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> With either instruments or notation, introducing something "better" requires people to make a serious commitment to starting practically from scratch and suck

> With either instruments or notation, introducing something "better" requires people to make a serious commitment to starting practically from scratch and sucking for a long, long time, before being able to do anything productive. That's really not true in practice. A person who is proficient at playing one instrument is much better equipped to learn another than one who has no experience at all. Sure, it's easier to develop the skill as a child, but there are millions of adults who learn their first instrument and become proficient within a reasonable time-frame. > Developing a new notation system to the point of finding out if it's actually workable for reading sophisticated music in a performance setting would be a staggering undertaking. Likewise for an experimental keyboard layout. The latter has been done by experts and hobbyists alike. It's not just a naturally difficult thing to promote nonstandard notation: the professional music community is extremely averse to the idea. It's nothing short of blasphemy. Musical notation is not that hard. You have 12 notes, fractional rhythms, and various accents to embellish them. There are several glaring obfuscations that make the traditional notation system unnecessarily complicated: Keys multiply the amount of notes by 12, and each Clef multiplies the entire set of keys once more. From those two factors alone, a proficient reader must learn to recognize each of the 12 modes written 24 different ways. All of the sudden, 12 scales have become 288! It's also interesting to me that this hasn't been solved already by software. Notation is nothing more than formatting. We have dozens of competing data interchange formats, and it's pretty trivial to convert between them. > One reason why pianists like the crooked layout is that it provides visual and tactile guidance as to where things are. The fact that each key has its own personality becomes a feature, not a bug, in the hands of a good player. That's true to a point, but not as necessary as it sounds. Consider for example, Gymnopedie No.1 by Eric Satie: The left hand moves more than an octave every measure. Does a proficient pianist feel around for the unique-feeling D key? Not usually. In a general sense, a fixed seated position is more than enough positional information for a practiced pianist. Most can fall back on sight for the rest. Even if this feature were desired, it could be implemented. Keys can be given a different feel from one another without changing their relative shape and size. > But despite these challenges, there is extensive exploration of novel instrument layouts and designs, often conducted in an academic setting. Music is not as static as one might think. A pianist at the University of Wisconsin has developed a piano with a smaller keyboard. The fact that you shared an article about a professor creating a piano with such a subtle change like it was news speaks volumes to this problem. Imagine reading an article about a guitarist making a shorter neck guitar, then promoting a literal organization that petitions for variable-length necks! As for actual exploration on the topic, you can read about the Jammer Keyboard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jammer_keyboard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jammer_keyboard

sporkologist 6y ago
In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they're not.
- silicon2401 6y ago
  Why do you think that theory and practice are the same? For me and many other guitar players who learned from tabs, there's zero theory involved. Just mechanically learning a song through positioning and timing. You can learn considerable musicality and expression through this approach without ever knowing a word of theory.
  - sporkologist 6y ago
    My bad, I am mixing metaphors here. I meant 'theory' as in 'the opposite of practice or experiment', not music theory. I totally agree that there are many famous and accomplished musicians who don't know any formal theory or reading notation.
analog31 6y ago
>>> Musical notation is not that hard. You have 12 notes, fractional rhythms, and various accents to embellish them. Don't forget reading. The notation has to be readable on the fly by people who are capable of doing it. Proving this to be possible for a given notation system is a massive undertaking. I still contend that it's not about traditionalism, but about practicality. Musicians don't want to suck. Changing instruments or notation means sucking for a long, long time before being able to use it at the level they already attained on the previous system. I'm in this boat myself right now. I'm a working double bassist. As a lockdown project, I decided to get back into playing cello, after a 35+ year hiatus. I'm also trying to get up to speed on sight reading treble clef. I can tell that it will take me a crazy amount of effort on the cello to reach the level of the bands that I play bass in. >>> It's also interesting to me that this hasn't been solved already by software. Notation is nothing more than formatting. We have dozens of competing data interchange formats, and it's pretty trivial to convert between them. Then do it! The good stuff isn't in the computer. ;-) Only about the past couple decades of literature has been digitized. Of that, vanishingly little is publicly available due to heavy handed copyright restrictions for sheet music. Some of the really good stuff was never even published, but hastily photocopied and shared. My band's entire library, spanning a century of big-band jazz, exists only on paper, with the exception of a small handful of modern compositions. >>> The fact that you shared an article about a professor creating a piano with such a subtle change like it was news speaks volumes to this problem. Imagine reading an article about a guitarist making a shorter neck guitar, then promoting a literal organization that petitions for variable-length necks! >>> As for actual exploration on the topic, you can read about the Jammer Keyboard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jammer_keyboard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jammer_keyboard >>> That thing can't control a grand piano. There's no doubt that new instruments are developed all the time as I mentioned elsewhere in the thread. Consider the scratch turntable. It didn't even exist when I was a kid, and I suspect it would frustrate any attempt at notation using the current system. New notation systems have been developed. For instance jazz bass parts that consist of a combination of notation and chord symbols didn't exist in the 19th century, and would have been unplayable by anybody from that era. The Nashville number system developed in the recording industry, sometime in the past century. Instruments gain popularity in musical styles that don't depend as much on written music, such as folk, rock, and so forth. That's one way to deal with notation. Lots of adults learn to play without learning to read at all. Amplification and electronic synthesis reduce the physical and acoustical demands on instruments, allowing the "user interface" layout to be detached from the physical production of sound. When musicians do try something new, it's often not just to play the old music using a new technology, though that does happen. Instead, it's everything all at once. When the electric guitar burst on the scene, it ushered in new styles of music, and new ways of composing and communicating ideas that largely avoided notation altogether. Nobody formed a band of 19 guitars to play Glenn Miller charts. Well, maybe they did. It's amazing the huge variety of things that musicians are willing to try for the sake of novelty.

sporkologist 6y ago

In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they're not.

silicon2401 6y ago
Why do you think that theory and practice are the same? For me and many other guitar players who learned from tabs, there's zero theory involved. Just mechanically learning a song through positioning and timing. You can learn considerable musicality and expression through this approach without ever knowing a word of theory.
- sporkologist 6y ago
  My bad, I am mixing metaphors here. I meant 'theory' as in 'the opposite of practice or experiment', not music theory. I totally agree that there are many famous and accomplished musicians who don't know any formal theory or reading notation.

analog31 6y ago

>>> Musical notation is not that hard. You have 12 notes, fractional rhythms, and various accents to embellish them. Don't forget reading. The notation has to be readable on the fly by people who are capable of doing it. Proving this to be possible for a given notation system is a massive undertaking. I still contend that it's not about traditionalism, but about practicality. Musicians don't want to suck. Changing instruments or notation means sucking for a long, long time before being able to use it at the level they already attained on the previous system. I'm in this boat myself right now. I'm a working double bassist. As a lockdown project, I decided to get back into playing cello, after a 35+ year hiatus. I'm also trying to get up to speed on sight reading treble clef. I can tell that it will take me a crazy amount of effort on the cello to reach the level of the bands that I play bass in. >>> It's also interesting to me that this hasn't been solved already by software. Notation is nothing more than formatting. We have dozens of competing data interchange formats, and it's pretty trivial to convert between them. Then do it! The good stuff isn't in the computer. ;-) Only about the past couple decades of literature has been digitized. Of that, vanishingly little is publicly available due to heavy handed copyright restrictions for sheet music. Some of the really good stuff was never even published, but hastily photocopied and shared. My band's entire library, spanning a century of big-band jazz, exists only on paper, with the exception of a small handful of modern compositions. >>> The fact that you shared an article about a professor creating a piano with such a subtle change like it was news speaks volumes to this problem. Imagine reading an article about a guitarist making a shorter neck guitar, then promoting a literal organization that petitions for variable-length necks! >>> As for actual exploration on the topic, you can read about the Jammer Keyboard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jammer_keyboard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jammer_keyboard >>> That thing can't control a grand piano. There's no doubt that new instruments are developed all the time as I mentioned elsewhere in the thread. Consider the scratch turntable. It didn't even exist when I was a kid, and I suspect it would frustrate any attempt at notation using the current system. New notation systems have been developed. For instance jazz bass parts that consist of a combination of notation and chord symbols didn't exist in the 19th century, and would have been unplayable by anybody from that era. The Nashville number system developed in the recording industry, sometime in the past century. Instruments gain popularity in musical styles that don't depend as much on written music, such as folk, rock, and so forth. That's one way to deal with notation. Lots of adults learn to play without learning to read at all. Amplification and electronic synthesis reduce the physical and acoustical demands on instruments, allowing the "user interface" layout to be detached from the physical production of sound. When musicians do try something new, it's often not just to play the old music using a new technology, though that does happen. Instead, it's everything all at once. When the electric guitar burst on the scene, it ushered in new styles of music, and new ways of composing and communicating ideas that largely avoided notation altogether. Nobody formed a band of 19 guitars to play Glenn Miller charts. Well, maybe they did. It's amazing the huge variety of things that musicians are willing to try for the sake of novelty.