collisions (e.g. "is that a G or a G#?"). Each note on a line (or space) on which collisions occur would need an accidental. Which defeats the purpose of key signatures. A diatonic scale contains an odd number of unique notes. The fact that C lies on a line while C' lies on a space is an unfortunate artifact of representing a 7-note scale with alternating lines and spaces.

hellofunk 10y ago

I think that you are approaching the notation from a very left brained kind of logical point of view. Once you learn to recognize the patterns in musical notation, none of these concerns actually matter. Musicians just see the pattern and play it, and then focus on the stuff that is really difficult, which is the musicality.

Kiro 10y ago

DAWs don't use the classical notation system, neither does this tutorial, so I don't understand the context of your comment.

teilo 10y ago
Well, technically some DAWs have a notation view (Logic and Sonar, for example), but it's pretty much useless.

a_lieb 10y ago

I'm a programmer/musician and I can read on guitar and piano. I'm somewhere on the middle on this debate. I really dislike conventional notation but I also agree that the alternatives have some big downsides as well. My biggest objection to conventional notation is that it gives a profoundly misleading picture of how music and harmony really work. It defines one reference key (C Major/A Minor) with a certain pattern of steps and gaps, starting on a certain note. Then for all of the other keys you add more and more sharps or flats until you get into ridiculous keys where all 7 notes are modified. The truth is that there's just one evenly spaced set of 12 tones, and all it means to be "in a key" is that you've picked a certain note out of the 12 to start the pattern on. There's nothing special about C. We could have chosen the key we call F# as the reference key and named it C, and everything would work the same. It's hard to overstate the damage from this. Lots of musicians I know—serious players, people who took music in college—still think of "complicated keys" and "easy keys" and are only vaguely aware that the keys are actually all the same and they're just being tormented by the notation and terminology. I'm teaching guitar to a friend who was first trombone in high school and it blows her mind that she can play the same scales starting anywhere up and down the fretboard and it sounds the same. It all comes from the design of the keyboard, where the notes of C major are evenly spaced (white keys) and the sharps/flats are stuck in between. There's also the fact that in the past the 12 notes weren't evenly spaced, so the different keys really did all sound different back then. Conventional notation does have one big advantage, though: every line or space represents one note in the scale. This is more how musicians think: you don't care that much about the notes outside your key, and having the other ones "tucked away" in between makes it easy to see what's going on. That's why it's so quick to read once you know it. Out of the hundreds of alternative notations, I haven't seen one that's both key-neutral and also makes it easy to see things in terms of scale degrees. (One idea I've had is a 12-tone staff with Sacred Harp-style shaped note heads to show you what scale degree you're playing. Not sure if that's ever been tried.)

elihu 10y ago
I agree with your main point -- standard notation is basically just piano tablature and it tends to confuse as much as it enlightens about how music works. However, I disagree about the "there's just one evenly spaced set of 12 tones" bit. This is a simplifying assumption of standard notation that makes it hard to express the idea of notes that are outside of the well-known 12. Even in the key of C major, this is a problem in just intonation. Say you want to play a G major chord, so it's made up of G, B, and D (3/2, 15/8, and 9/8). Later in the song you want to play a D minor, so you play D, F, and A (9/8, 4/3, and 5/3). That doesn't sound right, though. It turns out that the D you want is actually 10/9, which is just a bit flatter than 9/8. In standard notation, you can't distinguish. It's possible to get around this by adding non-standard modifiers to notes aside from the usual ones (sharp/flat/natural), but unmodified standard notation misleads people into thinking that those two notes are the same. Which is another example of your main point, that "standard notation gives a profoundly misleading picture of how music and harmony really work".

ninjakeyboard 10y ago

piano rolls are used instead in production. (source: I make lots of music - http://www.soundcloud.com/decklyn http://www.soundcloud.com/decklyn)

boomlinde 10y ago

Since music notation is a form of communication, wide adoption is a huge factor in what is considered better. We could come up with more precise and effective languages than the ones we naturally speak, as well, but the good-enoughness of the ones we already have and the fact that others around us are very likely familiar with them is more important. Utility trumps quality, and worse is better. That said, if all you want is a different notation system for you to use personally or with small groups of other proponents, there are plenty to choose from. ABC and MML variants use letters for notes and numbers for note lengths, for example. Probably not optimal for sight reading, but maybe better than staff notation when writing or transcribing music. There's also trackers and piano rolls. Neither is very good for quick conprehension, but maybe lay things out in a way that makes more intuitive sense.

avodonosov 10y ago

Roman numerals may seem simpler than arabic, but turns out arabic are more convenient for complex operations like multiplication.

MandieD 10y ago

I wonder how many of us "skilled musical technicians" there are - people who can read music really well, produce those notes on our instruments predictably enough to play in a group, but just aren't that "musical" - we're boring to listen to on our own and have trouble singing. I'm a competent flute player, but it's a good thing I was just as interested in computers as a teen.

pishpash 10y ago

It's clear that current music software is poor for conveying information when compared to editors for many other tasks. It is easy to blame musical notation for that, but in fact in most music software there are several equivalent views (tracks, piano roll, notation), and you'll find that notation is the _most_ efficient of those. Consider this: In this system, your most complex Classical scores for an entire orchestra are written, and present day trained composers continue to work efficiently in it. That tells you about its expressive power. It is in fact not stupid, but very well tuned to a lot of music theory. Other than complex timbre manipulation (and even that), you can do probably everything you want to accomplish with just software that does nothing but notation. Instead, what most music software lacks is in the organization department. The organization of non-linear ideas, their programmatic (as in music) occurrence, the automation of repetitive tasks, and the completion of obvious intent. Tracks and loops are probably not the right view of musical structure, at least far from a _complete_ view. There needs to be a better bridge between musical phrases and ideas at the local level (for which musical notation is perfectly suited) and the organizational structure of a complex piece at the macro level (for which tools are very lacking). There also needs to be a better bridge between some conception of events (for which musical notation is slightly ill suited, being restricted to notes) and the microscopic world of timbres, effects, and transformations. Until music software makers recognize that what they should be helping with is neither engraving, nor mixing console simulation, but a non-linear creative task, music software will continue to suck.

amai 10y ago

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_notation#Other_systems_and_practices https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_notation#Other_systems...

tylercubell 10y ago

Speaking as a classical pianist, I think the conventional musical notation system is actually pretty good. My only issue is having to memorize Italian, French, and German phrases to be able to read music properly. IMHO, music notation should be localized.

JusticeJuice 10y ago

They actually disucss that in this course. They talk about pelog scales and 19 note divisions of octaves (not 12) https://learningmusic.ableton.com/advanced-topics/pelog.html https://learningmusic.ableton.com/advanced-topics/pelog.html

globuous 10y ago

> I always wondered why musicians keep up with the conventional musical notation system, and haven't come up with something better (maybe a job for a HNer?). Me too. But you think about it, all you really is a graphical representation that describes the pitch of sounds relative to each other as well as their duration relative to the beat. And the conventional notation is not bad at it ! The current system is essentially: a dot on a coordinate system representing the pitch, duration, and position of the sound in a sequence of sounds. - a horizontal position axis: you draw an invisible x-axis representing the position of the note in its ordered sequence. It gives no indication on its duration. - a vertical pitch axis defined by western notes (do, re, mi, etc): You draw your pitch lines, y-axis with y=Do, y=Re, y=Mi etc. - a duration axis (let's say it points towards you): We can't draw it for a 2d representation of music, so we'll project this coordinate on the time-pitch plane which is your staff. We'll decorate the dot representing the note w.r.t. to it's duration coordinate: say it's duration is half a beat, the the dot is a black filled circle; if it's a full beat then it's a white circle; it's its a 4th of a beat the it'll be a black filled circle with a hook. Etc etc etc. And then you start making all the addition of music notation: blank for 1/2 beats, vibrato, tempo, etc Now there is this choice not representing note position and duration on a single axis. That may very well be so it's easier to standardise and read probably. You could also choose to represent the duration coordinate with colour, would that make it easier ? :) Maybe the problem doesn't come from the notation, but the system in itself. The half step between B and C, the 12 notes but really it's more, etc. That's why solfeggio is hard ! I think some greeks considered the study of harmony to be at least as intellectual as that of counting ! I wonder if there's an algebra for harmonie. An H-Algebra why not ? But really, it's not the only notation: guitar tabs, guitar chord representation, etc

acjohnson55 10y ago

I once thought the same thing, but after months of studying our music system and our way of notating it, I came to understand why it's so difficult to improve upon staff notation. First of all, Western music has complex structure both horizontally and vertically. This makes it rather difficult to encode and visualize, right at the outset. You need some sort of matrix visualization, like a staff or piano roll, to capture all of the nuance. What makes the staff so useful is that it also captures the tonal aspects of music in compact way -- those that relate to the key the music is written in. Every triad in the same inversion looks the same in every key. A triad is three consecutive lines or spaces. And then deviations from the standard triad for that tonal function are marked with accidentals. This turns out to be extremely useful for performers, because you learn to play an instrument by learning to play in all the keys, rather than learning what the 12 notes are and playing note by note. I realized this when taking piano class and doing exercises where we'd transpose to another key while sightreading in the original key. There are other notation systems that have been as successful as the staff, but they tend to be specific to particular instruments or styles. For example, most guitarists find tablature much easier to play than standard notation, especially if the tablature is augmented with note durations and rests. Also, although I've become a true believer when it comes to the staff, I have less rationale for why the traditional clef system has stuck around. It seems like something that is more regular as you go up and down the scale would be more helpful. There are systems that use things like note shapes or colors to help mark the note name. I guess we just haven't found a standard.

pklausler 10y ago

Tempered tuning indeed divides the octave into 12 half-steps, but a huge amount of music uses only 7 or fewer of them for long stretches (or entire pieces) with a few exceptions. So think of the lines & spaces as being a compressed representation that doesn't waste vertical space for the tones that a piece isn't going to use. Me, I love standard notation. Common chord voicings and interval patterns stand out as easily recognizable patterns on the page.