3 ms·

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

by 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
> At any reasonable tempo, 1/16th, 1/32nd, etc. note symbols bring little value considering the visual noise they add Such notes are commonly quite heavily used in classical music. Whether they might be better doubled in length with the tempo doubled, is another matter. It can go the other way, too: if you look in hymn books from the 19th or early 20th century, you may also find hymns that use whole and half notes, with the occasional breve and quarter note; whereas if you look at a later edition of such a hymn book, you may find those notes got halved, to use half and quarter notes, with the occasional whole and eighth note. I certainly find the latter easier to play.
- mathw 8y ago
  I mostly play baroque music from notation, where the convention was to use roughly doubled note values compared to today - most of what I play has the beat in minim/half-note sized values, so we're often in 4/2 or 6/4 rather than 4/4 or 6/8. The lack of visual noise from the sparser notation, hollow note-heads etc. is rather pleasing compared to some later music where you're into demisemiquavers where you could have just had semiquavers. We see semiquavers in my viol consort we know they're going to be teeny little notes in most pieces. There's just less ink on our pages! I don't really understand why it shifted to shorter values. I guess it probably wasn't deliberate though. These things usually aren't, they just... happen. ETA: maybe the increased visual grouping of beamed quavers and smaller notes was considered valuable for conveying the composer's intentions with regard to phrasing, especially as printing technology became increasingly capable of properly reproducing them.
  - chrismorgan 8y ago
    My experience with scores in both /2 and /4 is in hymn books, playing the piano. I find the /4 version decidedly easier to read than the /2 version, and my brother and dad have said the same thing. It generally conveys the flow better. Naturally, there are other differences in the engraving as well, some for the better and some for the worse, so it’s not a fair comparison.

by crehn 8y ago

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

> At any reasonable tempo, 1/16th, 1/32nd, etc. note symbols bring little value considering the visual noise they add Such notes are commonly quite heavily used in classical music. Whether they might be better doubled in length with the tempo doubled, is another matter. It can go the other way, too: if you look in hymn books from the 19th or early 20th century, you may also find hymns that use whole and half notes, with the occasional breve and quarter note; whereas if you look at a later edition of such a hymn book, you may find those notes got halved, to use half and quarter notes, with the occasional whole and eighth note. I certainly find the latter easier to play.

mathw 8y ago
I mostly play baroque music from notation, where the convention was to use roughly doubled note values compared to today - most of what I play has the beat in minim/half-note sized values, so we're often in 4/2 or 6/4 rather than 4/4 or 6/8. The lack of visual noise from the sparser notation, hollow note-heads etc. is rather pleasing compared to some later music where you're into demisemiquavers where you could have just had semiquavers. We see semiquavers in my viol consort we know they're going to be teeny little notes in most pieces. There's just less ink on our pages! I don't really understand why it shifted to shorter values. I guess it probably wasn't deliberate though. These things usually aren't, they just... happen. ETA: maybe the increased visual grouping of beamed quavers and smaller notes was considered valuable for conveying the composer's intentions with regard to phrasing, especially as printing technology became increasingly capable of properly reproducing them.
- chrismorgan 8y ago
  My experience with scores in both /2 and /4 is in hymn books, playing the piano. I find the /4 version decidedly easier to read than the /2 version, and my brother and dad have said the same thing. It generally conveys the flow better. Naturally, there are other differences in the engraving as well, some for the better and some for the worse, so it’s not a fair comparison.