16 ms·

Clairnote: An alternative music notation system

197 points by agmand 4y ago

EamonnMR 4y ago
It's really hard to see the difference between sitting on top vs inside the line.
lc9er 4y ago
This is interesting. Growing up, I had 8 years of music theory, so reading standard notation is second nature. In high school and later on in rock/metal bands, I never actually used it. It was far more common to use guitar tablature (even though I was the drummer). Tab is more of a short-hand system, giving you fret markings and measures, but usually omitting rhythmic notation. To me, this system is actually more confusing. The spacing is kind of hard to see. Maybe it's because I keep trying to read it as if it were standard notation. I wonder if it would help someone starting from scratch.
- deleted 4y ago
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- michelpp 4y ago
  > In high school and later on in rock/metal bands, I never actually used it. It was far more common to use guitar tablature I know you know this, but I'd like to point out for others that Tab is specific to the guitar family (basses, ukulele, etc) it does not work for any other kind of instrument.
- CuriouslyC 4y ago
  Tabs are so much better than old school sheet music for guitar (drum sheet music I don't mind), maybe some people want to figure out their own fretting but I'm fine being spoon fed (even being a finger style weirdo).
acjohnson55 4y ago
This is interesting! As weird as the standard notation system is, it works pretty well for tonal music. If you know how to play your instrument within a given key, music takes the same basic shape on the staff, even if it's transposed. It also keeps most pieces pretty compact, even if they have a wide range. However, standard notation is also notoriously difficult to learn, to the point that many virtuoso players never actually learn it (especially guitar players). Clairnote appears to respect most of the most useful properties of standard notation, except maybe efficiency with vertical space. Maybe some day I'll give it a try.
- nine_k 4y ago
  To me, this notation fixes a number of annoying bugs of the traditional notation. They clearly show each fix. Each fix clearly makes sense. (I wish this notation were adopted since Bach's WTK was published. Alas.)
  - aidenn0 4y ago
    The fixes are all about directness, consistency, and intuitiveness. Legibility is never mentioned Tonal music is arguably more suited to the original than this is, where small differences in distance from the lines can make for a different note. For example, I claim that the tonic scale will be more legible in traditional notation than in clarinote; portions of the tonic scale make up a significant fraction of music that many people read. TFA never claims that chords and/or arpeggios will be easier to read under the new notation, and I don't have a strong opinion on that one after my brief time with it.
    - acjohnson55 4y ago
      Good point that stepwise tonal motion is much more apparent in standard notation. Maybe there would be a way to augment the notation for that, perhaps at the cost of losing some of the commonalities they kept. For instance, if you're willing to play with the duration notation, maybe you can use filled-in notes for notes within the key and hollow notes for accidentals. Or something. Or maybe they could have done the staff lines differently.
tomthe 4y ago
I am of course sceptical whether this notation system will gain a bigger following, but I really appreciate their nice website and how they clearly communicate their idea. They even have a nice interactive online tutorial: https://clairnote.org/learn/ https://clairnote.org/learn/
TOGoS 4y ago
I like it. As a kid (and well into my 30s[1]), any time I tried to learn 'music theory' I was put off by the feeling that what I was learning was more about the goofy and confusing standard notation than it was about music. By fixing the notation that barrier could be removed and students could get straight into the interesting stuff sooner. At least I think it would have helped me! [1] I eventually came to understand a lot of the concepts about scales/keys/etc by ignoring the notation and just horsing around on my MIDI keyboard a lot.
InitialLastName 4y ago
At a glance, this is a neat concept, but doesn't seem to come at the problem from the perspective of the most common users of music notation (experienced musicians); rather, it appears to have been written by somebody who was frustrated by trying to learn to read music. For experienced musicians, the priorities are a) legibility for sight-reading and transcription (which this system, with indistinguishable sitting/hanging notes and pervasive ledger lines fails) and b) musical context for expressive decisions, such as information about key, mode, modulation and harmonic content as hinted at by the key signatures and accidentals (which this system downplays as unnecessary).
- Jeff_Brown 4y ago
  That does appear to be its origin. And if you take 12 equal divisions of the octave as a given, Clairnote seems more natural. OTOH once you're thinking in terms of a 7-tone subset, maybe traditional notation is more natural. (It certainly is to me, but I haven't given Clairnote a try.) Traditional notation uses the scale degree as the fundamental unit, whereas this uses the 12-edo chromatic tone as the fundamental unit. While it's not a big deal to most musicians, there are a lot of microtonal variations of traditional notation (my favorite is HEWM[1]). A 12-edo notation like CLairnote could be similarly modified, but it seems awkward, because (most) microtonal systems don't start from 12 equal divisions of the octave. I don't think the sitting/hanging notes are indistinguishable. But they do need to be distinguished, which means it's more work than looking at a traditional between-two-lines note. I find it difficult. Clairnote does make key signatures available. Surely any real composer would include them, or something equally or more informative (e.g. the text "G dorian"). [1] http://www.tonalsoft.com/enc/h/hewm.aspx http://www.tonalsoft.com/enc/h/hewm.aspx
  - iainmerrick 4y ago
    I'm very surprised they don't make the sitting/hanging notes semicircular, so they're much more visually distinct (like stalactites and stalagmites). Instead they seem to have tried two different systems for the sitting/hanging notes, both of which look very hard to read to me: https://clairnote.org/clairnote-dn-clairnote-sn/ https://clairnote.org/clairnote-dn-clairnote-sn/ (although as you say, if you already know traditional notation it's hard to look at this with an unbiased eye).
iainmerrick 4y ago
I hate to be too much of a downer as there are some nice ideas here, but I can see at least three problems with this: 1) First and foremost, of course, the massive entrenched investment in traditional notation. It's like trying to replace the QWERTY keyboard. 2) More risk of transcription errors in written music. The difference between "sitting just above the line" and "sitting on the line" is quite subtle. 3) This is strictly tied to the 12-note equal temperament scale, with enharmonic sharps and flats. Traditional notation works fairly well with many alternate tunings, e.g. 19-note equal temperament (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/19_equal_temperament https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/19_equal_temperament) Edit to add: looking more closely, it does include a notation to distinguish between e.g. G# and Ab, but as it's optional for most music it comes across as an afterthought that most people won't learn; and as in the previous point, it looks ripe for transcription errors. # and b are a little weird but at least they look very different! I really like that this tries to be a more general-purpose system without being biased towards western classical diatonic music, but it looks significantly worse for that style of music (point 2) while not necessarily being significantly better for other styles (point 3). Easy transposition across octaves is nice, but not exactly a killer feature. That's already one of the easiest things you can do on most instruments.
- Jeff_Brown 4y ago
  > the massive entrenched investment At first I thought it would be like switching from Facebook to Mastodon. But if there is automatic translation software, it wouldn't actually be as hard -- you can just wear your own Clairnote lenses when you want, without bothering the other musicians. > The difference between "sitting just above the line" and "sitting on the line" is quite subtle. Agreed. It seems worth using different heads for the two kinds of notes.
  - iainmerrick 4y ago
    That's a good point; if/when all the scores are fully electronic, they could easily be transcribed automatically. Anyone know how close we are to that? I feel like I'm seeing many more professional classical musicians using iPads rather than paper scores, but I don't know if they're just looking at scanned scores, or something like MIDI that can be freely transliterated.
abanayev 4y ago
Applause for the effort but I doubt that this will become popular. Music notation has been a certain way for hundreds of years for musicians around the world – a notation with the universal legibility of mathematics. However, as someone who sight-reads all of his piano music, I'd be interested in experiencing if this makes sight-reading any easier or harder. It's taken many years of experience to be able to spot and predict patterns several measures ahead of where I'm playing, and I wonder if future musicians could get to advanced sight-reading levels more quickly using an alternative notation.
- jan_Inkepa 4y ago
  >Applause for the effort but I doubt that this will become popular. Music notation has been a certain way for hundreds of years for musicians around the world – a notation with the universal legibility of mathematics. This system is really compatible with the standard one though? It's essentially a visual skin. Removing the middle line is kinda nice - I remember as a kid having trouble and counting lines a lot to figure out what not something was. The sharp/flat notation seems pretty week though/visually unclear? I'm not sold on the the numbers in the clef symbols - I don't find it so helpful, and don't have a very intuitive sense of what the number of the octaves are. Especially because the rest of the notation is quite visual/geometric, it's odd to see it resorting to adding numbers here (where the normal notation leaves them out unless the clefs are in non-standard octaves).
- iainmerrick 4y ago
  The current piano layout (seven white keys and five black keys) is pretty closely tied to traditional music notation (sharps and flats => black keys), so I'd guess sight-reading with this notation would be harder on current pianos. In principle you could imagine a more regular piano layout that maps well to this more regular notation. In practice, attempts to do that have generally failed and it's hard to see how to make it work. The irregular spacing of the current piano layout can be frustrating, but it fits under the fingers pretty well, and it's very useful to be able to identify notes at a glance.
spicyusername 4y ago
Very cool. Every domain is always in need of fresh ideas. Even if they don't directly take off, they still provide valuable perspective and help bolster the process of slow, constant improvement. It would be interesting to see how this, or a similar system, could be extended for any X-TET system, not just 12-TET.
aikiplayer 4y ago
I'm a still learning guitar player (I think I've been taking lessons for ~8.5 yrs and did some piano lessons as a kid and was in school bands). I usually work on solo style arrangements of popular songs but sometimes dabble into learning solos, different parts of songs, etc. I try to transcribe what I'm working on in standard notation generally. For me the hard part isn't writing down the pitch; it's the rhythm and timing. Trying to document vocal parts and/or solos is hard, because they float all around. As others have mentioned, different genres of music document their music differently. Standard notation is probably actually pretty rare. I don't think the pitch notation system in standard notation is harder than learning the underlying concepts (scales are 7 notes, there are half steps between the 3rd and 4th degree and 7th and 8th degree (the octave) of the scales, etc.). It's an interesting approach but I don't think it's solving the harder problem.
scrozier 4y ago
Interesting, well thought out, and well-presented. Just not sure that it solves a problem. It certainly isn't radically easier to learn than traditional notation. And despite other comments here, huge numbers of young people learn traditional notation all the time, with little stress. Maybe, as is true with spoken languages, it becomes harder to learn musical notation as we get older? All the "problems" that this notation "fixes" are essentially non-issues for musicians who already know traditional notation.
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  I mean, English isn't hard to learn if you grew up with it either, but it's still three languages in a trenchcoat with a ton of weird things. I mean, pronounce all of these words that have the same combinations of the letters "ough": though, through, rough, cough, thought, bough, plough, ought and borough. The notation is the same, but it's clearly not adequate to express the difference between pronunciation. If you grew up with it, you Know how they're pronounced, but as a non-native you wouldn't.
  - scrozier 4y ago
    This isn't a parallel argument. There are no ambiguities in standard musical notation that parallel the pronunciation issue you point out in English. Further, there are no non-traditional-music-notation "speakers" trying to learn musical notation. One is (almost) always learning it anew, unless perhaps you're coming at it from a different notation system, which is a different discussion.
    - wl 4y ago
      Intervals are ambiguous on the staff in the traditional system. They're disambiguated by reference to the clef and key signature. The whole point of this new system is to remove that ambiguity so you don't constantly have to keep the clef and key signature in mind when analyzing intervals.
      - scrozier 4y ago
forthetrees 4y ago
I don’t like it!
severak_cz 4y ago
reminds me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodeka_music_notation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodeka_music_notation
jerf 4y ago
I like the idea with the octaves. I'm not as sure about the chromatic stuff; the key signatures are there for a reason and I'm not sure it reduces the cognitive load in an expert. It would in an novice, sure. Possibly said novice would then move on to prefer it as they become an expert, so it's hard to tell. On-the-fly transposition would probably be a bit harder, but perhaps that's a skill level already so high that it's hardly worth optimizing for in the notation anyhow. But definitely there's too much dependency on where note heads are versus the staff. Even in the typography used in the example, the note heads seem to noticeably hang below the line. I'm not sure the vaguely elliptical blobs really work with this system and I'd consider pushing another step away from conventional notation and distinguishing with something more visually clear, e.g., normal heads on the lines, squared-off heads if they are a half step away or something. Something that makes it completely unambiguous whether a note is on or in the line. ("Unfortunately" conventional notation that this is trying to be compatible with has already consumed whether the head is hollow.) I would also like to see something less trivial on the intro page. In HN terms, visual programming always looks awesome as long as you're demonstrating something drop-dead simple like simply traversing a linked list or something. Show something with a bit more crunch in it, like even something as simple as a quicksort, and the vast majority of visual programming pitches suddenly look a lot less compelling. All the PDFs on the bottom of the page 404'd for me, but I'd like to see something inline. Still, some interesting ideas here. The standard system is definitely a bit wrapped around a piano. I could see how this could simplify teaching any instrument that makes one tone at a time; all the rules for reading music become "this note -> this fingering/position/valves/etc", which would smooth over the first couple of years nicely. One of the tensions of the current system is the learning novice vs. the expert. The current system is heavily tilted towards an expert. At the time it was written, that was appropriate. Building some more novice-friendly features in might be more appropriate in a more democratized era. (Though how one gets past the switching costs here for any alternate notation I have no idea.)
midenginedcoupe 4y ago
I'm not entirely sure who's the target audience of this new notation. I've been reading music for 40 years and don't think I've once needed the vertical gaps between notes to tell me whether an interval was a major or a minor third. In fact, I think in terms of steps in the scale, not whether those steps are flattened or not. So equi-distant vertical spacing for the notes in a major scale better fits my mental model. But that's just my own preference/habit. The real sticking point for me is the ambiguity of whether a note head is exactly on a line or just below. Sight reading needs that decision to be immediate - picking out whether the note is just below the line inamongst some large and rapid intervallic jumps is going to be almost impossible. Also, I'm not sure the author has understood one of the key rationales for these other clefs - that the number of ledger lines can be minimised. E.g. Playing in the upper register of the trombone is an exercise in parsing 4-6 ledger lines, which can get tricky especially with rough hand-written charts. Switching to tenor or even alto clef keeps everything nicely within the stave and easier to read. Where in the staff the 'C' sits is just a detail, and it's surprisingly quick to get used to different clefs with different centres.
- sfblah 4y ago
  I basically agree. On a piano, this notation has the significant negative of making it unclear which notes are played on "white" keys and which are played on "black" keys, in the key of C. It's pretty useful to have that explicitly marked.
andrewzah 4y ago
To my eyes this is way harder to read than traditional notation, which really isn't hard to learn and works well for most music (and non-12TET music). It's hard to see if a note is on a line or just above/under it.
- MattPalmer1086 4y ago
  Same here. The different notes look too similar.
- nameless912 4y ago
  Same. Maybe it's my bias from having played piano for going on 25 years, but this notation is just irritating to look at, and has way more ambiguity than the standard system to my eyes. It also seems like it's less compact, which is a _huge_ problem. If you ever look at older ürtexts and the like, music notation is traditionally very dense to save paper and engraving costs. I don't think anything that makes music less dense is going to fly in the industry.
rawling 4y ago
I couldn't figure out the justification for middle C being on a ledger line, and then the D above it being higher up, but on the higher of two ledger lines.
- projektfu 4y ago
  It follows the same pattern in the middle of the staff. Between the two bottom lines is another whole step represented by a ledger line. I thought it was odd too but I can see how it makes sense, given that they want to unambiguously represent half steps.
jef_leppard 4y ago
I’m a musician who can’t read music notation and found it hard to pick up when I’ve tried. I assume I’m the target demographic for this system. At first glance I can’t for the life of me understand why I’d put the time into learning this. For one, it doesn’t appear to make anything that I personally struggle with any simpler. For two, the entire point of learning to read music is to communicate with other musicians. If I am writing my ideas in some bespoke system that no one else knows, what’s the point?
harry-wood 4y ago
Top search result for "alternative music notation" is https://www.dodekamusic.com https://www.dodekamusic.com which looks like it has the same ideas, plus a rectangular rhythm design which makes it all _look_ different at a glance (for better or worse)
- Toutouxc 4y ago
  What I like about Dodeka is not their notation, but the Dodeka keyboard. I'm learning to play the piano now and the amount of stupid unnecessary complexity stemming from the fact that we've designed the keyboard to make playing in a single specific key easier and fuck everything else, is hurting my programmer brain. That, and the fact that small-handed male players like me (and like 80 % of women) are gate-kept forever from a significant portion of music, just because. It's a shame that our most versatile instrument is actually not that versatile. We could do better as a humanity.
  - stephen_g 4y ago
    Would their keyboard really be better for hand size? Seems to me that unless the keys were uncomfortably narrow, it would actually require bigger hands to play big chords than on a standard piano because they’re fitting all the notes in a single row instead of two? But I’ve never seen one in real life, let alone tried to play one. I wouldn’t say that the standard keyboard is designed the way it is to make any one key “easier”, it’s more just the result of mapping the mapping based on how our notation works, and it’s just happens to be that one key doesn’t have sharps or flats so you don’t need the black keys, so it’s easier at first… Thinking of it in the way you said is probably unhelpful. Eventually every scale becomes as easy with muscle memory if you practice enough, but the best thing to do is to try and do scales and chords by thinking about what the intervals should be. Getting intuition for that is a killer skill, especially for playing by ear when you can hear something and your fingers instantly know where to go to play it after finding the first note.
  - yboris 4y ago
    Makes me think of the Jankó keyboard which has so many benefits I would love to get one someday. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jank%C3%B3_keyboard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jank%C3%B3_keyboard
yboris 4y ago
There's also Hummingbird notation: https://www.hummingbirdnotation.com/ https://www.hummingbirdnotation.com/
abecedarius 4y ago
> In traditional music notation notes an octave apart do not resemble each other. This is what I'd emphasize. To sight read, the mapping from sign to note has to be so automatic it's unconscious. In standard notation this mapping looks different at every one of the middle four octaves, which nearly quadruples the size of the "multiplication table" you're installing in memory. Since your exposure in practice to the further ends of that range is less frequent, you're still slowed down by some notes even once the middle ones are automatic to you. (And there's probably some "cross talk" for a long time -- at least, that's how it felt to me.) It's strange to me when people are like "eh, what's the big deal" about a UX failure that seems this big.
- bentcorner 4y ago
  At least for me as a very casual musician, I instinctively know how to map all the notes on the staff and maybe 2/2.5 lines above/below. Most sheet music uses the octave above/below notation when necessary too, so it's not common (for me) to need more than that. When I was younger and played more complex pieces, my teacher and I would sometimes write down notes that were way out there just to help things along. Personally at first glance this notation is jarring to read, and I don't know if it would make sense investing in learning this when literally everything else I've seen and own is traditionally notated. Where I find challenge in music is not understanding notes quickly enough, it's my physical mechanics, memory, and expressiveness.
- reikonomusha 4y ago
  I don't agree with this "multiplication table" idea. Octaves have the same physical distance between notes on the page in traditional notation, so they can be identified at a glance. People typically do not read octaves by deciphering the bottom note, deciphering the top note, and saying "ah, this is an octave".
  - abhorrence 4y ago
    And even if they did, the stems of the notes (excluding half and whole notes) traditionally are as long as the distance between octaves. One of the things that I think makes traditional notation more robust for experts is the redundancy of information. It also helps that for many instruments there’s a mapping between the layout of the instrument and the notation! This is less true for brass and the violin family, though I think even with them there are probably some arguments to be made about the harmonic series, or the spacing of strings in fifths.
karmakaze 4y ago
[I don't read music.] From stories/videos I've watched on the topic, musician's don't so much read absolute notes but notes of a scale. A trained one knows their scales and can represent them with the letters A-G once each, using sharps or flats as necessary. I'd also expect them to know exactly where each note name/sharp/flat is on the instrument they play. There's also an affinity for piano being a sort-of reference instrument pertaining to mapping of scales as it has the least idiosyncratic placement of notes compared to other instruments. What about a scale that has lines for the white keys of the piano and larger spaces where black keys appear would be 1:1 with piano, but there would be too high a density of lines. So how about we make the black keys the lines and we can have single spaces for single white keys and double spaces where two white keys intervene the black ones? That almost makes sense as the lines are black and the page/spaces are white.
moultano 4y ago
I've struggled with reading music despite years of piano lessons, years of church and school choirs, and being the main arranger for my college a cappella group. Watching the video of the Blue Danube Waltz on that page was amazing. I felt for the first time like the shapes of the things on the page actually corresponded well to the musical concepts in my head. I know it's an extremely uphill battle to actually get anything like this adopted, but I think it would do wonders for teaching and working with music. How many musical concepts would suddenly be obvious to people if they could actually see them directly on the page without layers of translation in between?
- recursive 4y ago
  I'm not an apologist for music notation as it exists today, but it doesn't seem obvious that this is a net improvement. I watched the Blue Danube video. Apparently, I still don't understand the notation. There are some notes in the bottom staff that are sitting on the middle ledger line in a group of three. I don't see a thing where it's explained what that means. I don't get it.
jedimastert 4y ago
Tantacrul made a really interesting video about how incredibly difficult it is to make a notation font that might be a good watch[0], and I say that to say this: I see an issue here that left me confused for several minutes: the little bit of overlap when a note is attached to a line but not intersecting it looks like an alignment mistake and leaves ambiguity. My recommendation would be to have no overlap, with the top/bottom pixel of the note head in line with the top/bottom pixel of the staff line, like traditional notation. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGo4PJd1lng https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGo4PJd1lng
jedimastert 4y ago
The main "problem" I see this notation style as trying to "solve" is that the standard 5 line western notation is built around a very strong affinity and "default" of the western diatonic scales. For any key/mode, if you're within that pattern then relationships of notes and notation is very clear. This is also enforced by the note names themselves, with A to A being a Aeolian/natural minor scale that fits into this same pattern. It's interesting (and useful) to step outside of this default, but IMO in for a penny in for a pound; there really should be a commitment to a complete separation, at least as a "default". The examples are trying to connect a notation decoupled from the diatonic scale back to that same diatonic. Even if you do stick with the other "assumptions" made here: - 12 equal tones per octave - octave-equivalent - divisive rhythm IMO you should change the note names. Numbers would be preferable to me, although maybe confusing given the use of numbers in western music analysis. Perhaps O-Z?
KaiserPro 4y ago
As someone who has a difficult time reading music, at first glance this looks like it might help. My main issue is that note in the middle of the stave are essentially unknowable for me. middle c-f is doable. but in the middle it get very fuzzy, too many lines. I thought this notation might solve that, but instead of having notes with lines through them to indicate notes on a line, they are slightly above/below. That for me makes it very hard, even though most of the stave has been removed.
jancsika 4y ago
Has anyone tried turning the entire grand staff 90 degrees counterclockwise and animate the notes toward the player, Guitar-hero style?
exabrial 4y ago
Electric bass player here. Oh and I'm quite mediocre too. I think a musical notation system should not be driven by edge cases, which is what a bunch of HNers pointing out where this system falls short (microtonals, equal temperment sucks, etc, blah blah). Second, I think standard notation is designed for piano soloists, not for bands. I've found the most effective system for sharing musical ideas with a band is the so called "Nashville Numbers System." Why is this? Well because you can't apply a capo to a vocalist. Every time I play with a different vocalist, there's going to be a key change. When we talk in terms of scale degrees "hey guys play 6m, 5/7, root", rather than "oh hey play a Em, D, G, wait j/k, that's too low, can you play G#m, F#, B? oh wait, earl over there says playing G#m on acoustic is impossible, go another half step up" everything is easy. What does this require? Every musician needs to memorize scales, which isn't very hard. The process is: decide on the root as a band, then jam. And you handle accidentals as they come up as edge cases, rather than have them drive the bus off a cliff. So how can we take this successful concept and apply it to notation? I think there are two main issues with standard notation: First, the key signature is embedded into the notation. This was like HTML before CSS: the presentation should be separated from the content. Here's the hill I'll die on: given that you're going to be playing in equal temperament, we don't need to have _any_ information about the key in musical notation. The only thing that matters is intervals. 99.95% of the audience doesn't have perfect pitch and they don't care either. All notes on the staff should be relative to some arbitrary root. Which brings us to the second problem: Standard notation does not represent octaves consistently. This is the dumbest UX failure that annoys the absolute shit of out me as a bass player. If I want to mirror the melody line in a song for a section, I have to switch my brain from reading Bass clef where I live, to fumbling through Treble cleff notes, and they're all in the wrong spots. Looking at the link, there are some improvements on the above two points. I do think there is still a leaky abstraction about the key signature. Given that I write things down as relative scale degrees anyway, I'd take this over standard notation any day if I learned to read it.
gnulinux 4y ago
I don't like it because it's not backwards compatible with traditional Western notation. This will cause problems with anyone transcribing Clairnote work without being an expert. What looks like G, actually notates G#. Major problem imho.
skybrian 4y ago
I play both piano and chromatic button accordion (a little). One thing that seems a bit harder on button accordion is going up the scale playing thirds or sixths, because you need to be aware of which are major versus minor thirds (or sixths) in the diatonic scale you're using. With a piano, the keyboard mostly takes care of this, at least in easier keys. It seems like this notation has similar issues in emphasizing the chromatic scale over diatonic scales maybe a little too much?
dr_j_ 4y ago
I’m a guitarist and I can’t understand either.
kadenwolff 4y ago
This music would be extremely hard to sight-read. The only aspect of it that I like is that it is key-agnostic. It would be cool to see atonal music written in this notation system. But for professional musicians this isn't worth learning.
the_other 4y ago
At first I thought the “missing” line in the middle of each stave would help me. My myopia, astigmatism and nystagmus make traditional notation incredibly difficult to read, on top of its inherent complexity. The “missing” line actually clarifies the top and bottom two lines. However, the multiple positions notes can sit relative to a line, and the seemingly arbitrary number of optional lines make this system completely unworkable, for me.
armagon 4y ago
I think Clairnote is pretty neat. There are more alternate musical notation systems at http://musicnotation.org http://musicnotation.org. The current system we use because it is the one experts know and music is written in. I'm sure it could be worse, but I feel like it has a ton of backwards-compatible features as add-ons that would be so much cleaner with a rewrite. The very simplest change that could be made would be to have a grand staff that uses the same clef, so people don't need to learn two of them. I don't think we'll actually see a change until such time as you could put on a pair of AR glasses, which could recognize/OCR your music, and then, on-the-fly 'transnotate' the song into a sane notation. (Perhaps the same could be said for making English more phonetic; and, perhaps it will never happen; in the meantime, I can't help but feeling that hundreds of hours are needlessly spent learning this system that wouldn't be needed with a simpler one, many people who'd like to learn it never do, and, oddly, plenty of singers sing better because they can't read the written notation!).
throwaway675309 4y ago
The problem with something like this is that it's basically the musical equivalent of the artificially constructed language Esperanto. It will NEVER gain any significant traction in the existing world of musicians.
code_runner 4y ago
I get the same feelings whenever somebody comes up with a "better" flavor of SQL that is "more logical" or "more expressive".... I know SQL well, it does what I want, and I think its great. When people "solve problems" with it, they're complaining about things they never tried to understand. This is a lot like that. I wish I was better at music.... I wish I had more skill etc... but the barrier is not my ability to read music.... a multi-note instrument like guitar/piano is much harder (in my personal experience) than a single note like trumpet/saxophone... and guitar tabulature exists for that reason... but its guitar specific and is probably a bridge for most in the beginning of their learning (not unlike a saxophone fingering chart).... but I don't see general use music notation being revolutionized anytime soon.... mostly because it does not need to be.
egypturnash 4y ago
All the example PDFs are 404.
danbmil99 4y ago
I suspect the younger generation of (self-taught) composers rely heavily on the grid or matrix modes in popular DAW's -- they visually represent the 12-tone chromatic scale in an intuitive and accessible way that reflects both how we hear music, and how the notes lie on a fretboard or keyboard.
shannifin 4y ago
While standard notation already seems optimal to me for performing music, it does leave something to be desired for analyzing harmony and composing, mainly because things like major and minor thirds look exactly the same. So I would love a notation system that made harmonic relations easier to see. I'm not sure yet if this is it, but I definitely like the idea!
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zharknado 4y ago
Music major and vocalist here. Seems like the problem is framed as “mapping dots to pitches,” which is a pretty good reduction of what notation does but glosses over some things I value in standard notation. C4 and C5 are not the same. Singing them well requires different techniques, as would playing them well on some instruments. So it doesn’t really bother me that they’re “different” in relation to staff lines (8va and 8vb notwithstanding). More importantly, knowing which scale degree you’re on (in relation to the key) is valuable for interpretation; it has implications for where the harmony is going. Likewise knowing how you function within a chord. If you’re on the third in a diatonic triad, much less volume is required for good balance with the other parts on the root and fifth. Even more so for sevenths, seconds, sixths. You could argue that just listening carefully might allow you to achieve a similar balance by adjusting on the fly, but one advantage of being a skilled music reader is that you can make interpretation decisions before you execute them, even if you’ve never performed the music before. Edit: clarified difference between scale degree and function within chord.
metaketa 4y ago
Is there a rendering SDK available? If you integrate it with https://parture.org https://parture.org you'll get the whole existing sheet music ecosystem for free.

197 points by agmand 4y ago

It's really hard to see the difference between sitting on top vs inside the line.

This is interesting. Growing up, I had 8 years of music theory, so reading standard notation is second nature. In high school and later on in rock/metal bands, I never actually used it. It was far more common to use guitar tablature (even though I was the drummer). Tab is more of a short-hand system, giving you fret markings and measures, but usually omitting rhythmic notation. To me, this system is actually more confusing. The spacing is kind of hard to see. Maybe it's because I keep trying to read it as if it were standard notation. I wonder if it would help someone starting from scratch.

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michelpp 4y ago
> In high school and later on in rock/metal bands, I never actually used it. It was far more common to use guitar tablature I know you know this, but I'd like to point out for others that Tab is specific to the guitar family (basses, ukulele, etc) it does not work for any other kind of instrument.
CuriouslyC 4y ago
Tabs are so much better than old school sheet music for guitar (drum sheet music I don't mind), maybe some people want to figure out their own fretting but I'm fine being spoon fed (even being a finger style weirdo).

acjohnson55 4y ago

This is interesting! As weird as the standard notation system is, it works pretty well for tonal music. If you know how to play your instrument within a given key, music takes the same basic shape on the staff, even if it's transposed. It also keeps most pieces pretty compact, even if they have a wide range. However, standard notation is also notoriously difficult to learn, to the point that many virtuoso players never actually learn it (especially guitar players). Clairnote appears to respect most of the most useful properties of standard notation, except maybe efficiency with vertical space. Maybe some day I'll give it a try.

nine_k 4y ago
To me, this notation fixes a number of annoying bugs of the traditional notation. They clearly show each fix. Each fix clearly makes sense. (I wish this notation were adopted since Bach's WTK was published. Alas.)
- aidenn0 4y ago
  The fixes are all about directness, consistency, and intuitiveness. Legibility is never mentioned Tonal music is arguably more suited to the original than this is, where small differences in distance from the lines can make for a different note. For example, I claim that the tonic scale will be more legible in traditional notation than in clarinote; portions of the tonic scale make up a significant fraction of music that many people read. TFA never claims that chords and/or arpeggios will be easier to read under the new notation, and I don't have a strong opinion on that one after my brief time with it.
  - acjohnson55 4y ago
    Good point that stepwise tonal motion is much more apparent in standard notation. Maybe there would be a way to augment the notation for that, perhaps at the cost of losing some of the commonalities they kept. For instance, if you're willing to play with the duration notation, maybe you can use filled-in notes for notes within the key and hollow notes for accidentals. Or something. Or maybe they could have done the staff lines differently.

tomthe 4y ago

I am of course sceptical whether this notation system will gain a bigger following, but I really appreciate their nice website and how they clearly communicate their idea. They even have a nice interactive online tutorial: https://clairnote.org/learn/ https://clairnote.org/learn/

TOGoS 4y ago

I like it. As a kid (and well into my 30s[1]), any time I tried to learn 'music theory' I was put off by the feeling that what I was learning was more about the goofy and confusing standard notation than it was about music. By fixing the notation that barrier could be removed and students could get straight into the interesting stuff sooner. At least I think it would have helped me! [1] I eventually came to understand a lot of the concepts about scales/keys/etc by ignoring the notation and just horsing around on my MIDI keyboard a lot.

InitialLastName 4y ago

At a glance, this is a neat concept, but doesn't seem to come at the problem from the perspective of the most common users of music notation (experienced musicians); rather, it appears to have been written by somebody who was frustrated by trying to learn to read music. For experienced musicians, the priorities are a) legibility for sight-reading and transcription (which this system, with indistinguishable sitting/hanging notes and pervasive ledger lines fails) and b) musical context for expressive decisions, such as information about key, mode, modulation and harmonic content as hinted at by the key signatures and accidentals (which this system downplays as unnecessary).

Jeff_Brown 4y ago
That does appear to be its origin. And if you take 12 equal divisions of the octave as a given, Clairnote seems more natural. OTOH once you're thinking in terms of a 7-tone subset, maybe traditional notation is more natural. (It certainly is to me, but I haven't given Clairnote a try.) Traditional notation uses the scale degree as the fundamental unit, whereas this uses the 12-edo chromatic tone as the fundamental unit. While it's not a big deal to most musicians, there are a lot of microtonal variations of traditional notation (my favorite is HEWM[1]). A 12-edo notation like CLairnote could be similarly modified, but it seems awkward, because (most) microtonal systems don't start from 12 equal divisions of the octave. I don't think the sitting/hanging notes are indistinguishable. But they do need to be distinguished, which means it's more work than looking at a traditional between-two-lines note. I find it difficult. Clairnote does make key signatures available. Surely any real composer would include them, or something equally or more informative (e.g. the text "G dorian"). [1] http://www.tonalsoft.com/enc/h/hewm.aspx http://www.tonalsoft.com/enc/h/hewm.aspx
- iainmerrick 4y ago
  I'm very surprised they don't make the sitting/hanging notes semicircular, so they're much more visually distinct (like stalactites and stalagmites). Instead they seem to have tried two different systems for the sitting/hanging notes, both of which look very hard to read to me: https://clairnote.org/clairnote-dn-clairnote-sn/ https://clairnote.org/clairnote-dn-clairnote-sn/ (although as you say, if you already know traditional notation it's hard to look at this with an unbiased eye).

iainmerrick 4y ago

I hate to be too much of a downer as there are some nice ideas here, but I can see at least three problems with this: 1) First and foremost, of course, the massive entrenched investment in traditional notation. It's like trying to replace the QWERTY keyboard. 2) More risk of transcription errors in written music. The difference between "sitting just above the line" and "sitting on the line" is quite subtle. 3) This is strictly tied to the 12-note equal temperament scale, with enharmonic sharps and flats. Traditional notation works fairly well with many alternate tunings, e.g. 19-note equal temperament (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/19_equal_temperament https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/19_equal_temperament) Edit to add: looking more closely, it does include a notation to distinguish between e.g. G# and Ab, but as it's optional for most music it comes across as an afterthought that most people won't learn; and as in the previous point, it looks ripe for transcription errors. # and b are a little weird but at least they look very different! I really like that this tries to be a more general-purpose system without being biased towards western classical diatonic music, but it looks significantly worse for that style of music (point 2) while not necessarily being significantly better for other styles (point 3). Easy transposition across octaves is nice, but not exactly a killer feature. That's already one of the easiest things you can do on most instruments.

Jeff_Brown 4y ago
> the massive entrenched investment At first I thought it would be like switching from Facebook to Mastodon. But if there is automatic translation software, it wouldn't actually be as hard -- you can just wear your own Clairnote lenses when you want, without bothering the other musicians. > The difference between "sitting just above the line" and "sitting on the line" is quite subtle. Agreed. It seems worth using different heads for the two kinds of notes.
- iainmerrick 4y ago
  That's a good point; if/when all the scores are fully electronic, they could easily be transcribed automatically. Anyone know how close we are to that? I feel like I'm seeing many more professional classical musicians using iPads rather than paper scores, but I don't know if they're just looking at scanned scores, or something like MIDI that can be freely transliterated.

abanayev 4y ago

Applause for the effort but I doubt that this will become popular. Music notation has been a certain way for hundreds of years for musicians around the world – a notation with the universal legibility of mathematics. However, as someone who sight-reads all of his piano music, I'd be interested in experiencing if this makes sight-reading any easier or harder. It's taken many years of experience to be able to spot and predict patterns several measures ahead of where I'm playing, and I wonder if future musicians could get to advanced sight-reading levels more quickly using an alternative notation.

jan_Inkepa 4y ago
>Applause for the effort but I doubt that this will become popular. Music notation has been a certain way for hundreds of years for musicians around the world – a notation with the universal legibility of mathematics. This system is really compatible with the standard one though? It's essentially a visual skin. Removing the middle line is kinda nice - I remember as a kid having trouble and counting lines a lot to figure out what not something was. The sharp/flat notation seems pretty week though/visually unclear? I'm not sold on the the numbers in the clef symbols - I don't find it so helpful, and don't have a very intuitive sense of what the number of the octaves are. Especially because the rest of the notation is quite visual/geometric, it's odd to see it resorting to adding numbers here (where the normal notation leaves them out unless the clefs are in non-standard octaves).
iainmerrick 4y ago
The current piano layout (seven white keys and five black keys) is pretty closely tied to traditional music notation (sharps and flats => black keys), so I'd guess sight-reading with this notation would be harder on current pianos. In principle you could imagine a more regular piano layout that maps well to this more regular notation. In practice, attempts to do that have generally failed and it's hard to see how to make it work. The irregular spacing of the current piano layout can be frustrating, but it fits under the fingers pretty well, and it's very useful to be able to identify notes at a glance.

spicyusername 4y ago

Very cool. Every domain is always in need of fresh ideas. Even if they don't directly take off, they still provide valuable perspective and help bolster the process of slow, constant improvement. It would be interesting to see how this, or a similar system, could be extended for any X-TET system, not just 12-TET.

aikiplayer 4y ago

I'm a still learning guitar player (I think I've been taking lessons for ~8.5 yrs and did some piano lessons as a kid and was in school bands). I usually work on solo style arrangements of popular songs but sometimes dabble into learning solos, different parts of songs, etc. I try to transcribe what I'm working on in standard notation generally. For me the hard part isn't writing down the pitch; it's the rhythm and timing. Trying to document vocal parts and/or solos is hard, because they float all around. As others have mentioned, different genres of music document their music differently. Standard notation is probably actually pretty rare. I don't think the pitch notation system in standard notation is harder than learning the underlying concepts (scales are 7 notes, there are half steps between the 3rd and 4th degree and 7th and 8th degree (the octave) of the scales, etc.). It's an interesting approach but I don't think it's solving the harder problem.

scrozier 4y ago

Interesting, well thought out, and well-presented. Just not sure that it solves a problem. It certainly isn't radically easier to learn than traditional notation. And despite other comments here, huge numbers of young people learn traditional notation all the time, with little stress. Maybe, as is true with spoken languages, it becomes harder to learn musical notation as we get older? All the "problems" that this notation "fixes" are essentially non-issues for musicians who already know traditional notation.

Cthulhu_ 4y ago
I mean, English isn't hard to learn if you grew up with it either, but it's still three languages in a trenchcoat with a ton of weird things. I mean, pronounce all of these words that have the same combinations of the letters "ough": though, through, rough, cough, thought, bough, plough, ought and borough. The notation is the same, but it's clearly not adequate to express the difference between pronunciation. If you grew up with it, you Know how they're pronounced, but as a non-native you wouldn't.
- scrozier 4y ago
  This isn't a parallel argument. There are no ambiguities in standard musical notation that parallel the pronunciation issue you point out in English. Further, there are no non-traditional-music-notation "speakers" trying to learn musical notation. One is (almost) always learning it anew, unless perhaps you're coming at it from a different notation system, which is a different discussion.
  - wl 4y ago
    Intervals are ambiguous on the staff in the traditional system. They're disambiguated by reference to the clef and key signature. The whole point of this new system is to remove that ambiguity so you don't constantly have to keep the clef and key signature in mind when analyzing intervals.
    - scrozier 4y ago

forthetrees 4y ago

I don’t like it!

severak_cz 4y ago

reminds me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodeka_music_notation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodeka_music_notation

jerf 4y ago

I like the idea with the octaves. I'm not as sure about the chromatic stuff; the key signatures are there for a reason and I'm not sure it reduces the cognitive load in an expert. It would in an novice, sure. Possibly said novice would then move on to prefer it as they become an expert, so it's hard to tell. On-the-fly transposition would probably be a bit harder, but perhaps that's a skill level already so high that it's hardly worth optimizing for in the notation anyhow. But definitely there's too much dependency on where note heads are versus the staff. Even in the typography used in the example, the note heads seem to noticeably hang below the line. I'm not sure the vaguely elliptical blobs really work with this system and I'd consider pushing another step away from conventional notation and distinguishing with something more visually clear, e.g., normal heads on the lines, squared-off heads if they are a half step away or something. Something that makes it completely unambiguous whether a note is on or in the line. ("Unfortunately" conventional notation that this is trying to be compatible with has already consumed whether the head is hollow.) I would also like to see something less trivial on the intro page. In HN terms, visual programming always looks awesome as long as you're demonstrating something drop-dead simple like simply traversing a linked list or something. Show something with a bit more crunch in it, like even something as simple as a quicksort, and the vast majority of visual programming pitches suddenly look a lot less compelling. All the PDFs on the bottom of the page 404'd for me, but I'd like to see something inline. Still, some interesting ideas here. The standard system is definitely a bit wrapped around a piano. I could see how this could simplify teaching any instrument that makes one tone at a time; all the rules for reading music become "this note -> this fingering/position/valves/etc", which would smooth over the first couple of years nicely. One of the tensions of the current system is the learning novice vs. the expert. The current system is heavily tilted towards an expert. At the time it was written, that was appropriate. Building some more novice-friendly features in might be more appropriate in a more democratized era. (Though how one gets past the switching costs here for any alternate notation I have no idea.)

midenginedcoupe 4y ago

I'm not entirely sure who's the target audience of this new notation. I've been reading music for 40 years and don't think I've once needed the vertical gaps between notes to tell me whether an interval was a major or a minor third. In fact, I think in terms of steps in the scale, not whether those steps are flattened or not. So equi-distant vertical spacing for the notes in a major scale better fits my mental model. But that's just my own preference/habit. The real sticking point for me is the ambiguity of whether a note head is exactly on a line or just below. Sight reading needs that decision to be immediate - picking out whether the note is just below the line inamongst some large and rapid intervallic jumps is going to be almost impossible. Also, I'm not sure the author has understood one of the key rationales for these other clefs - that the number of ledger lines can be minimised. E.g. Playing in the upper register of the trombone is an exercise in parsing 4-6 ledger lines, which can get tricky especially with rough hand-written charts. Switching to tenor or even alto clef keeps everything nicely within the stave and easier to read. Where in the staff the 'C' sits is just a detail, and it's surprisingly quick to get used to different clefs with different centres.

sfblah 4y ago
I basically agree. On a piano, this notation has the significant negative of making it unclear which notes are played on "white" keys and which are played on "black" keys, in the key of C. It's pretty useful to have that explicitly marked.

andrewzah 4y ago

To my eyes this is way harder to read than traditional notation, which really isn't hard to learn and works well for most music (and non-12TET music). It's hard to see if a note is on a line or just above/under it.

MattPalmer1086 4y ago
Same here. The different notes look too similar.
nameless912 4y ago
Same. Maybe it's my bias from having played piano for going on 25 years, but this notation is just irritating to look at, and has way more ambiguity than the standard system to my eyes. It also seems like it's less compact, which is a _huge_ problem. If you ever look at older ürtexts and the like, music notation is traditionally very dense to save paper and engraving costs. I don't think anything that makes music less dense is going to fly in the industry.

rawling 4y ago

I couldn't figure out the justification for middle C being on a ledger line, and then the D above it being higher up, but on the higher of two ledger lines.

projektfu 4y ago
It follows the same pattern in the middle of the staff. Between the two bottom lines is another whole step represented by a ledger line. I thought it was odd too but I can see how it makes sense, given that they want to unambiguously represent half steps.

jef_leppard 4y ago

I’m a musician who can’t read music notation and found it hard to pick up when I’ve tried. I assume I’m the target demographic for this system. At first glance I can’t for the life of me understand why I’d put the time into learning this. For one, it doesn’t appear to make anything that I personally struggle with any simpler. For two, the entire point of learning to read music is to communicate with other musicians. If I am writing my ideas in some bespoke system that no one else knows, what’s the point?

harry-wood 4y ago

Top search result for "alternative music notation" is https://www.dodekamusic.com https://www.dodekamusic.com which looks like it has the same ideas, plus a rectangular rhythm design which makes it all _look_ different at a glance (for better or worse)

Toutouxc 4y ago
What I like about Dodeka is not their notation, but the Dodeka keyboard. I'm learning to play the piano now and the amount of stupid unnecessary complexity stemming from the fact that we've designed the keyboard to make playing in a single specific key easier and fuck everything else, is hurting my programmer brain. That, and the fact that small-handed male players like me (and like 80 % of women) are gate-kept forever from a significant portion of music, just because. It's a shame that our most versatile instrument is actually not that versatile. We could do better as a humanity.
- stephen_g 4y ago
  Would their keyboard really be better for hand size? Seems to me that unless the keys were uncomfortably narrow, it would actually require bigger hands to play big chords than on a standard piano because they’re fitting all the notes in a single row instead of two? But I’ve never seen one in real life, let alone tried to play one. I wouldn’t say that the standard keyboard is designed the way it is to make any one key “easier”, it’s more just the result of mapping the mapping based on how our notation works, and it’s just happens to be that one key doesn’t have sharps or flats so you don’t need the black keys, so it’s easier at first… Thinking of it in the way you said is probably unhelpful. Eventually every scale becomes as easy with muscle memory if you practice enough, but the best thing to do is to try and do scales and chords by thinking about what the intervals should be. Getting intuition for that is a killer skill, especially for playing by ear when you can hear something and your fingers instantly know where to go to play it after finding the first note.
- yboris 4y ago
  Makes me think of the Jankó keyboard which has so many benefits I would love to get one someday. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jank%C3%B3_keyboard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jank%C3%B3_keyboard

yboris 4y ago

There's also Hummingbird notation: https://www.hummingbirdnotation.com/ https://www.hummingbirdnotation.com/

abecedarius 4y ago

> In traditional music notation notes an octave apart do not resemble each other. This is what I'd emphasize. To sight read, the mapping from sign to note has to be so automatic it's unconscious. In standard notation this mapping looks different at every one of the middle four octaves, which nearly quadruples the size of the "multiplication table" you're installing in memory. Since your exposure in practice to the further ends of that range is less frequent, you're still slowed down by some notes even once the middle ones are automatic to you. (And there's probably some "cross talk" for a long time -- at least, that's how it felt to me.) It's strange to me when people are like "eh, what's the big deal" about a UX failure that seems this big.

bentcorner 4y ago
At least for me as a very casual musician, I instinctively know how to map all the notes on the staff and maybe 2/2.5 lines above/below. Most sheet music uses the octave above/below notation when necessary too, so it's not common (for me) to need more than that. When I was younger and played more complex pieces, my teacher and I would sometimes write down notes that were way out there just to help things along. Personally at first glance this notation is jarring to read, and I don't know if it would make sense investing in learning this when literally everything else I've seen and own is traditionally notated. Where I find challenge in music is not understanding notes quickly enough, it's my physical mechanics, memory, and expressiveness.
reikonomusha 4y ago
I don't agree with this "multiplication table" idea. Octaves have the same physical distance between notes on the page in traditional notation, so they can be identified at a glance. People typically do not read octaves by deciphering the bottom note, deciphering the top note, and saying "ah, this is an octave".
- abhorrence 4y ago
  And even if they did, the stems of the notes (excluding half and whole notes) traditionally are as long as the distance between octaves. One of the things that I think makes traditional notation more robust for experts is the redundancy of information. It also helps that for many instruments there’s a mapping between the layout of the instrument and the notation! This is less true for brass and the violin family, though I think even with them there are probably some arguments to be made about the harmonic series, or the spacing of strings in fifths.

karmakaze 4y ago

[I don't read music.] From stories/videos I've watched on the topic, musician's don't so much read absolute notes but notes of a scale. A trained one knows their scales and can represent them with the letters A-G once each, using sharps or flats as necessary. I'd also expect them to know exactly where each note name/sharp/flat is on the instrument they play. There's also an affinity for piano being a sort-of reference instrument pertaining to mapping of scales as it has the least idiosyncratic placement of notes compared to other instruments. What about a scale that has lines for the white keys of the piano and larger spaces where black keys appear would be 1:1 with piano, but there would be too high a density of lines. So how about we make the black keys the lines and we can have single spaces for single white keys and double spaces where two white keys intervene the black ones? That almost makes sense as the lines are black and the page/spaces are white.

moultano 4y ago

I've struggled with reading music despite years of piano lessons, years of church and school choirs, and being the main arranger for my college a cappella group. Watching the video of the Blue Danube Waltz on that page was amazing. I felt for the first time like the shapes of the things on the page actually corresponded well to the musical concepts in my head. I know it's an extremely uphill battle to actually get anything like this adopted, but I think it would do wonders for teaching and working with music. How many musical concepts would suddenly be obvious to people if they could actually see them directly on the page without layers of translation in between?

recursive 4y ago
I'm not an apologist for music notation as it exists today, but it doesn't seem obvious that this is a net improvement. I watched the Blue Danube video. Apparently, I still don't understand the notation. There are some notes in the bottom staff that are sitting on the middle ledger line in a group of three. I don't see a thing where it's explained what that means. I don't get it.

jedimastert 4y ago

Tantacrul made a really interesting video about how incredibly difficult it is to make a notation font that might be a good watch[0], and I say that to say this: I see an issue here that left me confused for several minutes: the little bit of overlap when a note is attached to a line but not intersecting it looks like an alignment mistake and leaves ambiguity. My recommendation would be to have no overlap, with the top/bottom pixel of the note head in line with the top/bottom pixel of the staff line, like traditional notation. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGo4PJd1lng https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGo4PJd1lng

jedimastert 4y ago

The main "problem" I see this notation style as trying to "solve" is that the standard 5 line western notation is built around a very strong affinity and "default" of the western diatonic scales. For any key/mode, if you're within that pattern then relationships of notes and notation is very clear. This is also enforced by the note names themselves, with A to A being a Aeolian/natural minor scale that fits into this same pattern. It's interesting (and useful) to step outside of this default, but IMO in for a penny in for a pound; there really should be a commitment to a complete separation, at least as a "default". The examples are trying to connect a notation decoupled from the diatonic scale back to that same diatonic. Even if you do stick with the other "assumptions" made here: - 12 equal tones per octave - octave-equivalent - divisive rhythm IMO you should change the note names. Numbers would be preferable to me, although maybe confusing given the use of numbers in western music analysis. Perhaps O-Z?

KaiserPro 4y ago

As someone who has a difficult time reading music, at first glance this looks like it might help. My main issue is that note in the middle of the stave are essentially unknowable for me. middle c-f is doable. but in the middle it get very fuzzy, too many lines. I thought this notation might solve that, but instead of having notes with lines through them to indicate notes on a line, they are slightly above/below. That for me makes it very hard, even though most of the stave has been removed.

jancsika 4y ago

Has anyone tried turning the entire grand staff 90 degrees counterclockwise and animate the notes toward the player, Guitar-hero style?

exabrial 4y ago

Electric bass player here. Oh and I'm quite mediocre too. I think a musical notation system should not be driven by edge cases, which is what a bunch of HNers pointing out where this system falls short (microtonals, equal temperment sucks, etc, blah blah). Second, I think standard notation is designed for piano soloists, not for bands. I've found the most effective system for sharing musical ideas with a band is the so called "Nashville Numbers System." Why is this? Well because you can't apply a capo to a vocalist. Every time I play with a different vocalist, there's going to be a key change. When we talk in terms of scale degrees "hey guys play 6m, 5/7, root", rather than "oh hey play a Em, D, G, wait j/k, that's too low, can you play G#m, F#, B? oh wait, earl over there says playing G#m on acoustic is impossible, go another half step up" everything is easy. What does this require? Every musician needs to memorize scales, which isn't very hard. The process is: decide on the root as a band, then jam. And you handle accidentals as they come up as edge cases, rather than have them drive the bus off a cliff. So how can we take this successful concept and apply it to notation? I think there are two main issues with standard notation: First, the key signature is embedded into the notation. This was like HTML before CSS: the presentation should be separated from the content. Here's the hill I'll die on: given that you're going to be playing in equal temperament, we don't need to have _any_ information about the key in musical notation. The only thing that matters is intervals. 99.95% of the audience doesn't have perfect pitch and they don't care either. All notes on the staff should be relative to some arbitrary root. Which brings us to the second problem: Standard notation does not represent octaves consistently. This is the dumbest UX failure that annoys the absolute shit of out me as a bass player. If I want to mirror the melody line in a song for a section, I have to switch my brain from reading Bass clef where I live, to fumbling through Treble cleff notes, and they're all in the wrong spots. Looking at the link, there are some improvements on the above two points. I do think there is still a leaky abstraction about the key signature. Given that I write things down as relative scale degrees anyway, I'd take this over standard notation any day if I learned to read it.

gnulinux 4y ago

I don't like it because it's not backwards compatible with traditional Western notation. This will cause problems with anyone transcribing Clairnote work without being an expert. What looks like G, actually notates G#. Major problem imho.

skybrian 4y ago

I play both piano and chromatic button accordion (a little). One thing that seems a bit harder on button accordion is going up the scale playing thirds or sixths, because you need to be aware of which are major versus minor thirds (or sixths) in the diatonic scale you're using. With a piano, the keyboard mostly takes care of this, at least in easier keys. It seems like this notation has similar issues in emphasizing the chromatic scale over diatonic scales maybe a little too much?

dr_j_ 4y ago

I’m a guitarist and I can’t understand either.

kadenwolff 4y ago

This music would be extremely hard to sight-read. The only aspect of it that I like is that it is key-agnostic. It would be cool to see atonal music written in this notation system. But for professional musicians this isn't worth learning.

the_other 4y ago

At first I thought the “missing” line in the middle of each stave would help me. My myopia, astigmatism and nystagmus make traditional notation incredibly difficult to read, on top of its inherent complexity. The “missing” line actually clarifies the top and bottom two lines. However, the multiple positions notes can sit relative to a line, and the seemingly arbitrary number of optional lines make this system completely unworkable, for me.

armagon 4y ago

I think Clairnote is pretty neat. There are more alternate musical notation systems at http://musicnotation.org http://musicnotation.org. The current system we use because it is the one experts know and music is written in. I'm sure it could be worse, but I feel like it has a ton of backwards-compatible features as add-ons that would be so much cleaner with a rewrite. The very simplest change that could be made would be to have a grand staff that uses the same clef, so people don't need to learn two of them. I don't think we'll actually see a change until such time as you could put on a pair of AR glasses, which could recognize/OCR your music, and then, on-the-fly 'transnotate' the song into a sane notation. (Perhaps the same could be said for making English more phonetic; and, perhaps it will never happen; in the meantime, I can't help but feeling that hundreds of hours are needlessly spent learning this system that wouldn't be needed with a simpler one, many people who'd like to learn it never do, and, oddly, plenty of singers sing better because they can't read the written notation!).

throwaway675309 4y ago

The problem with something like this is that it's basically the musical equivalent of the artificially constructed language Esperanto. It will NEVER gain any significant traction in the existing world of musicians.

code_runner 4y ago

I get the same feelings whenever somebody comes up with a "better" flavor of SQL that is "more logical" or "more expressive".... I know SQL well, it does what I want, and I think its great. When people "solve problems" with it, they're complaining about things they never tried to understand. This is a lot like that. I wish I was better at music.... I wish I had more skill etc... but the barrier is not my ability to read music.... a multi-note instrument like guitar/piano is much harder (in my personal experience) than a single note like trumpet/saxophone... and guitar tabulature exists for that reason... but its guitar specific and is probably a bridge for most in the beginning of their learning (not unlike a saxophone fingering chart).... but I don't see general use music notation being revolutionized anytime soon.... mostly because it does not need to be.

egypturnash 4y ago

All the example PDFs are 404.

danbmil99 4y ago

I suspect the younger generation of (self-taught) composers rely heavily on the grid or matrix modes in popular DAW's -- they visually represent the 12-tone chromatic scale in an intuitive and accessible way that reflects both how we hear music, and how the notes lie on a fretboard or keyboard.

shannifin 4y ago

While standard notation already seems optimal to me for performing music, it does leave something to be desired for analyzing harmony and composing, mainly because things like major and minor thirds look exactly the same. So I would love a notation system that made harmonic relations easier to see. I'm not sure yet if this is it, but I definitely like the idea!

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zharknado 4y ago

Music major and vocalist here. Seems like the problem is framed as “mapping dots to pitches,” which is a pretty good reduction of what notation does but glosses over some things I value in standard notation. C4 and C5 are not the same. Singing them well requires different techniques, as would playing them well on some instruments. So it doesn’t really bother me that they’re “different” in relation to staff lines (8va and 8vb notwithstanding). More importantly, knowing which scale degree you’re on (in relation to the key) is valuable for interpretation; it has implications for where the harmony is going. Likewise knowing how you function within a chord. If you’re on the third in a diatonic triad, much less volume is required for good balance with the other parts on the root and fifth. Even more so for sevenths, seconds, sixths. You could argue that just listening carefully might allow you to achieve a similar balance by adjusting on the fly, but one advantage of being a skilled music reader is that you can make interpretation decisions before you execute them, even if you’ve never performed the music before. Edit: clarified difference between scale degree and function within chord.

metaketa 4y ago

Is there a rendering SDK available? If you integrate it with https://parture.org https://parture.org you'll get the whole existing sheet music ecosystem for free.