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What do you think about the piano roll, which is extremely approachable and used extensively by modern producers (of popular songs) with zero to little schoolin

by 21 9y ago

What do you think about the piano roll, which is extremely approachable and used extensively by modern producers (of popular songs) with zero to little schooling in the area. I think is the WYSIWYG of music notation (and just as DOC vs Latex, less powerful and less expressive) https://i.ytimg.com/vi/F5vcDzzqT7c/maxresdefault.jpg https://i.ytimg.com/vi/F5vcDzzqT7c/maxresdefault.jpg

necubi 9y ago
It has a different purpose. Traditional music notation is meant to be read by humans, often very quickly (sight-reading at performance tempo might mean having less than 100ms to read each note). It also has to contain all relevant information in a single place (expression, technique, dynamics, etc).
klodolph 9y ago
I have half a mind to write a FAQ for this… quick summary is that piano roll is based on chromatic scale, but most music uses diatonic scale, and doesn't notate phrasing well. There are some other factors but there are good reasons why composers overwhelmingly use traditional notation.
acjohnson55 9y ago
As others have mentioned, it's kind of like drawing pixel by pixel. The key signature does a lot of leg work in allowing staff notation to easily depict the idioms of tonal music.
jcranmer 9y ago
Since I'm not terribly great at the technicals of playing a piano, I thought I would do really well with a piano roll, but in practice, I find it much easier to read sheet music. Some reasons why: 1. Piano rolls spend a lot of visual real estate on functionally unimportant stuff. You need to see the full 7-octave range even if you need to play only 3-4 octaves at any given point of time. By contrast, traditional scores let you use clef changes or 8va/8vb notation to do access different ranges, allowing the full range to be compressed in around 2 inches or so of space. 2. Even worse than pitch range is the difference in the time dimension: when you have a piece that varies between long, sustained notes and bursts of short melodies, a traditional score can give you the pitch contour of the first part and the sufficient detail of the second part. A piano roll means that you either have to stretch the first bit out so long you can't see the overall contour or you have to make the second part so small as to be virtually unreadable (or, as I've found on some pieces, both!). Alternatively, you might opt for a non-uniform mapping on the time dimension, but that is probably going to screw players up big time. 3. Piano rolls (at least every one that I've seen) are unable to reflect useful ancillary information, such as dynamics, very effectively. Admittedly, traditional scores tend to suck at reflecting the true dynamics very well, but they are more than adequate for getting people to reproduce them in a rather recognizable way. It's kind of like written text and language--our written languages, even IPA, can't faithfully reproduce spectograms of human speech, but there's sufficient information to reproduce sounds that we can understand as pretty accurate speech. 4. It definitely seems a lot harder on a piano roll to recognize patterns that ease the actual playing of the tune. For example, seeing that this section is an earlier section at a different tempo, different key, different pitch, etc.
- evincarofautumn 9y ago
  Your comparison to IPA is interesting—it’s as if the piano roll is a raw “phonetic” transcription, while traditional notation is more like a structural “phonemic” representation that conveys the sounds as they’re functionally understood. The former treats all information as equally important, missing high-level structure and using space poorly; the latter omits some information and encodes other information redundantly or in a compressed format to convey what’s most important to the reader.
bane 9y ago
Piano roll style notation systems can be useful, but they're very hard to use for human playback for basically all the reasons jcranmer states. They're originally intended for automatic playback in mechanical systems, and they work well for that, but for humans they waste lots of space on things that aren't terribly useful. They're about 1 level of sophistication above the "Square Notation" on the chart. They've become very popular on digital systems were lots of the expressiveness of the notes doesn't really need to be encoded and the playback is automated. Another popular and very similar system are tracker interfaces [1] which are at a slightly higher level of sophistication than many of the other examples given, but has a similar purpose to piano rolls in terms of automated playback. However, due to robust "effects" columns, can be very expressive in terms of encoding [2]. In this example, all the various pitch bends, volume, vibrato and so on are specifically encoded next to the notes. But it's also almost entirely impossible to read for human playback. Piano roll systems usually offload this kind of encoding to secondary displays and input systems and this further disassociates lots of the information from the note information. [3] Compare to a full score [4] which has - a couple dozen different voices - phrase encoding (important for performance) - timing (4/4 4 beats per musical unit with quarter notes being the unit of tempo) - rests where the instrument isn't being played - note length, compactly encoded without using visual length to encode, important for human playback (it allows the player to know instantaneously how long a note should last without having to look ahead, which then frees them up to read ahead of where they're playing to "load" the next note into memory) - chords, without using lots of white space - absolute and relative volume: mf, f, ff, etc. and crescendo/descrescendo bars - tempo 144 - various techniques (glissando, spiccato, etc.) - exceptions (triplets, grace notes) - instrument specific encodings (see the percussion section here) - playback notes "hard yarn mallets" - key (useful for finger placement for playback) - huge pitch ranges using cleffs, this encoding scheme shows tuba up to piccolo and harp using the same scheme - large scale patterns are also frequently observable so that you can be informed about how something might be played long before you have to actually play it One of the beauties is that this scheme is incredibly flexible, the same basic system can encode performance information for everything from a violin to a metal saw submerged in water (I've seen it before). It can be used to encode one voice, two voices, or an entire orchestra, chords, accompaniment, melody, singing, and so on. And if you learn it for one instrument, you can basically "read" the music for any other instrument even if you don't know how to play it and you can look back literally hundreds of years and still basically know how to play something [5] For people who aren't skilled musicians, many musicians are actually reading ahead and "loading note data into memory" a few moments before they actually have to play it. Very skilled musicians can "sight read" even complex music literally the first time they see it without ever practicing it. [6] Even better, most 1st year music students can "read" the majority of any music put in front of them. Music notation of this complexity is actually an incredible technological achievement that seems to have only really been accomplished once in all history. 1 - http://www.charliemccarron.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/MilkyTracker-Music-Tracker-How-To.png http://www.charliemccarron.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2014/09... 2 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3xHPIuX3s4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3xHPIuX3s4 3 - https://i.ytimg.com/vi/bTki0n9c3QA/maxresdefault.jpg https://i.ytimg.com/vi/bTki0n9c3QA/maxresdefault.jpg 4 - https://i.imgur.com/XqUhdiY.jpg https://i.imgur.com/XqUhdiY.jpg 5 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9IkpUYlOx8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9IkpUYlOx8 6 - http://oi53.tinypic.com/21cy2ax.jpg http://oi53.tinypic.com/21cy2ax.jpg

by 21 9y ago

necubi 9y ago

It has a different purpose. Traditional music notation is meant to be read by humans, often very quickly (sight-reading at performance tempo might mean having less than 100ms to read each note). It also has to contain all relevant information in a single place (expression, technique, dynamics, etc).

klodolph 9y ago

I have half a mind to write a FAQ for this… quick summary is that piano roll is based on chromatic scale, but most music uses diatonic scale, and doesn't notate phrasing well. There are some other factors but there are good reasons why composers overwhelmingly use traditional notation.

acjohnson55 9y ago

As others have mentioned, it's kind of like drawing pixel by pixel. The key signature does a lot of leg work in allowing staff notation to easily depict the idioms of tonal music.

jcranmer 9y ago

Since I'm not terribly great at the technicals of playing a piano, I thought I would do really well with a piano roll, but in practice, I find it much easier to read sheet music. Some reasons why: 1. Piano rolls spend a lot of visual real estate on functionally unimportant stuff. You need to see the full 7-octave range even if you need to play only 3-4 octaves at any given point of time. By contrast, traditional scores let you use clef changes or 8va/8vb notation to do access different ranges, allowing the full range to be compressed in around 2 inches or so of space. 2. Even worse than pitch range is the difference in the time dimension: when you have a piece that varies between long, sustained notes and bursts of short melodies, a traditional score can give you the pitch contour of the first part and the sufficient detail of the second part. A piano roll means that you either have to stretch the first bit out so long you can't see the overall contour or you have to make the second part so small as to be virtually unreadable (or, as I've found on some pieces, both!). Alternatively, you might opt for a non-uniform mapping on the time dimension, but that is probably going to screw players up big time. 3. Piano rolls (at least every one that I've seen) are unable to reflect useful ancillary information, such as dynamics, very effectively. Admittedly, traditional scores tend to suck at reflecting the true dynamics very well, but they are more than adequate for getting people to reproduce them in a rather recognizable way. It's kind of like written text and language--our written languages, even IPA, can't faithfully reproduce spectograms of human speech, but there's sufficient information to reproduce sounds that we can understand as pretty accurate speech. 4. It definitely seems a lot harder on a piano roll to recognize patterns that ease the actual playing of the tune. For example, seeing that this section is an earlier section at a different tempo, different key, different pitch, etc.

evincarofautumn 9y ago
Your comparison to IPA is interesting—it’s as if the piano roll is a raw “phonetic” transcription, while traditional notation is more like a structural “phonemic” representation that conveys the sounds as they’re functionally understood. The former treats all information as equally important, missing high-level structure and using space poorly; the latter omits some information and encodes other information redundantly or in a compressed format to convey what’s most important to the reader.

bane 9y ago

Piano roll style notation systems can be useful, but they're very hard to use for human playback for basically all the reasons jcranmer states. They're originally intended for automatic playback in mechanical systems, and they work well for that, but for humans they waste lots of space on things that aren't terribly useful. They're about 1 level of sophistication above the "Square Notation" on the chart. They've become very popular on digital systems were lots of the expressiveness of the notes doesn't really need to be encoded and the playback is automated. Another popular and very similar system are tracker interfaces [1] which are at a slightly higher level of sophistication than many of the other examples given, but has a similar purpose to piano rolls in terms of automated playback. However, due to robust "effects" columns, can be very expressive in terms of encoding [2]. In this example, all the various pitch bends, volume, vibrato and so on are specifically encoded next to the notes. But it's also almost entirely impossible to read for human playback. Piano roll systems usually offload this kind of encoding to secondary displays and input systems and this further disassociates lots of the information from the note information. [3] Compare to a full score [4] which has - a couple dozen different voices - phrase encoding (important for performance) - timing (4/4 4 beats per musical unit with quarter notes being the unit of tempo) - rests where the instrument isn't being played - note length, compactly encoded without using visual length to encode, important for human playback (it allows the player to know instantaneously how long a note should last without having to look ahead, which then frees them up to read ahead of where they're playing to "load" the next note into memory) - chords, without using lots of white space - absolute and relative volume: mf, f, ff, etc. and crescendo/descrescendo bars - tempo 144 - various techniques (glissando, spiccato, etc.) - exceptions (triplets, grace notes) - instrument specific encodings (see the percussion section here) - playback notes "hard yarn mallets" - key (useful for finger placement for playback) - huge pitch ranges using cleffs, this encoding scheme shows tuba up to piccolo and harp using the same scheme - large scale patterns are also frequently observable so that you can be informed about how something might be played long before you have to actually play it One of the beauties is that this scheme is incredibly flexible, the same basic system can encode performance information for everything from a violin to a metal saw submerged in water (I've seen it before). It can be used to encode one voice, two voices, or an entire orchestra, chords, accompaniment, melody, singing, and so on. And if you learn it for one instrument, you can basically "read" the music for any other instrument even if you don't know how to play it and you can look back literally hundreds of years and still basically know how to play something [5] For people who aren't skilled musicians, many musicians are actually reading ahead and "loading note data into memory" a few moments before they actually have to play it. Very skilled musicians can "sight read" even complex music literally the first time they see it without ever practicing it. [6] Even better, most 1st year music students can "read" the majority of any music put in front of them. Music notation of this complexity is actually an incredible technological achievement that seems to have only really been accomplished once in all history. 1 - http://www.charliemccarron.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/MilkyTracker-Music-Tracker-How-To.png http://www.charliemccarron.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2014/09... 2 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3xHPIuX3s4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3xHPIuX3s4 3 - https://i.ytimg.com/vi/bTki0n9c3QA/maxresdefault.jpg https://i.ytimg.com/vi/bTki0n9c3QA/maxresdefault.jpg 4 - https://i.imgur.com/XqUhdiY.jpg https://i.imgur.com/XqUhdiY.jpg 5 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9IkpUYlOx8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9IkpUYlOx8 6 - http://oi53.tinypic.com/21cy2ax.jpg http://oi53.tinypic.com/21cy2ax.jpg