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This video is only a few years old but should already be considered a classic. Not long after, the video's creator was hired to lead design of MuseScore (anothe

This video is only a few years old but should already be considered a classic. Not long after, the video's creator was hired to lead design of MuseScore (another sheet music desktop app). I find the world of music notation software to be fascinating in its diversity of design philosophies. Something about music notation — its complexity, plus its worldwide ubiquity, plus the business reality that there's (relatively) not a ton of money to be made in its software industry — creates a situation where many interesting ideas bloom and there is not one clear monopoly. Yes, Sibelius and Finale are the longtime popular applications, but Dorico recently came on the scene with a genuinely new philosophy, and there are lots of less popular apps, mostly one-person-show kinds of things, with different approaches to how editing music should work. My own attempt is with Soundslice (https://www.soundslice.com/notation-editor/ https://www.soundslice.com/notation-editor/), which has an entirely web-based sheet-music editor and lots of tools for music learning/practice.

qmmmur 6y ago
I would hedge that's the majority of the world doesn't learn or doesn't care for Western notation to be fair.
- coldtea 6y ago
  And you'd be wrong. Western notation is used throughout the world, even more so than local notation systems. That's 100% true for classical, jazz, marching band, etc. musicians, but also for musicians in "pop" genres. Even folk/ethnic musicians around the world, with a few exceptions, are more common to use western notation than their historical notation (if available). If they gig and work with studios and orchestras, that's almost a certain.
  - anoonmoose 6y ago
    Or the two of you are just talking about different things. It is totally possible for "Western notation is used throughout the world" and "the majority of the world does not learn Western notation" to be true at the same time. What relevance their comment has is beyond me- perhaps making a point about the relatively niche market of "people who want to write music"- but who knows.
    - coldtea 6y ago
      >"the majority of the world does not learn Western notation" to be true at the same time. Well, that's true in the sense that non-musicians don't care for it, but that's also irrelevant (and something everybody already knows). If the parent was making that statement, I'm not sure why they felt it needed to be said :-)
      - qmmmur 6y ago
        Please see my response above and tell me my original comment is irrelevant.
    - qmmmur 6y ago
      You summed it up pretty well, writing scores is highly niche at this point.
  - qmmmur 6y ago
    My point is that the perceived "ubiquity" of notation is far exceeded by the plethora of ways music is recorded outside notation or recorded in a symbolic format that is nothing like western notation (from which is obviously the context of the OP). I can think of sample-based music (MPC/Decks/Acousmatic tradition/Ikeda/Microsound/Chartier/Field-recordings), improvised music, as well as the most obvious modern development of MIDI data and the piano roll which is not an interchangeable format with a "score". If we aren't exclusively talking about "notation" in a more general sense, we haven't even touched on the wealth of folk/traditional music out there with literally no recorded symbolic formats or concept of a written history such as australian aboriginal music.
    - PeanutNore 6y ago
      MIDI data can easily be converted into western score notation and vice-versa. You can write a musical score in western notation using MuseScore, export it as a MIDI file, and then import that into Ableton and see it on the piano roll. It's all one big "the map is not the territory" situation. The same piece of music is still the same piece of music whether it's written in staff notation, programmed into a sequencer in some proprietary format, written out in LSDJ code on a GameBoy, drawn in a piano roll, or played from memory by someone who doesn't know how to read any of those.
      - qmmmur 6y ago
        yeah, but just because a program can function as an adapter between two formats doesn't mean the person who wrote the music understands the intricacies of italian dynamic markings or the connotations of notation style. By the same logic any translation of a non-english novel is equivalent. Buh-buh
    - jcelerier 6y ago
      > as well as the most obvious modern development of MIDI data and the piano roll which is not an interchangeable format with a "score". midi is pretty much a piano-oriented subset of western music theory in terms of expressive power
  - nimp 6y ago
    lol as someone with a PhD in music and many years experience in industry and academia I can't rationalise such a reductive view of music as anything but lack of lateral thinking to imagine a world where western notation isn't king. I can think of heaps of examples where western notation absolutely isn't used- tabla bol, gamelan, zither/guqin/guzhen, indian classical music, just to name a few (and without being even slightly exhaustive). Western notation absolutely is used throughout the world but you can't say at all that it's used more than traditional notation systems because it's usually irrelevant for tuning systems- shruti in indian classical, for example- or rhythmic structures. I would be curious as to how exactly you can say with any certainty that it's more likely that people use western notation, seeing as it's categorically not true, even if we're not touching on the vast numbers of people who participate in oral traditions, either. I've also rarely worked session musicians who aren't orchestral who use anything other than charts and an enormous amount of the music we consume in the west is produced in a DAW or whatever without ever touching notation...
    - Kye 6y ago
      There's a very good video on the way too narrow view many people in the west have of music. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kr3quGh7pJA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kr3quGh7pJA I know the title will set people off in a place like this, but it's not a 2014 Tumblr-level "kill white people" style analysis. Totally worth the time.
      - qmmmur 6y ago
        Thanks for sharing this. I forgot about it but have watched it and it's quite a striking video for Adam Neely who usually covers jazz-bro harmonic complexity wank.
      - BuildTheRobots 6y ago
        That was a great video. Extremely well researched, very engaging, fantastic production quality and eye opening. Thank you for sharing.
    - coldtea 6y ago
      >lol as someone with a PhD in music and many years experience in industry and academia I can't rationalise such a reductive view of music as anything but lack of lateral thinking to imagine a world where western notation isn't king. Well, if you felt the need to "lol", let me LOL back at you :-) No PhD, but as someone with years of music training, who has travelled all over the world, and with a couple of professional musicians in the family, coming from a country with its own ancient music notation and millenia of musical history, and who has non-western modes and tradition, I can't even imagine the pedantry of your comment. Musicians all over the world: (a) playing westernized music (which covers about most of the charts everywhere, from Asia to Latin America and Africa), and western music directly (b) playing western music directly (classical, jazz, rock, blues, etc) (c) playing other genres with traditional western notation and even influences (tango, samba, and so on) deal predominantly with western music theory, notation, and instruments -- and which cover a huge chunk of global musicians. But (d) even traditional "folk" (ethnic) musicans adapt to westernized versions of local music, with few exceptions, and use standard western notations (or notation hacks, like tablature and chord charts) in the studio and the concerts. Heck, our traditional music is modal and microtonal, but it's mostly translated and played in your run of the mill western scales and keys. And I've seen the same all around the world. You might have in mind places like India, China, Indonesia, etc, but still most pros will use western style music theory and write with western notation than not. To the point that the exceptions are more folkore than actual every-day chart music. >I've also rarely worked session musicians who aren't orchestral who use anything other than charts and an enormous amount of the music we consume in the west is produced in a DAW or whatever without ever touching notation... Which is neither here, nor there. The Nashville number system, for example or a piano roll is still based on western music theory and norms (even if not notation), and those musician will still 99% use the typical major/minor/etc scales. The problem with a deep knowledge of musicology in this regard is that it makes it very easy to lose the forrest for the trees, and e.g. know 1000s of local / oral etc traditions, etc, but not see that those are nonetheless niche and very much not the norm in the day to day music of a country, and difficult to even find in the radio/charts in most countries. The rest are as representative as e.g. jazz is in 2021 US musical tastes, charts, sales, and so on...
- CornCobs 6y ago
  I'm quite sure that's not right. I don't think anything else is in much common use besides basic solfege, especially for teaching.
  - hdjfkkrrn 6y ago
    Music production (ie: what you hear on radio, Spotify, ...) pretty much exclusively uses the so called "piano roll" notation. Most music production software (Ableton, ...) doesn't even support Western notation.
    - Kye 6y ago
      Ableton Live is at least making movements toward supporting more traditional music-making. 11 lets you pick between flats and sharps. https://old.reddit.com/r/ableton/comments/jsqfvx/a_small_detail_added_in_live_11_you_can_now_have/ https://old.reddit.com/r/ableton/comments/jsqfvx/a_small_det...
    - klodolph 6y ago
      If you’re talking about solo producers churning out electronic beats in their studios, sure. If that’s what you listen to on Spotify, fine. First of all, music production is only a small part of music. There are tons of people out there who play musical instruments, and a much smaller number of people who do music production. Almost nobody who plays an instrument will use piano roll notation, because piano roll notation just fucking sucks. It’s the shittiest way to read music. Nearly everyone who reads music in some way reads a score, reads tablature, or at the very least, reads the chords. Second, when you look at music production, there are big chunks of it done with scores. You know why Cubase and Logic are so popular? Partly because they have decent notation systems in them. They’re not competitive with Sibelius/MuseScore/etc., but they work. That’s because people writing scores want to know, “What chord was that? Should I change the chord? Should I revoice it?”
    - lostgame 6y ago
      Logic Pro - and even GarageBand would like to say hello...they are the reason, as a classically trained composer, I purchased my first Mac (Mini G4) in 2005 and have never looked back. :) I use Pro Tools to mix and Logic to compose for this very reason. I don't use Ableton for this very reason. Logic is certainly a mainstream DAW. :) Same with GarageBand. EDIT: Doesn't Cubase also do this? ...like I am pretty sure there are quite a few apps that support this?
q-big 6y ago
> Yes, Sibelius and Finale are the longtime popular applications, but Dorico recently came on the scene with a genuinely new philosophy, and there are lots of less popular apps, mostly one-person-show kinds of things, with different approaches to how editing music should work. Another musical notation program which has quite some fans in Germany is capella: https://www.capella-software.com/us/index.cfm/products/capella/info-capella/ https://www.capella-software.com/us/index.cfm/products/capel...

qmmmur 6y ago

I would hedge that's the majority of the world doesn't learn or doesn't care for Western notation to be fair.

coldtea 6y ago
And you'd be wrong. Western notation is used throughout the world, even more so than local notation systems. That's 100% true for classical, jazz, marching band, etc. musicians, but also for musicians in "pop" genres. Even folk/ethnic musicians around the world, with a few exceptions, are more common to use western notation than their historical notation (if available). If they gig and work with studios and orchestras, that's almost a certain.
- anoonmoose 6y ago
  Or the two of you are just talking about different things. It is totally possible for "Western notation is used throughout the world" and "the majority of the world does not learn Western notation" to be true at the same time. What relevance their comment has is beyond me- perhaps making a point about the relatively niche market of "people who want to write music"- but who knows.
  - coldtea 6y ago
    >"the majority of the world does not learn Western notation" to be true at the same time. Well, that's true in the sense that non-musicians don't care for it, but that's also irrelevant (and something everybody already knows). If the parent was making that statement, I'm not sure why they felt it needed to be said :-)
    - qmmmur 6y ago
      Please see my response above and tell me my original comment is irrelevant.
  - qmmmur 6y ago
    You summed it up pretty well, writing scores is highly niche at this point.
- qmmmur 6y ago
  My point is that the perceived "ubiquity" of notation is far exceeded by the plethora of ways music is recorded outside notation or recorded in a symbolic format that is nothing like western notation (from which is obviously the context of the OP). I can think of sample-based music (MPC/Decks/Acousmatic tradition/Ikeda/Microsound/Chartier/Field-recordings), improvised music, as well as the most obvious modern development of MIDI data and the piano roll which is not an interchangeable format with a "score". If we aren't exclusively talking about "notation" in a more general sense, we haven't even touched on the wealth of folk/traditional music out there with literally no recorded symbolic formats or concept of a written history such as australian aboriginal music.
  - PeanutNore 6y ago
    MIDI data can easily be converted into western score notation and vice-versa. You can write a musical score in western notation using MuseScore, export it as a MIDI file, and then import that into Ableton and see it on the piano roll. It's all one big "the map is not the territory" situation. The same piece of music is still the same piece of music whether it's written in staff notation, programmed into a sequencer in some proprietary format, written out in LSDJ code on a GameBoy, drawn in a piano roll, or played from memory by someone who doesn't know how to read any of those.
    - qmmmur 6y ago
      yeah, but just because a program can function as an adapter between two formats doesn't mean the person who wrote the music understands the intricacies of italian dynamic markings or the connotations of notation style. By the same logic any translation of a non-english novel is equivalent. Buh-buh
  - jcelerier 6y ago
    > as well as the most obvious modern development of MIDI data and the piano roll which is not an interchangeable format with a "score". midi is pretty much a piano-oriented subset of western music theory in terms of expressive power
- nimp 6y ago
  lol as someone with a PhD in music and many years experience in industry and academia I can't rationalise such a reductive view of music as anything but lack of lateral thinking to imagine a world where western notation isn't king. I can think of heaps of examples where western notation absolutely isn't used- tabla bol, gamelan, zither/guqin/guzhen, indian classical music, just to name a few (and without being even slightly exhaustive). Western notation absolutely is used throughout the world but you can't say at all that it's used more than traditional notation systems because it's usually irrelevant for tuning systems- shruti in indian classical, for example- or rhythmic structures. I would be curious as to how exactly you can say with any certainty that it's more likely that people use western notation, seeing as it's categorically not true, even if we're not touching on the vast numbers of people who participate in oral traditions, either. I've also rarely worked session musicians who aren't orchestral who use anything other than charts and an enormous amount of the music we consume in the west is produced in a DAW or whatever without ever touching notation...
  - Kye 6y ago
    There's a very good video on the way too narrow view many people in the west have of music. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kr3quGh7pJA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kr3quGh7pJA I know the title will set people off in a place like this, but it's not a 2014 Tumblr-level "kill white people" style analysis. Totally worth the time.
    - qmmmur 6y ago
      Thanks for sharing this. I forgot about it but have watched it and it's quite a striking video for Adam Neely who usually covers jazz-bro harmonic complexity wank.
    - BuildTheRobots 6y ago
      That was a great video. Extremely well researched, very engaging, fantastic production quality and eye opening. Thank you for sharing.
  - coldtea 6y ago
    >lol as someone with a PhD in music and many years experience in industry and academia I can't rationalise such a reductive view of music as anything but lack of lateral thinking to imagine a world where western notation isn't king. Well, if you felt the need to "lol", let me LOL back at you :-) No PhD, but as someone with years of music training, who has travelled all over the world, and with a couple of professional musicians in the family, coming from a country with its own ancient music notation and millenia of musical history, and who has non-western modes and tradition, I can't even imagine the pedantry of your comment. Musicians all over the world: (a) playing westernized music (which covers about most of the charts everywhere, from Asia to Latin America and Africa), and western music directly (b) playing western music directly (classical, jazz, rock, blues, etc) (c) playing other genres with traditional western notation and even influences (tango, samba, and so on) deal predominantly with western music theory, notation, and instruments -- and which cover a huge chunk of global musicians. But (d) even traditional "folk" (ethnic) musicans adapt to westernized versions of local music, with few exceptions, and use standard western notations (or notation hacks, like tablature and chord charts) in the studio and the concerts. Heck, our traditional music is modal and microtonal, but it's mostly translated and played in your run of the mill western scales and keys. And I've seen the same all around the world. You might have in mind places like India, China, Indonesia, etc, but still most pros will use western style music theory and write with western notation than not. To the point that the exceptions are more folkore than actual every-day chart music. >I've also rarely worked session musicians who aren't orchestral who use anything other than charts and an enormous amount of the music we consume in the west is produced in a DAW or whatever without ever touching notation... Which is neither here, nor there. The Nashville number system, for example or a piano roll is still based on western music theory and norms (even if not notation), and those musician will still 99% use the typical major/minor/etc scales. The problem with a deep knowledge of musicology in this regard is that it makes it very easy to lose the forrest for the trees, and e.g. know 1000s of local / oral etc traditions, etc, but not see that those are nonetheless niche and very much not the norm in the day to day music of a country, and difficult to even find in the radio/charts in most countries. The rest are as representative as e.g. jazz is in 2021 US musical tastes, charts, sales, and so on...
CornCobs 6y ago
I'm quite sure that's not right. I don't think anything else is in much common use besides basic solfege, especially for teaching.
- hdjfkkrrn 6y ago
  Music production (ie: what you hear on radio, Spotify, ...) pretty much exclusively uses the so called "piano roll" notation. Most music production software (Ableton, ...) doesn't even support Western notation.
  - Kye 6y ago
    Ableton Live is at least making movements toward supporting more traditional music-making. 11 lets you pick between flats and sharps. https://old.reddit.com/r/ableton/comments/jsqfvx/a_small_detail_added_in_live_11_you_can_now_have/ https://old.reddit.com/r/ableton/comments/jsqfvx/a_small_det...
  - klodolph 6y ago
    If you’re talking about solo producers churning out electronic beats in their studios, sure. If that’s what you listen to on Spotify, fine. First of all, music production is only a small part of music. There are tons of people out there who play musical instruments, and a much smaller number of people who do music production. Almost nobody who plays an instrument will use piano roll notation, because piano roll notation just fucking sucks. It’s the shittiest way to read music. Nearly everyone who reads music in some way reads a score, reads tablature, or at the very least, reads the chords. Second, when you look at music production, there are big chunks of it done with scores. You know why Cubase and Logic are so popular? Partly because they have decent notation systems in them. They’re not competitive with Sibelius/MuseScore/etc., but they work. That’s because people writing scores want to know, “What chord was that? Should I change the chord? Should I revoice it?”
  - lostgame 6y ago
    Logic Pro - and even GarageBand would like to say hello...they are the reason, as a classically trained composer, I purchased my first Mac (Mini G4) in 2005 and have never looked back. :) I use Pro Tools to mix and Logic to compose for this very reason. I don't use Ableton for this very reason. Logic is certainly a mainstream DAW. :) Same with GarageBand. EDIT: Doesn't Cubase also do this? ...like I am pretty sure there are quite a few apps that support this?

q-big 6y ago

> Yes, Sibelius and Finale are the longtime popular applications, but Dorico recently came on the scene with a genuinely new philosophy, and there are lots of less popular apps, mostly one-person-show kinds of things, with different approaches to how editing music should work. Another musical notation program which has quite some fans in Germany is capella: https://www.capella-software.com/us/index.cfm/products/capella/info-capella/ https://www.capella-software.com/us/index.cfm/products/capel...