5 ms·

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 solvi

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 5y 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 5y ago
  Brew vs macports in a nutshell.
  - Elidrake24 5y 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 5y ago
  Isn't that the reactionary response to all innovation, such as in tech? 'That's not the way we do it.'
  - mkr-hn 5y ago
    There's a gradient between "there's a reason we do things this way and you should understand it before you try to change it" and "don't roll your own notation."
    - evilotto 5y ago
      https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Chesterton%27s_Fence https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Chesterton%27s_Fence
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - _moof 5y ago
    It rhymes with it, sure. The key difference is that the phenomenon I'm talking about comes from people who haven't taken the time to understand the problem, or they come up with "solutions" that have already been tried and found not to work. The reactionary, conversely, is simply afraid: of change, that they won't be able to learn the new thing, of not being important because they aren't the one who came up with it, of losing status gained from being an expert in the old thing, etc.
    - wolverine876 5y ago
      > The key difference is that the phenomenon I'm talking about comes from people who haven't taken the time to understand the problem, or they come up with "solutions" that have already been tried and found not to work. IME, that is a common 'reactionary' response. Often the problem has changed.
      - mkr-hn 5y ago
        Notation has changed, adapted, expanded, contracted, and even spun off for different and new aspects of the problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_notation#Variations_on_staff_notation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_notation#Variations_on... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_notation#Other_systems_and_practices https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_notation#Other_systems... There are some grognards out there who hate even this, and they're way too influential in traditional music education, but notation hasn't been static and unchanging all these centuries. A lot of that resistance is from people who believe their idealized notion of their culture is superior and resist any exposure to new ideas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kr3quGh7pJA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kr3quGh7pJA
- munificent 5y ago
  It so hard for an outsider to tell the difference between: 1. It is this way for logical but obscure reasons that will become clearer later when you have deeper understanding. 2. It is this way only because of path dependence and historical baggage and it's arbitrarily annoying for a new person to learn but we don't switch because we all learned it the old hard way. It's valuable for inexperienced people to question designs that appear bad from the outside because there are a lot of examples of 2 and experienced users of a system aren't incentivized to fix them because they've already climbed up the learning curve and don't personally benefit. But that baggage is a worthless drain for every new user. The tax for having new users point out and sometimes fix #2 is having to deal with them sometimes erroneously "fixing" cases that are #1.
  - gabereiser 5y ago
    I think you forgot 3. It is hard because of me? Music isn't for everyone and reading sheet music is not for all musicians. I know plenty of guitarists who only can read tabs. I know a few serious musicians that can't read sheet music (they have to take it home to study). Anyone that has had proper music instruction though was taught how to read sheet music in their clef. Pianists learn both. We must also understand our own limitations and accept that there are some things in this world that we, in our current state, can't understand without either further experience or further instruction or unlearning a prejudice we have.
  - vintermann 5y ago
    Well, it's even harder for insiders. What makes you think the would-be be reformers are outsiders anyway? Further down this thread, someone brought up their sight reading tutor program. That's a very classic "solution" to the problem. Also very classic is that when the well meaning "insider" who approves of classical notation finds out that his tutor program didn't really help matters, he'll come up with a reform proposal of his own... We know that reformed notation systems can increase musical literacy, because they have. Examples are the Scandinavian siffer notation, the Chinese system (which is almost identical to the Scandinavian one, even though developed independently) and the American shape note systems. But we also know that once they do, there is inevitably a push from educators to "graduate to real notation", and the gains are typically lost within a generation...
- scrozier 5y ago
  As a very experienced "tech guy" and a very experienced musician, I notice this happens a lot on HN. Maybe because there's a very math-y, notation-rich aspect to music that appeals to technology types. I am absolutely all for everybody getting to music whichever way works for them, but there has been a lot of effort spent by technologists trying to "fix" music or make it better, when a little humble learning would have paid big rewards. I wonder in what fields I do this same thing....
jnovek 5y ago
How does one learn to actually read music, then? I have been learning to play the keyboard for about a year and I find the layout of the keys to make a lot of sense for figuring out things like scales and chords. When I was in high school I never really learned to sight-read a staff, it was always a struggle for me and probably what turned me off to playing an instrument for so long. If simplified notations are essentially a crutch for newbies, how does one “git gud”?
- reikonomusha 5y ago
  Learning to sight-read is different than just reading. Sight-reading takes an enormous amount of daily dedication and practice for years to get to even an intermediate level.
  - JasonFruit 5y ago
    I don't recall it being that difficult to achieve. Probably the difference is in early teaching and expectations: if you learn to read music as an aid to remembering pieces that are perfected over a long time, sight-reading would be slow to develop, but if you learn it as a way to be able to play new music frequently, it will come more quickly. Probably like the difference between learning a foreign language by studying grammar and working translation exercises as opposed to on-the-fly immersion — you develop different strengths.
    - jnovek 5y ago
      This is a great perspective that I hadn’t considered before. My previous experience, years ago in high school, was absolutely the former. I think it makes tons of sense to try playing a wide variety of pieces at my skill level.
      - ghostpepper 5y ago
        I am just beginning to learn piano and when I told my teacher that I was memorizing the pieces I was supposed to be reading, he told me to simply play each piece once, mistakes and all, and continue on to the next - specifically to practice playing a piece on first sight.
phkahler 5y ago
I'm not sure it's possible to say it's worse. You suffer from having learned the traditional notation, so some of this is going to look weird regardless. I'm not good at reading music and agree with some of the issues it has, but looking at this does seem like a different set of issues to me as well. I think the only fair comparison could be done by someone with a lot of experience using both. I think it's fair to say the staff has to be spread out more for this notation since is doesn't compress 12 notes into 7 places like traditional notation. OTOH be glad you're not reading guitar tablature ;-)
- chrismorgan 5y ago
  Certainly I’m biased, but on the vertical alignment thing I think I can be objective: relying on sub-millimetre positioning is a bad idea.
  - vintermann 5y ago
    It certainly is, but there are similar obvious bad ideas in regular notation. If you've typeset music manually, or written out nice parts by hand, you know that you need to take stem direction into account when spacing note heads. Notes with opposite stem direction will seem closer, or further apart, than they actually are. Optical illusions aren't a great feature of a notation system. Five lines is also a bad optical choice, because it's actually very difficult to count 5 or higher parallel lines at a glance. I remember my piano teacher, who was a very strong sight reader, played a Bach fugue for me. However, the score had been annotated with a line showing the figure part ("dux", "comes" etc.) and as it happened that line was spaced exactly like a staff line. He'd played three measures before going, "wait, that doesn't sound right" and realizing he'd been playing on a six-line staff!
analog31 5y ago
I'm an amateur double bassist, and a fluent sight-reader. To be fair, I gravitate towards situations where reading is an asset, since it gives me a leg up on the "competition" including pro's who haven't maintained their reading chops. Plus I benefit from the networking opportunities afforded by those situations. For me, here are the problems that I see with any new notation system: 1. "Standard" notation (SN) has created a symbiosis between composers and players. If you don't compose in SN, nobody will play your stuff. If you don't read SN, you won't be able to play anybody's stuff, and will probably not even get a chance to develop your reading skills to a performance level. The ultimate stage of learning to read is sight-reading in an ensemble with other players. 2. Learning a new notation gets exponentially harder as you get older. I started learning to read when I was about 10. It's like my spinal column has created a special circuit directly from my eyes to my hands, through my ears. A lot of time when I'm sight-reading, I'm actually thinking about other things. 3. All of the repertoire is in SN, virtually none of it is in computer readable form, and much of it is out of print. I play in a large jazz ensemble. We still maintain our entire music library, entirely on paper. For this reason, SN has much more inertia than one would expect from other "notations" such as programming languages. For these reasons, the shortcomings of SN and benefits of new notation, are practically irrelevant. Now, "standard" notation is not carved in stone. For instance, jazz bass parts are notated differently than classical clarinet parts. I get a lot of chord symbols and am expected to play an improvised bass line.
vintermann 5y ago
> They have a habit of solving problems that just aren’t problems for experienced readers, while causing problems for experienced readers. Well, of course. They have invested a lot in the system as it is. But I've noticed even very basic changes that should not cause problems for already strong readers (e.g. a slightly thicker middle line) have zero chance at adoption, whereas changes that are not justified by didacticts (e.g. many composers inventing some quirky new way of expressing something) are. I share your judgement that this system is poor, and that there are many poor notation systems proposed all the time, though.

_moof 5y 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 5y ago
Brew vs macports in a nutshell.
- Elidrake24 5y 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 5y ago
Isn't that the reactionary response to all innovation, such as in tech? 'That's not the way we do it.'
- mkr-hn 5y ago
  There's a gradient between "there's a reason we do things this way and you should understand it before you try to change it" and "don't roll your own notation."
  - evilotto 5y ago
    https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Chesterton%27s_Fence https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Chesterton%27s_Fence
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- _moof 5y ago
  It rhymes with it, sure. The key difference is that the phenomenon I'm talking about comes from people who haven't taken the time to understand the problem, or they come up with "solutions" that have already been tried and found not to work. The reactionary, conversely, is simply afraid: of change, that they won't be able to learn the new thing, of not being important because they aren't the one who came up with it, of losing status gained from being an expert in the old thing, etc.
  - wolverine876 5y ago
    > The key difference is that the phenomenon I'm talking about comes from people who haven't taken the time to understand the problem, or they come up with "solutions" that have already been tried and found not to work. IME, that is a common 'reactionary' response. Often the problem has changed.
    - mkr-hn 5y ago
      Notation has changed, adapted, expanded, contracted, and even spun off for different and new aspects of the problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_notation#Variations_on_staff_notation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_notation#Variations_on... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_notation#Other_systems_and_practices https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_notation#Other_systems... There are some grognards out there who hate even this, and they're way too influential in traditional music education, but notation hasn't been static and unchanging all these centuries. A lot of that resistance is from people who believe their idealized notion of their culture is superior and resist any exposure to new ideas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kr3quGh7pJA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kr3quGh7pJA
munificent 5y ago
It so hard for an outsider to tell the difference between: 1. It is this way for logical but obscure reasons that will become clearer later when you have deeper understanding. 2. It is this way only because of path dependence and historical baggage and it's arbitrarily annoying for a new person to learn but we don't switch because we all learned it the old hard way. It's valuable for inexperienced people to question designs that appear bad from the outside because there are a lot of examples of 2 and experienced users of a system aren't incentivized to fix them because they've already climbed up the learning curve and don't personally benefit. But that baggage is a worthless drain for every new user. The tax for having new users point out and sometimes fix #2 is having to deal with them sometimes erroneously "fixing" cases that are #1.
- gabereiser 5y ago
  I think you forgot 3. It is hard because of me? Music isn't for everyone and reading sheet music is not for all musicians. I know plenty of guitarists who only can read tabs. I know a few serious musicians that can't read sheet music (they have to take it home to study). Anyone that has had proper music instruction though was taught how to read sheet music in their clef. Pianists learn both. We must also understand our own limitations and accept that there are some things in this world that we, in our current state, can't understand without either further experience or further instruction or unlearning a prejudice we have.
- vintermann 5y ago
  Well, it's even harder for insiders. What makes you think the would-be be reformers are outsiders anyway? Further down this thread, someone brought up their sight reading tutor program. That's a very classic "solution" to the problem. Also very classic is that when the well meaning "insider" who approves of classical notation finds out that his tutor program didn't really help matters, he'll come up with a reform proposal of his own... We know that reformed notation systems can increase musical literacy, because they have. Examples are the Scandinavian siffer notation, the Chinese system (which is almost identical to the Scandinavian one, even though developed independently) and the American shape note systems. But we also know that once they do, there is inevitably a push from educators to "graduate to real notation", and the gains are typically lost within a generation...
scrozier 5y ago
As a very experienced "tech guy" and a very experienced musician, I notice this happens a lot on HN. Maybe because there's a very math-y, notation-rich aspect to music that appeals to technology types. I am absolutely all for everybody getting to music whichever way works for them, but there has been a lot of effort spent by technologists trying to "fix" music or make it better, when a little humble learning would have paid big rewards. I wonder in what fields I do this same thing....

jnovek 5y ago

How does one learn to actually read music, then? I have been learning to play the keyboard for about a year and I find the layout of the keys to make a lot of sense for figuring out things like scales and chords. When I was in high school I never really learned to sight-read a staff, it was always a struggle for me and probably what turned me off to playing an instrument for so long. If simplified notations are essentially a crutch for newbies, how does one “git gud”?

reikonomusha 5y ago
Learning to sight-read is different than just reading. Sight-reading takes an enormous amount of daily dedication and practice for years to get to even an intermediate level.
- JasonFruit 5y ago
  I don't recall it being that difficult to achieve. Probably the difference is in early teaching and expectations: if you learn to read music as an aid to remembering pieces that are perfected over a long time, sight-reading would be slow to develop, but if you learn it as a way to be able to play new music frequently, it will come more quickly. Probably like the difference between learning a foreign language by studying grammar and working translation exercises as opposed to on-the-fly immersion — you develop different strengths.
  - jnovek 5y ago
    This is a great perspective that I hadn’t considered before. My previous experience, years ago in high school, was absolutely the former. I think it makes tons of sense to try playing a wide variety of pieces at my skill level.
    - ghostpepper 5y ago
      I am just beginning to learn piano and when I told my teacher that I was memorizing the pieces I was supposed to be reading, he told me to simply play each piece once, mistakes and all, and continue on to the next - specifically to practice playing a piece on first sight.

phkahler 5y ago

I'm not sure it's possible to say it's worse. You suffer from having learned the traditional notation, so some of this is going to look weird regardless. I'm not good at reading music and agree with some of the issues it has, but looking at this does seem like a different set of issues to me as well. I think the only fair comparison could be done by someone with a lot of experience using both. I think it's fair to say the staff has to be spread out more for this notation since is doesn't compress 12 notes into 7 places like traditional notation. OTOH be glad you're not reading guitar tablature ;-)

chrismorgan 5y ago
Certainly I’m biased, but on the vertical alignment thing I think I can be objective: relying on sub-millimetre positioning is a bad idea.
- vintermann 5y ago
  It certainly is, but there are similar obvious bad ideas in regular notation. If you've typeset music manually, or written out nice parts by hand, you know that you need to take stem direction into account when spacing note heads. Notes with opposite stem direction will seem closer, or further apart, than they actually are. Optical illusions aren't a great feature of a notation system. Five lines is also a bad optical choice, because it's actually very difficult to count 5 or higher parallel lines at a glance. I remember my piano teacher, who was a very strong sight reader, played a Bach fugue for me. However, the score had been annotated with a line showing the figure part ("dux", "comes" etc.) and as it happened that line was spaced exactly like a staff line. He'd played three measures before going, "wait, that doesn't sound right" and realizing he'd been playing on a six-line staff!

analog31 5y ago

I'm an amateur double bassist, and a fluent sight-reader. To be fair, I gravitate towards situations where reading is an asset, since it gives me a leg up on the "competition" including pro's who haven't maintained their reading chops. Plus I benefit from the networking opportunities afforded by those situations. For me, here are the problems that I see with any new notation system: 1. "Standard" notation (SN) has created a symbiosis between composers and players. If you don't compose in SN, nobody will play your stuff. If you don't read SN, you won't be able to play anybody's stuff, and will probably not even get a chance to develop your reading skills to a performance level. The ultimate stage of learning to read is sight-reading in an ensemble with other players. 2. Learning a new notation gets exponentially harder as you get older. I started learning to read when I was about 10. It's like my spinal column has created a special circuit directly from my eyes to my hands, through my ears. A lot of time when I'm sight-reading, I'm actually thinking about other things. 3. All of the repertoire is in SN, virtually none of it is in computer readable form, and much of it is out of print. I play in a large jazz ensemble. We still maintain our entire music library, entirely on paper. For this reason, SN has much more inertia than one would expect from other "notations" such as programming languages. For these reasons, the shortcomings of SN and benefits of new notation, are practically irrelevant. Now, "standard" notation is not carved in stone. For instance, jazz bass parts are notated differently than classical clarinet parts. I get a lot of chord symbols and am expected to play an improvised bass line.

vintermann 5y ago

> They have a habit of solving problems that just aren’t problems for experienced readers, while causing problems for experienced readers. Well, of course. They have invested a lot in the system as it is. But I've noticed even very basic changes that should not cause problems for already strong readers (e.g. a slightly thicker middle line) have zero chance at adoption, whereas changes that are not justified by didacticts (e.g. many composers inventing some quirky new way of expressing something) are. I share your judgement that this system is poor, and that there are many poor notation systems proposed all the time, though.