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Show HN: Simplified music notation

51 points by crehn 8y ago

samjanis 8y ago
Nice. It's like guitar tabs, but for piano. Keep working on it!
prohor 8y ago
I have the same feeling, that the note notation is way too complex. I would love to see something like this getting traction.
relyks 8y ago
I think Hummingbird notation is a better alternative: http://www.hummingbirdnotation.com/ http://www.hummingbirdnotation.com/
- altharaz 8y ago
  I didn’t know about Hummingbird. This is really cool. I think I prefer Hummingbird’s approach to OP’s because it makes deciphering the notes way easier with its symbol mnemonic, and I think deciphering the notes is the hardest part.
- kalefranz 8y ago
  Granted I’ve been reading the traditional style since second grade, I feel like learning this Hummingbird style would be an order of magnitude harder than learning another programming language. Maybe I’m just getting old and the plasticity is hardening.
- forgotpwd16 8y ago
  This looks like having Gallifreyan symbols. Cool.
- werbel 8y ago
  I discovered Hummingbird when looking for alternative music notation for my tattoo (a phrase from my piano song). After reading the "docs" it was easy to read the notation but for some I struggled with transcribing it. Maybe it'd be easy to first write classical notation and then change it to hummingbird. Also just noticed that even in the toggle example on the home page "natural" symbol is missing (flat/sharp reset).
  - rhaps0dy 8y ago
    >Also just noticed that even in the toggle example on the home page "natural" symbol is missing (flat/sharp reset). Yes. But, also from the toggle example, you can notice that each note that is sharp or flat (even if that is part of the key) is individually indicated. Thus, there is no need to keep track of the "state" of sharpness or flatness. I think this is kind of cool but I would need some time to learn it. Not that I've found traditional notation ever constraining.
    - werbel 8y ago
      You're completely right, sir.
- meesterdude 8y ago
  wow, hummingbird is awesome! it really is easier to read and way more intuitive. I'll have to look more deeply into it. picking up sight reading, I've also felt like there could be a better way. But at the same time, i was never sure what would be worth changing because everything mattered.
noname120 8y ago
I suggest you to update your readme to include a side-by-side comparison of the traditional notation system with the one that you are proposing on a short tablature.
- cyclecycle 8y ago
  I think its clear enough as is, and that the readme benefits from its current simplicity. Though for interest's sake this wouldn't hurt.
ReverseCold 8y ago
> Rests aren't explicitly displayed. Hmm.. Would you just leave a space there instead of a rest? That actually seems harder than the current system.
pbhjpbhj 8y ago
Natural sharp and flat: why do the notes all lie to the right: why not flat to the left, natural in the middle and sharp to the right (the shape of the note head doesn't matter much then but I'd go with < o and >). If you're going to use height to indicate note duration then why not put a bold crossing line to make it more clear. 16th and 32nd length notes are going to get a bit unwieldy in the OP's scheme. I'm not sure length of tail is preferable to having flags on the stem and suspect it's worse.
mpalmer 8y ago
I like most of this - but. Leaving out rest symbols and encoding note duration by stem length are two choices I feel would make sight reading harder, not easier. +1 to side-by-side samples
jlg23 8y ago
> Note length, tempo, velocity, progression and other stuff are minor worries in comparison. Those things can be felt, without learning. Can it? How do you learn a piece for which you only have a sheet? I would go even further and say that the most I learned about music was from handwritten notes on musicians or conductors[1] sheets. Yes, I can figure out a lot myself just because of my background knowledge but give me something of an obscure era/modernist fashion and I am completely lost. Furthermore, I played the flute, so tempo, for example, dictates how to start a note (lacking the English term here) because there is a huge difference of what I can do to a single note when played larghissimo in contrast to prestissimo. And especially with lots of modern music, composers resort to their own, additional notation because classical notation is not enough to express the music on paper.
- hashkb 8y ago
  I was going to attack the same line you quoted. That word you are looking for is "articulation" and of course it's part of traditional notation as is everything else, which is the point you are making. Every second spent on this type of project should be spent practicing. Music notation is hard because theory is complicated and performance is nuanced. People won't admit it... but we're all looking for shortcuts. Learn music the hard way. Or just be an amateur, but don't try to reinvent the kick-ass wheel we've been using for millennia.
  - thebricksta 8y ago
    But is it a kick ass wheel? Imagine if the only programming language available was C and all you wanted to be was an amateur script kiddie. It is nice to have beginner friendly languages we can start people off in, allow them to build real solutions in, but then slowly shift them out of into more nuanced code once they are ready. Tab solves part of that problem for entry level guitarists, but there is a bit of a void in the staff. I'm not saying that I don't like the staff - as someone who is literate, I agree, it works. I'm just saying that a simpler notation with a smoother learning curve might serve as an easier entry point for beginners who can make the jump to the full-on staff when they are ready. (I'm not saying I like OP's project either, I think that's missed the mark too.)
clockface 8y ago
I think a better approach would be to keep all the traditional musical symbols and rests, but get rid of all accidentals. As long as you're changing the staff, why not use a chromatic staff? http://musicnotation.org/ http://musicnotation.org/
cyclecycle 8y ago
Really like the idea of trying to improve things that are so widely adopted and entrenched that most (me, at least) don't think to change. We face the problem that people differ in what they think the features should be though. Ideally we would have a method to deduce what's the best symbolism for maximising input/output speed to human's minds. Some kind of scientific voodoo. Beyond me what that might be.
- analog31 8y ago
  I think that the effort to improve music notation should be encouraged, in spite of the entrenchment of traditional notation systems. In my view there are two huge barriers: First, sight-reading of traditional notation is a widely shared working skill that nobody's going to give up. It's too much of a productivity booster and ensemble management tool. If you write in nonstandard notation, nobody will play your stuff. Second, the huge bulk of existing written music is in non computer readable form, so it can't be re-notated without considerable effort. My band has well over a thousand "charts" most of which were printed before the age of the personal computer. Dealing with the second issue might help with the first. If there were a decent OCR for sheet music, it would create a bulk of "source code" for printing in modern notation, and perhaps give readers a choice. For me, since my brain is hard wired for traditional notation, that's what I would choose. But for someone learning to play music, they could choose a more intuitive system.
FridgeSeal 8y ago
> Reading music is hard. Well I mean, it's not. Presence of a learning curve isn't a problem.
kurtisc 8y ago
How can you differentiate quavers in 6/8 and 3/4? The former is played as triads, the latter as pairs.
crehn 8y ago
OP here, wasn't expecting this to gain much traction. Lots of great comments and ideas! This started as a fun challenge/side project, nothing too serious. Not trying to replace modern notation, just testing an alternative. The notation is more intended for piano beginners who want to play songs they've already heard. Within that context, here are some (perhaps wrong) assumptions the project is based around: - Most people know what sounds good - Most people don't care about about recreating songs "perfectly", they just need a little bit of help - Most people can already hum the songs they want to play - Improvisation is fun (and encouraged with this sort of trimmed-down notation; letting loose is better than constraining) And some of the issues I faced when trying to read and play music: - Key signatures require constantly scanning left-to-right - Hand positioning is different for different scales - Rest symbols bring little value considering the visual noise they add - At any reasonable tempo, 1/16th, 1/32nd, etc. note symbols bring little value considering the visual noise they add - Inconsistent symbols Will keep working on this. I'm no musician and would love to learn from those more experienced than me. Thanks for the interest!
- chrismorgan 8y ago
  > Rest symbols bring little value considering the visual noise they add Visual noise is an area that I think is worth fiddling with. I’ve played around in various contexts with reducing the opacity of less interesting staves, staff lines, rests—in particular circumstances, you can dramatically improve a score. (e.g. if sight-reading a score with two choir and two piano staves per system, you can sometimes accidentally jump to the wrong place after the end of a line; if “your” staves are black and the others are grey, it’s much easier to go to the right place.) Similarly with libretti I’ve played around with things like reducing the opacity of stage directions; it can improve things. Or producing a variant of the libretti for each part with other parts only grey, effectively doing the job of highlighting the script which people will often do. Things like these weren’t possible traditionally in printing: your ink was on or off; it was theoretically possible to use two ink colours, perhaps one lighter than the other, but it was more expensive and so wasn’t done. People would just annotate it with a pencil, or more recently a highlighter. But experimenting with these sorts of things now is quite interesting.
- chrismorgan 8y ago
jancsika 8y ago
Reminded me a bit of shape note singing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shape_note https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shape_note
matchagaucho 8y ago
"Rests aren't explicitly displayed" "Stem length denotes note duration" If only my eyes were 20 yrs younger. This hurts to read :-(
- swiley 8y ago
  That also sounds pretty much impossible to hand write. I hate notating stuff I come up with on a computer. I've tried lillypond and some GUI tools and none of it is as comfortable as just writing it down.
mastazi 8y ago
> Rests aren't explicitly displayed. How would that work? If I see 3 notes with a length of 1/4 each in a 4/4 bar, how do I know where the rest goes?
thsowers 8y ago
I studied piano in college and during one lesson I was struggling to read some Chopin piece that had double sharps. I asked my professor why classical music notation hadn't been "improved" over the years, because some parts of it seemed so convoluted to me. I felt that the goal was to get to "the music", which was actually the sound of the piece, and the methods to reach that didn't matter. He told me that this was how Chopin had communicated his music, and this the only true medium that he (and many other composers) had to get their works and musical ideas to present day. I still feel like classical notation can be a undue burden in many cases, but it also feels like studying an older dialect of a language so that you can attempt to most accurately translate the meaning
swiley 8y ago
> Reading music is hard. People say this about many notations including the latin alphabet when they're first learning to read them. Mathematical notation is another one, and while some people have legitimate complaints I think they're usually much better off just learning the current notation. > All I want to know is where to put my fingers. Note length, tempo, [...] is minor in comparison NO!!! Music is the combination of rhythm and pitch. In many cases rythm is more important than pitch! A music notation without rhythm is like writing without vowels. Yes you can feel out the meaning of the sentence but it's ambiguous to the point that the meaning can also often become completely lost. This is my complaint with things like guitar chords; you can figure out how to strum along if you've heard the song before but it's not nice! People learning with western music probably underestimate just how important rhythm is even in classical music but so much more in newer music. You can't just throw that away. >This is written from the perspective of a clueless piano beginner who just wants to play. I feel horrible saying this but, that wasn't surprising to read. Really, practice reading new pieces for a year or so and you'll be able to sight read, it really is like learning to read all over again and the confusion will slowly go away. EDIT: you also have to keep in mind that music notation is meant to be used by composers as well as performers, the way this removes key signitures can make you think more chromatically which I would argue hurts beginner composers a lot (who should be thinking tonally IMHO.)
- fenomas 8y ago
  > > All I want to know is where to put my fingers. Note length, tempo, [...] is minor in comparison > NO!!! Music is the combination of rhythm and pitch. In many cases rythm is more important than pitch! Lots of folks have jumped on this line, but surely if we put on our principle-of-charity hats we can presume that the author is saying rhythm's not important for the purposes of their notation - e.g. because it's meant for learners playing songs they're already familiar with. They're presumably not claiming rhythm is unimportant period - nobody who's heard music thinks that.
- L_226 8y ago
  I grew up playing multiple instruments, and I have never been able to read rhythm from sheet music. I don't know if I'm just lazy or if I have a problem. Definitely the hardest part of playing in my opinion. Have played: violin, piano, clarinet, alto sax (plus a short foray into alto-clarinet :).
furgooswft13 8y ago
Reading music is not hard, playing it is. You'll be comfortable with reading standard notation relatively quickly compared to how long (forever) it takes to get your fingers to move to the right keys at the right time. Standard notation may not be ideal for many instruments, but it is perfect for piano. It was designed off of the keyboard layout after all. I've sometimes been asked if there is an equivalent of guitar tabs for piano. Yes, I say, there is, sheet music.
- burke 8y ago
  I really don’t think this is true. I don’t think what’s provided here is better for piano than standard notation, but much of standard notation is optimized to be easy to write by hand. We don’t really need that constraint anymore, and could probably come up with a notation that would be easier to build familiarity with without throwing away information.
  - furgooswft13 8y ago
    I'm curious what you, or anyone else, thinks could be improved without just being different. I've seen suggestions such as ditching accidentals and just giving every note their own line or space, but that would make it much harder to recognize common chords or shapes in different keys. Really the problem is the piano layout itself. It's designed to make playing C major easy and everything else hard (though many experienced players would say they prefer a scale with lots of black keys such as B major because those are easier to hit accuratley). Of course there's already an answer to that, the Janko keyboard[1], which has been available for well over 100 years. It has a regular layout for easy transposition, and allows each hand to reach a wider range of notes without large jumps. Perhaps music notation would have evolved differently if this type of keyboard had been prominent. Alas we got what we got, and have a massive catalog of music designed for it, and already experienced piano players certainly are not going to try to help change that. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jank%C3%B3_keyboard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jank%C3%B3_keyboard
yongjik 8y ago
> Assuming d is the note value (where 1 is a whole note) and h is the size of the gap between staff lines, the stem length is (log₂(1 / d) + 1) * h. I wonder if the author thought about triplets. ...and what about quintuplets? They do appear prominently in some music.
rtkwe 8y ago
It seems pretty hard to read the note length quickly vs the current system. Especially when we start getting to 32nds or 64ths the difference isn't as immediately obvious and you'll have to sit and count lines.
adrianh 8y ago
As somebody who has devoted six years of his life to building a web-based music notation rendering engine, I salute you! I make Soundslice (https://www.soundslice.com/ https://www.soundslice.com/), which syncs music notation and real performance audio/video. I've seen several "alternate" or "simplified" music notations come and go. While I applaud experimentation, I've gotta be honest: if you do the work of learning to read traditional music notation instead of inventing a new notation, many more doors will be opened to you. You'll be able to jump in and read hundreds of years' worth of music, you'll be able to communicate better with fellow musicians, and it'll help develop your music theory knowledge. I say all of this as somebody who began as an amateur guitarist, reading only ASCII tabs. I know what it's like on both sides of the notational divide. :-)
forgotpwd16 8y ago
I didn't see a link, but was that inspired from SMN[1] as you've used the same symbols for sharp and flat notes? [1]: http://www.simplifiedmusicnotation.org/instructions.pdf http://www.simplifiedmusicnotation.org/instructions.pdf
krsdcbl 8y ago
I honestly feel this is harder to read than classical notation - minute details of the head shape indicate sharp/flat, and i have to almost count the lines to know note length, instead of stronger visual clues. Not mentioning the pain of making these little shapes & accurate-length-strokes all by hand if you consider writing it. All in all I'd say yes, you changed _where_ the basic information gets encoded, but does it really make it any better?
vinayms 8y ago
I appreciate the effort but I am unable to understand the purpose of this. As the creator says in a post here, if it is intended to be used by beginners to play music they have already heard before, can't they simply play it from memory? Why do they need to struggle reading the notation? They already know the song. I mean, what's important for a musician, at any level, is to develop an ear (or mind?) for notes and rhythm; everything else is bells and whistles. So, can't beginners simply play by learning the black and white keys and their octave ranges? If this is meant to be used to play songs previously unheard, thus by sight reading, then all music written in established notations must be mass translated to this notation. Not impossible, but just a tremendous amount of work, dare I say wasteful, overall. Investing some time to learn the existing notations instead has more ROI. When I started playing guitar in college, and got introduced to western music (I learnt Carnatic violin as a schoolboy, the notation was mainly for notes aka 'svara'), I quickly gave up trying to sight read since not only was I not a professional, it was also much simpler, and more natural, to just play instead of multitasking. Note(ha!) that I can read music, but I can't do it in real time.

51 points by crehn 8y ago

Nice. It's like guitar tabs, but for piano. Keep working on it!

I have the same feeling, that the note notation is way too complex. I would love to see something like this getting traction.

relyks 8y ago

I think Hummingbird notation is a better alternative: http://www.hummingbirdnotation.com/ http://www.hummingbirdnotation.com/

altharaz 8y ago
I didn’t know about Hummingbird. This is really cool. I think I prefer Hummingbird’s approach to OP’s because it makes deciphering the notes way easier with its symbol mnemonic, and I think deciphering the notes is the hardest part.
kalefranz 8y ago
Granted I’ve been reading the traditional style since second grade, I feel like learning this Hummingbird style would be an order of magnitude harder than learning another programming language. Maybe I’m just getting old and the plasticity is hardening.
forgotpwd16 8y ago
This looks like having Gallifreyan symbols. Cool.
werbel 8y ago
I discovered Hummingbird when looking for alternative music notation for my tattoo (a phrase from my piano song). After reading the "docs" it was easy to read the notation but for some I struggled with transcribing it. Maybe it'd be easy to first write classical notation and then change it to hummingbird. Also just noticed that even in the toggle example on the home page "natural" symbol is missing (flat/sharp reset).
- rhaps0dy 8y ago
  >Also just noticed that even in the toggle example on the home page "natural" symbol is missing (flat/sharp reset). Yes. But, also from the toggle example, you can notice that each note that is sharp or flat (even if that is part of the key) is individually indicated. Thus, there is no need to keep track of the "state" of sharpness or flatness. I think this is kind of cool but I would need some time to learn it. Not that I've found traditional notation ever constraining.
  - werbel 8y ago
    You're completely right, sir.
meesterdude 8y ago
wow, hummingbird is awesome! it really is easier to read and way more intuitive. I'll have to look more deeply into it. picking up sight reading, I've also felt like there could be a better way. But at the same time, i was never sure what would be worth changing because everything mattered.

noname120 8y ago

I suggest you to update your readme to include a side-by-side comparison of the traditional notation system with the one that you are proposing on a short tablature.

cyclecycle 8y ago
I think its clear enough as is, and that the readme benefits from its current simplicity. Though for interest's sake this wouldn't hurt.

ReverseCold 8y ago

> Rests aren't explicitly displayed. Hmm.. Would you just leave a space there instead of a rest? That actually seems harder than the current system.

pbhjpbhj 8y ago

Natural sharp and flat: why do the notes all lie to the right: why not flat to the left, natural in the middle and sharp to the right (the shape of the note head doesn't matter much then but I'd go with < o and >). If you're going to use height to indicate note duration then why not put a bold crossing line to make it more clear. 16th and 32nd length notes are going to get a bit unwieldy in the OP's scheme. I'm not sure length of tail is preferable to having flags on the stem and suspect it's worse.

mpalmer 8y ago

I like most of this - but. Leaving out rest symbols and encoding note duration by stem length are two choices I feel would make sight reading harder, not easier. +1 to side-by-side samples

jlg23 8y ago

> Note length, tempo, velocity, progression and other stuff are minor worries in comparison. Those things can be felt, without learning. Can it? How do you learn a piece for which you only have a sheet? I would go even further and say that the most I learned about music was from handwritten notes on musicians or conductors[1] sheets. Yes, I can figure out a lot myself just because of my background knowledge but give me something of an obscure era/modernist fashion and I am completely lost. Furthermore, I played the flute, so tempo, for example, dictates how to start a note (lacking the English term here) because there is a huge difference of what I can do to a single note when played larghissimo in contrast to prestissimo. And especially with lots of modern music, composers resort to their own, additional notation because classical notation is not enough to express the music on paper.

hashkb 8y ago
I was going to attack the same line you quoted. That word you are looking for is "articulation" and of course it's part of traditional notation as is everything else, which is the point you are making. Every second spent on this type of project should be spent practicing. Music notation is hard because theory is complicated and performance is nuanced. People won't admit it... but we're all looking for shortcuts. Learn music the hard way. Or just be an amateur, but don't try to reinvent the kick-ass wheel we've been using for millennia.
- thebricksta 8y ago
  But is it a kick ass wheel? Imagine if the only programming language available was C and all you wanted to be was an amateur script kiddie. It is nice to have beginner friendly languages we can start people off in, allow them to build real solutions in, but then slowly shift them out of into more nuanced code once they are ready. Tab solves part of that problem for entry level guitarists, but there is a bit of a void in the staff. I'm not saying that I don't like the staff - as someone who is literate, I agree, it works. I'm just saying that a simpler notation with a smoother learning curve might serve as an easier entry point for beginners who can make the jump to the full-on staff when they are ready. (I'm not saying I like OP's project either, I think that's missed the mark too.)

clockface 8y ago

I think a better approach would be to keep all the traditional musical symbols and rests, but get rid of all accidentals. As long as you're changing the staff, why not use a chromatic staff? http://musicnotation.org/ http://musicnotation.org/

cyclecycle 8y ago

Really like the idea of trying to improve things that are so widely adopted and entrenched that most (me, at least) don't think to change. We face the problem that people differ in what they think the features should be though. Ideally we would have a method to deduce what's the best symbolism for maximising input/output speed to human's minds. Some kind of scientific voodoo. Beyond me what that might be.

analog31 8y ago
I think that the effort to improve music notation should be encouraged, in spite of the entrenchment of traditional notation systems. In my view there are two huge barriers: First, sight-reading of traditional notation is a widely shared working skill that nobody's going to give up. It's too much of a productivity booster and ensemble management tool. If you write in nonstandard notation, nobody will play your stuff. Second, the huge bulk of existing written music is in non computer readable form, so it can't be re-notated without considerable effort. My band has well over a thousand "charts" most of which were printed before the age of the personal computer. Dealing with the second issue might help with the first. If there were a decent OCR for sheet music, it would create a bulk of "source code" for printing in modern notation, and perhaps give readers a choice. For me, since my brain is hard wired for traditional notation, that's what I would choose. But for someone learning to play music, they could choose a more intuitive system.

FridgeSeal 8y ago

> Reading music is hard. Well I mean, it's not. Presence of a learning curve isn't a problem.

kurtisc 8y ago

How can you differentiate quavers in 6/8 and 3/4? The former is played as triads, the latter as pairs.

crehn 8y ago

OP here, wasn't expecting this to gain much traction. Lots of great comments and ideas! This started as a fun challenge/side project, nothing too serious. Not trying to replace modern notation, just testing an alternative. The notation is more intended for piano beginners who want to play songs they've already heard. Within that context, here are some (perhaps wrong) assumptions the project is based around: - Most people know what sounds good - Most people don't care about about recreating songs "perfectly", they just need a little bit of help - Most people can already hum the songs they want to play - Improvisation is fun (and encouraged with this sort of trimmed-down notation; letting loose is better than constraining) And some of the issues I faced when trying to read and play music: - Key signatures require constantly scanning left-to-right - Hand positioning is different for different scales - Rest symbols bring little value considering the visual noise they add - At any reasonable tempo, 1/16th, 1/32nd, etc. note symbols bring little value considering the visual noise they add - Inconsistent symbols Will keep working on this. I'm no musician and would love to learn from those more experienced than me. Thanks for the interest!

chrismorgan 8y ago
> Rest symbols bring little value considering the visual noise they add Visual noise is an area that I think is worth fiddling with. I’ve played around in various contexts with reducing the opacity of less interesting staves, staff lines, rests—in particular circumstances, you can dramatically improve a score. (e.g. if sight-reading a score with two choir and two piano staves per system, you can sometimes accidentally jump to the wrong place after the end of a line; if “your” staves are black and the others are grey, it’s much easier to go to the right place.) Similarly with libretti I’ve played around with things like reducing the opacity of stage directions; it can improve things. Or producing a variant of the libretti for each part with other parts only grey, effectively doing the job of highlighting the script which people will often do. Things like these weren’t possible traditionally in printing: your ink was on or off; it was theoretically possible to use two ink colours, perhaps one lighter than the other, but it was more expensive and so wasn’t done. People would just annotate it with a pencil, or more recently a highlighter. But experimenting with these sorts of things now is quite interesting.
chrismorgan 8y ago

jancsika 8y ago

Reminded me a bit of shape note singing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shape_note https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shape_note

matchagaucho 8y ago

"Rests aren't explicitly displayed" "Stem length denotes note duration" If only my eyes were 20 yrs younger. This hurts to read :-(

swiley 8y ago
That also sounds pretty much impossible to hand write. I hate notating stuff I come up with on a computer. I've tried lillypond and some GUI tools and none of it is as comfortable as just writing it down.

mastazi 8y ago

> Rests aren't explicitly displayed. How would that work? If I see 3 notes with a length of 1/4 each in a 4/4 bar, how do I know where the rest goes?

thsowers 8y ago

I studied piano in college and during one lesson I was struggling to read some Chopin piece that had double sharps. I asked my professor why classical music notation hadn't been "improved" over the years, because some parts of it seemed so convoluted to me. I felt that the goal was to get to "the music", which was actually the sound of the piece, and the methods to reach that didn't matter. He told me that this was how Chopin had communicated his music, and this the only true medium that he (and many other composers) had to get their works and musical ideas to present day. I still feel like classical notation can be a undue burden in many cases, but it also feels like studying an older dialect of a language so that you can attempt to most accurately translate the meaning

swiley 8y ago

> Reading music is hard. People say this about many notations including the latin alphabet when they're first learning to read them. Mathematical notation is another one, and while some people have legitimate complaints I think they're usually much better off just learning the current notation. > All I want to know is where to put my fingers. Note length, tempo, [...] is minor in comparison NO!!! Music is the combination of rhythm and pitch. In many cases rythm is more important than pitch! A music notation without rhythm is like writing without vowels. Yes you can feel out the meaning of the sentence but it's ambiguous to the point that the meaning can also often become completely lost. This is my complaint with things like guitar chords; you can figure out how to strum along if you've heard the song before but it's not nice! People learning with western music probably underestimate just how important rhythm is even in classical music but so much more in newer music. You can't just throw that away. >This is written from the perspective of a clueless piano beginner who just wants to play. I feel horrible saying this but, that wasn't surprising to read. Really, practice reading new pieces for a year or so and you'll be able to sight read, it really is like learning to read all over again and the confusion will slowly go away. EDIT: you also have to keep in mind that music notation is meant to be used by composers as well as performers, the way this removes key signitures can make you think more chromatically which I would argue hurts beginner composers a lot (who should be thinking tonally IMHO.)

fenomas 8y ago
> > All I want to know is where to put my fingers. Note length, tempo, [...] is minor in comparison > NO!!! Music is the combination of rhythm and pitch. In many cases rythm is more important than pitch! Lots of folks have jumped on this line, but surely if we put on our principle-of-charity hats we can presume that the author is saying rhythm's not important for the purposes of their notation - e.g. because it's meant for learners playing songs they're already familiar with. They're presumably not claiming rhythm is unimportant period - nobody who's heard music thinks that.
L_226 8y ago
I grew up playing multiple instruments, and I have never been able to read rhythm from sheet music. I don't know if I'm just lazy or if I have a problem. Definitely the hardest part of playing in my opinion. Have played: violin, piano, clarinet, alto sax (plus a short foray into alto-clarinet :).

furgooswft13 8y ago

Reading music is not hard, playing it is. You'll be comfortable with reading standard notation relatively quickly compared to how long (forever) it takes to get your fingers to move to the right keys at the right time. Standard notation may not be ideal for many instruments, but it is perfect for piano. It was designed off of the keyboard layout after all. I've sometimes been asked if there is an equivalent of guitar tabs for piano. Yes, I say, there is, sheet music.

burke 8y ago
I really don’t think this is true. I don’t think what’s provided here is better for piano than standard notation, but much of standard notation is optimized to be easy to write by hand. We don’t really need that constraint anymore, and could probably come up with a notation that would be easier to build familiarity with without throwing away information.
- furgooswft13 8y ago
  I'm curious what you, or anyone else, thinks could be improved without just being different. I've seen suggestions such as ditching accidentals and just giving every note their own line or space, but that would make it much harder to recognize common chords or shapes in different keys. Really the problem is the piano layout itself. It's designed to make playing C major easy and everything else hard (though many experienced players would say they prefer a scale with lots of black keys such as B major because those are easier to hit accuratley). Of course there's already an answer to that, the Janko keyboard[1], which has been available for well over 100 years. It has a regular layout for easy transposition, and allows each hand to reach a wider range of notes without large jumps. Perhaps music notation would have evolved differently if this type of keyboard had been prominent. Alas we got what we got, and have a massive catalog of music designed for it, and already experienced piano players certainly are not going to try to help change that. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jank%C3%B3_keyboard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jank%C3%B3_keyboard

yongjik 8y ago

> Assuming d is the note value (where 1 is a whole note) and h is the size of the gap between staff lines, the stem length is (log₂(1 / d) + 1) * h. I wonder if the author thought about triplets. ...and what about quintuplets? They do appear prominently in some music.

rtkwe 8y ago

It seems pretty hard to read the note length quickly vs the current system. Especially when we start getting to 32nds or 64ths the difference isn't as immediately obvious and you'll have to sit and count lines.

adrianh 8y ago

As somebody who has devoted six years of his life to building a web-based music notation rendering engine, I salute you! I make Soundslice (https://www.soundslice.com/ https://www.soundslice.com/), which syncs music notation and real performance audio/video. I've seen several "alternate" or "simplified" music notations come and go. While I applaud experimentation, I've gotta be honest: if you do the work of learning to read traditional music notation instead of inventing a new notation, many more doors will be opened to you. You'll be able to jump in and read hundreds of years' worth of music, you'll be able to communicate better with fellow musicians, and it'll help develop your music theory knowledge. I say all of this as somebody who began as an amateur guitarist, reading only ASCII tabs. I know what it's like on both sides of the notational divide. :-)

forgotpwd16 8y ago

I didn't see a link, but was that inspired from SMN[1] as you've used the same symbols for sharp and flat notes? [1]: http://www.simplifiedmusicnotation.org/instructions.pdf http://www.simplifiedmusicnotation.org/instructions.pdf

krsdcbl 8y ago

I honestly feel this is harder to read than classical notation - minute details of the head shape indicate sharp/flat, and i have to almost count the lines to know note length, instead of stronger visual clues. Not mentioning the pain of making these little shapes & accurate-length-strokes all by hand if you consider writing it. All in all I'd say yes, you changed _where_ the basic information gets encoded, but does it really make it any better?

vinayms 8y ago

I appreciate the effort but I am unable to understand the purpose of this. As the creator says in a post here, if it is intended to be used by beginners to play music they have already heard before, can't they simply play it from memory? Why do they need to struggle reading the notation? They already know the song. I mean, what's important for a musician, at any level, is to develop an ear (or mind?) for notes and rhythm; everything else is bells and whistles. So, can't beginners simply play by learning the black and white keys and their octave ranges? If this is meant to be used to play songs previously unheard, thus by sight reading, then all music written in established notations must be mass translated to this notation. Not impossible, but just a tremendous amount of work, dare I say wasteful, overall. Investing some time to learn the existing notations instead has more ROI. When I started playing guitar in college, and got introduced to western music (I learnt Carnatic violin as a schoolboy, the notation was mainly for notes aka 'svara'), I quickly gave up trying to sight read since not only was I not a professional, it was also much simpler, and more natural, to just play instead of multitasking. Note(ha!) that I can read music, but I can't do it in real time.