11 ms·

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 musici

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).
- dwringer 4y ago
  I always thought one of the main benefits of a 7-tone subset is that it fits inside working memory. It's also what anyone who grew up with commercial pop music or western classical music has a natural ear for. Not to mention that even just looking at it harmonically, all 12 tones are most certainly not equal from a given root. AFAIU, historically 12-TET is really a compromise, sacrificing some harmonicity to simplify and enable having symmetrical 7-note tonality in any traditional mode starting from any point in any scale. Some modern styles definitely subvert this idea, embracing the full range of chromaticity - but without abandoning 12-TET, they are still playing with the audience's harmonic preconceptions that are based in conventional tonality.
  - Jeff_Brown 4y ago
    > AFAIU, historically 12-TET is really a compromise, sacrificing some harmonicity to simplify and enable having symmetrical 7-note tonality in any traditional mode starting from any point in any scale It is. And it's a surprisingly lucky compromise. By some metrics 19-EDO, 22-EDO and 31-EDO dominate 12-EDO for traditional (5-limit) music theory. (And of course every multiple of 12 does.) But if you want strictly better thirds and fifths, the smallest EDO that qualifies is 41. For anyone interested in big microtonal scales, there's a great website[1] that will render a touchscreen-friendly virtual keyboard with whatever scale and layout (provided it's hexagonal) you want. Don't worry about all the menus to start, just pick something from the first menu, "Tuning\Layout Quick Links". [1] http://terpstrakeyboard.com/web-app/keys.htm http://terpstrakeyboard.com/web-app/keys.htm
- InitialLastName 4y ago
  > I don't think the sitting/hanging notes are indistinguishable. They aren't indistinguishable when rendered by a computer. When rendered by hand (where space notes have a tendency to float from the line to avoid being interpreted as line notes), the F and G especially would be indistinguishable.
- exabrial 4y ago
  > microtonal variations The vast majority of music probably doesn't need this
  - nameless912 4y ago
    The vast majority of _Western_ music doesn't need it, but microtonal music is extremely important in a number of Asian, Middle Eastern, African, and even Eastern European systems.
    - exabrial 4y ago
      Ok... so? Use a different notation, duh. See my point about letting edge cases drive the bus off a cliff.
      - Jeff_Brown 4y ago
        Continuing to use the status quo notation would hardly constitute driving the bus off a cliff. And the cases of microtonality are not that edge. Beyond allowing interoprability among musicians from different cultures, western notation has been critical to most (and there's a lot of it) western microtonal music.
        exabrial 4y ago
        Who the hell cares? Use a different notation for the .00000000001% of the time you ever have to interop with a non 12-tone equal temperament scale.
chrismorgan 4y ago
I’ve gained that impression from every single alternative notation system that’s come up here (a new one comes up every year or two). They have a habit of solving problems that just aren’t problems for experienced readers, while causing problems for experienced readers. (They may also solve some real problems, but when they do, they always involve compromises. Inconsistent octave positioning on the staff is a problem, even if it becomes comparatively minor for fairly experienced readers, but the solution offered for that particular issue here looks lousy to me, the compromises made being considerably worse than the original problem.) In this instance, I look at the subtle vertical placements alone and first guessed rendering imprecision, because I’ve seen that bad and worse from some digital scores, to say nothing of older scores especially with inconsistent ledger line spacing, especially when they’ve been scanned or reprinted or are otherwise aged. I also see something that my dad would struggle to distinguish visually except under fairly strong lighting. This notation looks terribly unsuitable if you don’t have (a) a high-precision, high-resolution display, (b) good lighting, and (c) good eyesight. And it certainly won’t scale down as well, nor is it in any way suitable for hand notation.
- _moof 4y ago
  > They have a habit of solving problems that just aren’t problems for experienced readers, while causing problems for experienced readers. If I had a dollar for every "new way of doing XYZ" made by someone inexperienced who just doesn't want to learn the way we're all doing XYZ just fine...
  - jonnycomputer 4y ago
    Brew vs macports in a nutshell.
    - Elidrake24 4y ago
      What's great is I'm not even sure which one you're disparaging; they both "just work" and stay out of my way.
  - wolverine876 4y ago
blagie 4y ago
The vast majority of users of music notation are amateurs, and being more friendly to amateurs would mean even more users. The vast majority of decision-makers are experienced users with a vested interest in the status quo. The issue is very similar to why corporate systems have such horrible user interfaces. The people making the decisions in IT aren't the normal users of the system. IT cares about features, integrations, and high-level analytics. Employees care to be able to sanely input their time sheets, file an expense report, or buy a stapler. I'd like a system simple enough to use by all the kids in my local elementary school music class, much more than I care about what happens in the local orchestra.
- tgv 4y ago
  The problem, IMO, is that once you have acquired a notation system is that you can’t/won’t make the jump the another one. So if you train beginners with eg. clairnote, they will have a hard time making the jump to a higher difficulty level. It’s not unlike a walled garden.
  - dehrmann 4y ago
    It's a bit like the Dvorak keyboard problem. It's slightly better, but too much of a hassle to bother with. You need something between 2x and 10x better to displace an entrenched incumbent.
    - blagie 4y ago
      I think a better music notation system would easily be at least 2x better for beginners. A rationalized system could mean 100% of kids learn to read and write music, and anyone could understand how to play an instrument like a piano from music (even if not able to do it at full speed). My point was that it could be 10x better, and it wouldn't lead to a switch. The decision-makers aren't the same as the people whom it would benefit. Coincidentally, there are a lot of scientific fields where jargon could be dramatically simplified, to where anyone could learn them too. Same entrenched walled garden problem. That's especially true of fields like medicine, chemistry, and biology where things were named before we understood them.
aidenn0 4y ago
Right, some highly chromatic music would be better represented in this notation, but it seems a poor fit for traditional western music. Also, a single, brief, look at a piano keyboard will expose why whole-steps and half-steps always being equidistant on the sheet music might not be a desirable goal. There are similar affordances on woodwinds as well. Maybe a string-instrument player could comment on usefulness for string music? [edit] I'd also be interested in seeing examples of transposing in Clairnote; all of the examples in TFA were in the key of C and I don't have an intuition for how easy/hard this would be. As an amateur clarinetist I was often handed oboe music...
- LegionMammal978 4y ago
  > Maybe a string-instrument player could comment on usefulness for string music? Speaking from my experience playing violin (as an ameteur), players generally practice their scales until the finger positions become muscle memory. This way, the key provides the entire note position -> finger position mapping, and accidentals simply become half-step modifications. Since the scales would need to be learned anyway to play tonal music, I don't see how this notation would simplify anything.
  - _moof 4y ago
    Can concur as a bass player. Tell me to play (for example) a B and without even thinking, my hand will move to the second fret on the A string. Put a flat sign on it and I just move one fret down. I also know the "shapes" of intervals though, and they are constant. A half-step is always one fret, a whole step is always two. A minor third is a minor third is a minor third: one finger on fret N of string M, the other finger on fret N-2 of string M+1; the names of the notes are irrelevant.
    - MandieD 4y ago
      I pulled my flute out of its case after over five years, and within minutes was playing all my scales, and able to play the melody lines out of a hymnal. My tone was awful, and my lips got tired long before my hands. To this day, I still associate flute fingerings with music I read for singing. Or piano, which gets messy…
WhitneyLand 4y ago
>for experienced musicians priorities are legibility…. For novices too! Just increasing the physical size of standard notation would be a big help. 13x19 sheet music would be nice.
ajkjk 4y ago
Yeah, agreed. I'm totally on board with fixing the fact that you have to learn ledger lines / note placements separately for each clef. Besides that, none of this seems necessary, and the legitimately of sitting/hanging notes is a big problem. I'm all for a notation system that distinguishes major/minor thirds more clear. It's a neat idea.
balabaster 4y ago
Well I can't speak for everyone else obviously, but I find traditional notation much easier to read than Clairnote's alternative. Even with the description, I find it harder to glance at the Clairnote notation and see what it means.
- tomComb 4y ago
  But isn’t that because the Clairenote alternative is new to you? Seems like an unfair comparison.
taylodl 4y ago
Exactly! It's like designing a language making Hello World! programs trivial to create but makes the actual programs we write a little more difficult to create and doesn't solve the actual problems experienced by day-to-day developers. Not useful.
throwaway675309 4y ago
Even if the system was superior, at this point in history it's irrelevant because you simply won't be able to gain traction or hit critical mass for large scale adoption for all existing musicians. The only thing this will do is teach you a completely different system and as soon as you move out of your own isolated learning and into working with other musicians and gigging or other public functions you will just get frustrated. At the very least you would wanna system that would be somewhat transferable to the existing sheet notation and tablature systems.
mkr-hn 4y ago
You see the same with people suggesting MIDI is a replacement for notation. I program MIDI in a MIDI roll and still appreciate notation. MIDI is to notation as a play is to a script. Notation is more like a script. It's there to guide the performance. Notation has persisted and evolved for centuries for a reason!

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).
dwringer 4y ago
I always thought one of the main benefits of a 7-tone subset is that it fits inside working memory. It's also what anyone who grew up with commercial pop music or western classical music has a natural ear for. Not to mention that even just looking at it harmonically, all 12 tones are most certainly not equal from a given root. AFAIU, historically 12-TET is really a compromise, sacrificing some harmonicity to simplify and enable having symmetrical 7-note tonality in any traditional mode starting from any point in any scale. Some modern styles definitely subvert this idea, embracing the full range of chromaticity - but without abandoning 12-TET, they are still playing with the audience's harmonic preconceptions that are based in conventional tonality.
- Jeff_Brown 4y ago
  > AFAIU, historically 12-TET is really a compromise, sacrificing some harmonicity to simplify and enable having symmetrical 7-note tonality in any traditional mode starting from any point in any scale It is. And it's a surprisingly lucky compromise. By some metrics 19-EDO, 22-EDO and 31-EDO dominate 12-EDO for traditional (5-limit) music theory. (And of course every multiple of 12 does.) But if you want strictly better thirds and fifths, the smallest EDO that qualifies is 41. For anyone interested in big microtonal scales, there's a great website[1] that will render a touchscreen-friendly virtual keyboard with whatever scale and layout (provided it's hexagonal) you want. Don't worry about all the menus to start, just pick something from the first menu, "Tuning\Layout Quick Links". [1] http://terpstrakeyboard.com/web-app/keys.htm http://terpstrakeyboard.com/web-app/keys.htm
InitialLastName 4y ago
> I don't think the sitting/hanging notes are indistinguishable. They aren't indistinguishable when rendered by a computer. When rendered by hand (where space notes have a tendency to float from the line to avoid being interpreted as line notes), the F and G especially would be indistinguishable.
exabrial 4y ago
> microtonal variations The vast majority of music probably doesn't need this
- nameless912 4y ago
  The vast majority of _Western_ music doesn't need it, but microtonal music is extremely important in a number of Asian, Middle Eastern, African, and even Eastern European systems.
  - exabrial 4y ago
    Ok... so? Use a different notation, duh. See my point about letting edge cases drive the bus off a cliff.
    - Jeff_Brown 4y ago
      Continuing to use the status quo notation would hardly constitute driving the bus off a cliff. And the cases of microtonality are not that edge. Beyond allowing interoprability among musicians from different cultures, western notation has been critical to most (and there's a lot of it) western microtonal music.
      - exabrial 4y ago
        Who the hell cares? Use a different notation for the .00000000001% of the time you ever have to interop with a non 12-tone equal temperament scale.

chrismorgan 4y ago

I’ve gained that impression from every single alternative notation system that’s come up here (a new one comes up every year or two). They have a habit of solving problems that just aren’t problems for experienced readers, while causing problems for experienced readers. (They may also solve some real problems, but when they do, they always involve compromises. Inconsistent octave positioning on the staff is a problem, even if it becomes comparatively minor for fairly experienced readers, but the solution offered for that particular issue here looks lousy to me, the compromises made being considerably worse than the original problem.) In this instance, I look at the subtle vertical placements alone and first guessed rendering imprecision, because I’ve seen that bad and worse from some digital scores, to say nothing of older scores especially with inconsistent ledger line spacing, especially when they’ve been scanned or reprinted or are otherwise aged. I also see something that my dad would struggle to distinguish visually except under fairly strong lighting. This notation looks terribly unsuitable if you don’t have (a) a high-precision, high-resolution display, (b) good lighting, and (c) good eyesight. And it certainly won’t scale down as well, nor is it in any way suitable for hand notation.

_moof 4y ago
> They have a habit of solving problems that just aren’t problems for experienced readers, while causing problems for experienced readers. If I had a dollar for every "new way of doing XYZ" made by someone inexperienced who just doesn't want to learn the way we're all doing XYZ just fine...
- jonnycomputer 4y ago
  Brew vs macports in a nutshell.
  - Elidrake24 4y ago
    What's great is I'm not even sure which one you're disparaging; they both "just work" and stay out of my way.
- wolverine876 4y ago

blagie 4y ago

The vast majority of users of music notation are amateurs, and being more friendly to amateurs would mean even more users. The vast majority of decision-makers are experienced users with a vested interest in the status quo. The issue is very similar to why corporate systems have such horrible user interfaces. The people making the decisions in IT aren't the normal users of the system. IT cares about features, integrations, and high-level analytics. Employees care to be able to sanely input their time sheets, file an expense report, or buy a stapler. I'd like a system simple enough to use by all the kids in my local elementary school music class, much more than I care about what happens in the local orchestra.

tgv 4y ago
The problem, IMO, is that once you have acquired a notation system is that you can’t/won’t make the jump the another one. So if you train beginners with eg. clairnote, they will have a hard time making the jump to a higher difficulty level. It’s not unlike a walled garden.
- dehrmann 4y ago
  It's a bit like the Dvorak keyboard problem. It's slightly better, but too much of a hassle to bother with. You need something between 2x and 10x better to displace an entrenched incumbent.
  - blagie 4y ago
    I think a better music notation system would easily be at least 2x better for beginners. A rationalized system could mean 100% of kids learn to read and write music, and anyone could understand how to play an instrument like a piano from music (even if not able to do it at full speed). My point was that it could be 10x better, and it wouldn't lead to a switch. The decision-makers aren't the same as the people whom it would benefit. Coincidentally, there are a lot of scientific fields where jargon could be dramatically simplified, to where anyone could learn them too. Same entrenched walled garden problem. That's especially true of fields like medicine, chemistry, and biology where things were named before we understood them.

aidenn0 4y ago

Right, some highly chromatic music would be better represented in this notation, but it seems a poor fit for traditional western music. Also, a single, brief, look at a piano keyboard will expose why whole-steps and half-steps always being equidistant on the sheet music might not be a desirable goal. There are similar affordances on woodwinds as well. Maybe a string-instrument player could comment on usefulness for string music? [edit] I'd also be interested in seeing examples of transposing in Clairnote; all of the examples in TFA were in the key of C and I don't have an intuition for how easy/hard this would be. As an amateur clarinetist I was often handed oboe music...

LegionMammal978 4y ago
> Maybe a string-instrument player could comment on usefulness for string music? Speaking from my experience playing violin (as an ameteur), players generally practice their scales until the finger positions become muscle memory. This way, the key provides the entire note position -> finger position mapping, and accidentals simply become half-step modifications. Since the scales would need to be learned anyway to play tonal music, I don't see how this notation would simplify anything.
- _moof 4y ago
  Can concur as a bass player. Tell me to play (for example) a B and without even thinking, my hand will move to the second fret on the A string. Put a flat sign on it and I just move one fret down. I also know the "shapes" of intervals though, and they are constant. A half-step is always one fret, a whole step is always two. A minor third is a minor third is a minor third: one finger on fret N of string M, the other finger on fret N-2 of string M+1; the names of the notes are irrelevant.
  - MandieD 4y ago
    I pulled my flute out of its case after over five years, and within minutes was playing all my scales, and able to play the melody lines out of a hymnal. My tone was awful, and my lips got tired long before my hands. To this day, I still associate flute fingerings with music I read for singing. Or piano, which gets messy…

WhitneyLand 4y ago

>for experienced musicians priorities are legibility…. For novices too! Just increasing the physical size of standard notation would be a big help. 13x19 sheet music would be nice.

ajkjk 4y ago

Yeah, agreed. I'm totally on board with fixing the fact that you have to learn ledger lines / note placements separately for each clef. Besides that, none of this seems necessary, and the legitimately of sitting/hanging notes is a big problem. I'm all for a notation system that distinguishes major/minor thirds more clear. It's a neat idea.

balabaster 4y ago

Well I can't speak for everyone else obviously, but I find traditional notation much easier to read than Clairnote's alternative. Even with the description, I find it harder to glance at the Clairnote notation and see what it means.

tomComb 4y ago
But isn’t that because the Clairenote alternative is new to you? Seems like an unfair comparison.

taylodl 4y ago

Exactly! It's like designing a language making Hello World! programs trivial to create but makes the actual programs we write a little more difficult to create and doesn't solve the actual problems experienced by day-to-day developers. Not useful.

throwaway675309 4y ago

Even if the system was superior, at this point in history it's irrelevant because you simply won't be able to gain traction or hit critical mass for large scale adoption for all existing musicians. The only thing this will do is teach you a completely different system and as soon as you move out of your own isolated learning and into working with other musicians and gigging or other public functions you will just get frustrated. At the very least you would wanna system that would be somewhat transferable to the existing sheet notation and tablature systems.

mkr-hn 4y ago

You see the same with people suggesting MIDI is a replacement for notation. I program MIDI in a MIDI roll and still appreciate notation. MIDI is to notation as a play is to a script. Notation is more like a script. It's there to guide the performance. Notation has persisted and evolved for centuries for a reason!