5 ms·

Experimental music notation resources (2015)

103 points by panic 8y ago

jcelerier 8y ago
If anyone is interested by this topic, feel free to check on the software I'm working on : a visual notation for art & multimedia installations which embeds traditional programming constructs (conditions, loops) but at the temporal level. The software is called Ossia Score (https://ossia.io https://ossia.io).
- enqk 8y ago
  Is this in anyway based on the Tiled Media papers? (Tuiles Musicales)
  - jcelerier 8y ago
    not really, but I did my thesis in the same lab than one of the authors (David Janin (ping Simon si tu passes par là!)) so there has been a lot of discussions about the various models for representing musical time :p
ttul 8y ago
Snowforms by R Murray Schafer: https://goo.gl/images/1FHHXo https://goo.gl/images/1FHHXo I performed this in France with my treble choir in 1990. Schafer sat in the audience looking grumpy. It’s a beautiful piece, and Schafer is odd.
mar77i 8y ago
I'm sorry if my layman's perspective is off here, but notation that impedes the musician's ability to actually perform a piece, and be it only for visual pleasure, seems like not a very useful idea to me. It kind of reminds me of this: https://imgur.com/gallery/XOT47 https://imgur.com/gallery/XOT47
- TotempaaltJ 8y ago
  Not everything in art has to be useful
- Bud 8y ago
  But, synaesthesia.
- Q6T46nT668w6i3m 8y ago
  A few of these are really beautiful! I really love the dice example.
adrianh 8y ago
Requisite link to my product Soundslice: https://www.soundslice.com/ https://www.soundslice.com/ We make web-based interactive music notation. Nothing “experimental” as in the original link, but it may be interesting to the HN crowd as a boundary-pushing web app.
ThinkingGuy 8y ago
Some alternative/experimental music notation systems look very impressive, and even beautiful, on paper, but with some of them I wonder if that's due to the system itself, or the complexity of particular piece being rendered. In the coding world, we have "Hello World" and Fizzbuzz. It would be nice if alternative music notation systems had something similar: A simple, familiar melody (candidates that come to mind are "Happy Birthday to You," and "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star") that, by rendering it in the new notation system, demonstrated the fundamental features of that system, and could be easily understood by someone knowledgeable in the traditional system.
- psychometry 8y ago
  It would be nice if people on HN didn't try to turn everything into a coding analogy.
  - wolfram74 8y ago
    But it's fairly fitting since musical notation is /supposed/ to be instructions for making a machine behave in a certain way. It's an early example of write-once-run-everywhere since the sheet music is relatively unchanged from instrument to instrument.
    - xxxdarrenxxx 8y ago
      When you input sheet music in a synth/computer it sounds "inhuman". People tend to blame the sound, which has it's merits, but the problem is we humans have an x factor. This factor is that we naturally add a million things when reading from sheet. Slight drag to create loose rhythm, microvariants on each note's volume (dynamics) timbre and everyone has a slightly different touch to the release (ASDR). Sheet might notate vibrato, but even this is different for each person. Musical notation is hardly an absolute instruction, but more a guide. We interprete it on the base that (formal) music training/experience/knowledge will "fill in the gaps" (ie. Palm mutes in metal or "swing" in jazz), but placing any sheet in a midi device shows how much magic happens between reading and moving the fingers. This is significant, because a math equation does not change between machines or men and thus these can be considered true instructions.
edjroot 8y ago
Slightly related, but I've always wondered if there are similar (preferably successful) explorations in maths. "Mainstream" notations are clearly optimized for handwriting, but there's just so much room with current tech for optimizing for e.g. visual intuitiveness. And let's not even talk about all the historical burden that's made these notations the convoluted mess they are today. (Uncreative, probably very bad) examples: Replace brackets with boxes, use colors (think syntax highlighting), icons, or even basic text-like formatting. And that's still being very conservative in relation to what could be done, as exemplified by the OP. Any pointers/ideas?
- eru 8y ago
  Mathematicians play around with new notation all the time. But yes, mostly hand-written. The standard notation is mostly for communicating with other people mediated via papers. But we don't actually use that many brackets in math---that's more of a programming thing. (Because programmers can't really use visual structure all that much, and mostly rely on linearization of their syntax trees. Languages with significant whitespace like Haskell (and to a lesser extent Python) see less parens and braces.)
- filleokus 8y ago
  I have always wondered how professional mathematicians work day to day. It depends on their field of course, but I guess most still use pen and paper (or a digital version, i.e iPad Pro + Apple Pencil / Wacom). I have at least never seen any tools for "explorative" manipulation of symbolic expressions. TeX etc works great for final type setting, but when going from mind to _something_ I guess that something is still paper, or an equivalent. Would be really interesting to see the equivalent of an IDE / good text editor for math, perhaps with pen input for speed.
  - xelxebar 8y ago
    I'm a Ph.D. student in a pure math field, and just coming from personal experience, the overall relationship with TeX is a pretty strained one. The overwhelming majority of working out is done by hand on paper or a chalk board. That said, as an experiment, I did about half of my Master's thesis work in TeX. Without quick feedback on the rendered formulae, I had a much harder time reasoning through things, so having a comfortable text editing environment seems crucial. That said, I wouldn't recommend using TeX as a scratchpad. It just doesn't map well to the sets of tools that we tend to use: mini diagrams, arrows between parts of the page, strikeout and circling text, etc. What might work is something like e-paper that renders a handwritten document into text. Ideally, we could turn letters into Unicode and diagrams into vector graphics, providing tools to edit and embellish the rendered versions if desired. It's extremely common to edit equations and diagrams on the fly, so I would probably feel friction with anything other that doesn't seem to just magically "prettify" whatever I handwrite at it. Seems like a really tall order though.
emptybits 8y ago
If you find yourself inspired by wild notations I recommend this coffee table book: "Notations 21" by Theresa Sauer.

103 points by panic 8y ago

If anyone is interested by this topic, feel free to check on the software I'm working on : a visual notation for art & multimedia installations which embeds traditional programming constructs (conditions, loops) but at the temporal level. The software is called Ossia Score (https://ossia.io https://ossia.io).

enqk 8y ago
Is this in anyway based on the Tiled Media papers? (Tuiles Musicales)
- jcelerier 8y ago
  not really, but I did my thesis in the same lab than one of the authors (David Janin (ping Simon si tu passes par là!)) so there has been a lot of discussions about the various models for representing musical time :p

ttul 8y ago

Snowforms by R Murray Schafer: https://goo.gl/images/1FHHXo https://goo.gl/images/1FHHXo I performed this in France with my treble choir in 1990. Schafer sat in the audience looking grumpy. It’s a beautiful piece, and Schafer is odd.

mar77i 8y ago

I'm sorry if my layman's perspective is off here, but notation that impedes the musician's ability to actually perform a piece, and be it only for visual pleasure, seems like not a very useful idea to me. It kind of reminds me of this: https://imgur.com/gallery/XOT47 https://imgur.com/gallery/XOT47

TotempaaltJ 8y ago
Not everything in art has to be useful
Bud 8y ago
But, synaesthesia.
Q6T46nT668w6i3m 8y ago
A few of these are really beautiful! I really love the dice example.

adrianh 8y ago

Requisite link to my product Soundslice: https://www.soundslice.com/ https://www.soundslice.com/ We make web-based interactive music notation. Nothing “experimental” as in the original link, but it may be interesting to the HN crowd as a boundary-pushing web app.

ThinkingGuy 8y ago

Some alternative/experimental music notation systems look very impressive, and even beautiful, on paper, but with some of them I wonder if that's due to the system itself, or the complexity of particular piece being rendered. In the coding world, we have "Hello World" and Fizzbuzz. It would be nice if alternative music notation systems had something similar: A simple, familiar melody (candidates that come to mind are "Happy Birthday to You," and "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star") that, by rendering it in the new notation system, demonstrated the fundamental features of that system, and could be easily understood by someone knowledgeable in the traditional system.

psychometry 8y ago
It would be nice if people on HN didn't try to turn everything into a coding analogy.
- wolfram74 8y ago
  But it's fairly fitting since musical notation is /supposed/ to be instructions for making a machine behave in a certain way. It's an early example of write-once-run-everywhere since the sheet music is relatively unchanged from instrument to instrument.
  - xxxdarrenxxx 8y ago
    When you input sheet music in a synth/computer it sounds "inhuman". People tend to blame the sound, which has it's merits, but the problem is we humans have an x factor. This factor is that we naturally add a million things when reading from sheet. Slight drag to create loose rhythm, microvariants on each note's volume (dynamics) timbre and everyone has a slightly different touch to the release (ASDR). Sheet might notate vibrato, but even this is different for each person. Musical notation is hardly an absolute instruction, but more a guide. We interprete it on the base that (formal) music training/experience/knowledge will "fill in the gaps" (ie. Palm mutes in metal or "swing" in jazz), but placing any sheet in a midi device shows how much magic happens between reading and moving the fingers. This is significant, because a math equation does not change between machines or men and thus these can be considered true instructions.

edjroot 8y ago

Slightly related, but I've always wondered if there are similar (preferably successful) explorations in maths. "Mainstream" notations are clearly optimized for handwriting, but there's just so much room with current tech for optimizing for e.g. visual intuitiveness. And let's not even talk about all the historical burden that's made these notations the convoluted mess they are today. (Uncreative, probably very bad) examples: Replace brackets with boxes, use colors (think syntax highlighting), icons, or even basic text-like formatting. And that's still being very conservative in relation to what could be done, as exemplified by the OP. Any pointers/ideas?

eru 8y ago
Mathematicians play around with new notation all the time. But yes, mostly hand-written. The standard notation is mostly for communicating with other people mediated via papers. But we don't actually use that many brackets in math---that's more of a programming thing. (Because programmers can't really use visual structure all that much, and mostly rely on linearization of their syntax trees. Languages with significant whitespace like Haskell (and to a lesser extent Python) see less parens and braces.)
filleokus 8y ago
I have always wondered how professional mathematicians work day to day. It depends on their field of course, but I guess most still use pen and paper (or a digital version, i.e iPad Pro + Apple Pencil / Wacom). I have at least never seen any tools for "explorative" manipulation of symbolic expressions. TeX etc works great for final type setting, but when going from mind to _something_ I guess that something is still paper, or an equivalent. Would be really interesting to see the equivalent of an IDE / good text editor for math, perhaps with pen input for speed.
- xelxebar 8y ago
  I'm a Ph.D. student in a pure math field, and just coming from personal experience, the overall relationship with TeX is a pretty strained one. The overwhelming majority of working out is done by hand on paper or a chalk board. That said, as an experiment, I did about half of my Master's thesis work in TeX. Without quick feedback on the rendered formulae, I had a much harder time reasoning through things, so having a comfortable text editing environment seems crucial. That said, I wouldn't recommend using TeX as a scratchpad. It just doesn't map well to the sets of tools that we tend to use: mini diagrams, arrows between parts of the page, strikeout and circling text, etc. What might work is something like e-paper that renders a handwritten document into text. Ideally, we could turn letters into Unicode and diagrams into vector graphics, providing tools to edit and embellish the rendered versions if desired. It's extremely common to edit equations and diagrams on the fly, so I would probably feel friction with anything other that doesn't seem to just magically "prettify" whatever I handwrite at it. Seems like a really tall order though.

emptybits 8y ago

If you find yourself inspired by wild notations I recommend this coffee table book: "Notations 21" by Theresa Sauer.