4 ms·
>Of course, the expert users have a vested interest in having a more-exclusive club. I am an almost entirely self-taught jazz musician. I learned to read notat
by jdietrich 8y ago
>Of course, the expert users have a vested interest in having a more-exclusive club.
I am an almost entirely self-taught jazz musician. I learned to read notation begrudgingly, assuming it to be an archaic hurdle put in place by snobbish classical musicians. My view of classical musicians has not changed, but my view of notation has.
A lot of people think that programming languages are a similar archaic hurdle and set out to build a visual programming environment that will be easy for beginners to use. Somewhere along that journey, they invariably realise that a) syntax is one of the easiest parts of programming, b) there is no good visual metaphor for recursion and c) the Deutsch limit is a cruel master. You can do simple scripting with a box and arrow diagram, you can teach kids to blink an LED, but you can't write a compiler.
The advantages of stave notation (and the disadvantages of alternative systems) are non-obvious, but they are very real. Critiques of notation usually sound like "command lines are stupid, everything should be a GUI" - they're not wrong per se, they just miss the point.
- 0815test 8y ago> ...there is no good visual metaphor for recursion... Now, now. You're on a site that's literally named after one!
- nixpulvis 8y agoI'm taking classical piano lessons currently, and I have much the same reaction. I don't love all the strict rules imposed by western music, but I do love the notation and theory, because it generalized in interesting ways across tunings and notation. Just like I learned C (for example) before imagining my own languages, or how I've learned many libraries before writing my own, I also appreciate the structure of classical notation for what it is.
- hnzix 8y ago>c) the Deutsch limit is a cruel master. I generally despise visual programming but MaxMSP does this pretty well. You can nest components in an almost object-oriented fashion. Prior textual programming experience doesn't massively help learning the language though, it's a whole different paradigm and it's def not easy for beginners.
- wwweston 8y agoDo you know if the nestability thing applies to puredata (open source Max/MSP)?
- hnzix 8y agoI haven't touched puredata yet but C&G's Organelle is looking really amazing right now.
- programLyrique 8y agoYes, you can create subpatches (http://write.flossmanuals.net/pure-data/subpatches/ http://write.flossmanuals.net/pure-data/subpatches/) and abstractions (http://write.flossmanuals.net/pure-data/abstractions/ http://write.flossmanuals.net/pure-data/abstractions/).
- rikkus 8y agoI'm happy with standard notation when playing the piano or something that can only play one note at a time (e.g. trumpet), but I still can't get my brain to read it fast enough when playing the guitar. I know tab notation exists to help with this, but it loses much of the detail encoded in standard notation - note lengths being the most obvious example. There have been attempts to create a hybrid notation and there are books with tab printed below the stave(s), but neither work well. If anyone's found any alternative notations that work well for guitar, I'd love to see them.
- taejo 8y agoI've played from books that had tabs with note stems, beams and flags attached to the numbers with the same meaning as in standard notation (this can't distinguish between a filled and unfilled note-head, but in guitar music one rarely needs to notate anything longer than a crotchet/quarter-note so it's not really an issue). I never really learned standard notation, but I do know some of the basics and found it useful.