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I’m a professional pianist; so I’m not in your target audience. There may well be some system of notation that is superior to the standard that has developed in

I’m a professional pianist; so I’m not in your target audience. There may well be some system of notation that is superior to the standard that has developed in Western music; but nothing I’ve seen matches the expressive flexibility and compactness of the way music is now notated. Experienced players read music in a way that overcomes some of the limitations that form the assumptions that are behind these alternative notation systems. Instead of looking at a measure as a collection of individual notes that must be perceived, interpreted and executed in sequence, they take it in as a chunk. (I imagine reading code must be similar.) This is why the density of traditional notation isn’t intimidating - after a while it can be read as a whole. Whether a system like this could be a pedagogical bridge to formal notation remains to be seen. I’ve encountered such bridging systems before. I’m an admitted skeptic because my orientation to this is that if you want to learn a thing, just start learning the thing. The struggle, within limits, is known to enhance learning.

unc0n 3y ago
I'm an experienced musician and this really resonates with me. It's possible to see a scale written out in the score and know exactly what that means in terms of how it's supposed to sound, what fingering I should use, and whether there are any "aberrant" notes in there that I should watch out for. The same goes for many other common note patterns. Trying to decode something like this into something that makes sense to me musically is a huge additional burden that doesn't exist. That said, having been through the journey of being able to sight read music myself and then trying to teach it to a number of people, I agree that reading a score in real time is one of the greatest hurdles to beginner and intermediate players alike, and probably a huge impediment to many people learning to play a variety of instruments. There is one particular instance in which getting away from traditional notation can help. I have absolute pitch, and I've played transposing (woodwind) instruments before. The mental link between specific finger positions and specific tones / notes on the score, is one that causes me untold issues with transposing instruments. If I could just focus on the finger positions without the distraction of the score, that would help me. I don't think this is a common problem though.
- nescioquid 3y ago
  I think there might be two different basic strategies that could help you out of this: 1) just work on actually transposing whatever you're reading by a fixed interval. If you get fluent in doing this, you'll get past your "page says f but it sounds d" discomfort. 2) practice reading C clefs (+ octave transposition). You play a C on a clarinet in B-flat, it sounds a B-flat. So, imagine instead of a treble clef, it were a tenor clef (but 8va higher) instead. That third-space treble-clef C is now a tenor-clef B (you have to add the accidentals). In either case, it is probably matter of just getting used to it, and that means spending time with it, so no truly "easy" answer for you.
  - unc0n 3y ago
    I'm actually quite good at transposing by any arbitrary interval (by ear), and can also play music both from sight reading and from ear. The problem is I have both an instinctive link between sounds and fingerings (or keys on a piano when I play that) and between the notes in the score and the keys they map to on the instrument. Alas I didn't encounter c clefs until rather late in my musical training (they weren't relevant for any of the instruments I played) and by that time I didn't have a compelling reason to practice reading scores. I'm adulthood I more or less only play solo piano so transposition is a moot point.
- Blackthorn 3y ago
  > If I could just focus on the finger positions without the distraction of the score, that would help me. Isn't this exactly what most guitar players do? Tablature is used instead of traditional staves.
  - cratermoon 3y ago
    Classical and jazz guitar are written in traditional notation. Classical notation has implied positions on the fretboard - first, fifth, seventh, etc. Tablature is useful, but it is not musical notation. Its expressiveness is so limited that many tablature sites add various symbols borrowed from standard. Indeed, go on almost any guitar forum on the net and you'll find a beginner asking about some notation found on a tablature. There's a great deal more to performing on the guitar than knowing where to put the fingers of the fretting hand.
yieldcrv 3y ago
> There may well be some system of notation that is superior to the standard that has developed in Western music; but nothing I’ve seen matches the expressive flexibility and compactness of the way music is now notated. I like Ableton's Push system and associated sequencing software. I think it is superior. Its an LED grid and matrix, but primarily within that grid it highlights all the C notes for every octave for someone that doesn't have the discipline to already sense them, there is no need to ever gain or hone that sense anymore its hard to describe, as the combination of hardware and software is quite comprehensive, but in comparison it really does seem like this just wasn't revisited for the last 700 years. the matrix is for playing and reading. whereas these would be separate things in analog devices and things that simulate them. hm, lines blur with the term analog. I mean in comparison to traditional physical instruments.
- squeaky-clean 3y ago
  I love me a matrix sequencer, but they don't easily convey things like dynamics, or tempo changes, or key changes. It also requires a score for an 88 key piano be 88 rows tall. A 4 bar rest and 64 16th notes also all have the same length in the sequencer, which is some times helpful but often not helpful. The Ableton Push sequencer is also designed with using it in a scale-only mode in mind. It gets a fair bit uglier if you enable chromatic mode.
jrockway 3y ago
Looking at the screenshots, I think this notation was chosen because it's easy to generate from MIDI files. MIDI files just say what note is being played, when it starts, and when it stops. Sheet music is much richer than that (as you'll note if you've ever used a tool to turn MIDI into sheet music), so anything that takes MIDI as an input is going to be terrible if it produces traditional notation as output. (I bet AI could help a lot here, though.)
- simonjgreen 3y ago
  Very importantly, just to append, midi start note also contains velocity, and midi also contains and control changes.
- bluGill 3y ago
  The notation looks like what a player piano would have used, so predates midi by 100 years.
heleninboodler 3y ago
I spent decades not understanding music theory and thinking of music as a sequence of notes, and I never understood why music notation and the layout of a piano were so bizarre. It just seemed like something that we were stuck with due to tradition and lack of innovation. Ever since I started learning something about music theory (just in the past couple years... I'm far from an expert), I've realized that both sheet music and the piano layout are both very clever in unexpected ways that, as you point out, make the music notation both expressive and more compact than a straight timeline of linear note values, because they lean on the fact that sections of music tend to skip very predictable parts of the range of notes. They tend to use them in particular patterns that make it useful to reduce your focus to a subset of the available range at any given moment.
- amelius 3y ago
  However transposing music should not have a dramatic effect on notation. Melodies that sounds the same should look the same.
  - heleninboodler 3y ago
    Part of me says yes and part of me says no. The thing that music notation recognizes is that which specific notes are important changes depending on which key you're in.
  - pclmulqdq 3y ago
    I'm not convinced, personally. Melodies that sound the same don't really sound the same (hitting different registers on the same instrument), and they aren't played the same (different fingerings), so why would they look the same in notation?
  - TylerE 3y ago
    Strong disagree. On many instruments there is a strong memory association between the place of the note on the staff and the physical movement to play that note, Wether it be a fingering, valve combination or lip tension or whatever.
  - 3y ago
whartung 3y ago
Far from left field related. > Instead of looking at a measure as a collection of individual notes that must be perceived, interpreted and executed in sequence, they take it in as a chunk. This is how Morse code is done. Not as individual letters, but as the sound of the stream. You don’t listen for letters per se, just rhythms of the sounds and patterns of letter combinations and words.
chimpansteve 3y ago
As a kid, I learnt violin and trombone to a very high orchestra level standard, and could read sheet music from a very early age. I then moved on in my late twenties to guitar, bass and keyboard in a rock band, and never looked at a piece of sheet music again in my life, and would have no idea how to translate musical notation to those instruments. I know people who cannot play a tune without sheet music. I know some of the most talented musicians on this earth who cannot read sheet music. There is no right and wrong to this. It's what works for you. I do think some form of formal music theory training is an absolute cheat code when it comes to playing multiple instruments, or just jamming and playing by ear though
- tkgally 3y ago
  I’m similar to you, and I agree with your points completely. I learned to play classical piano as a child and teenager and got reasonably good at it. But as my interests expanded to music that is normally not written down, I had less need to read music notation. Fifty years later, I still play the piano every day, but the only reading I do is occasionally looking at the chords and melody lines for jazz standards. The music theory I learned when young has been very helpful over the years, and it would have been more difficult for me to absorb it then without using standard music notation. But I no longer think about music in terms of notes on a stave; I have gradually developed my own mental representation of it. I still listen to classical music, and I do wish that I had acquired and maintained better sight-reading skills so that playing it would be a pleasure for me now rather than a chore.
snarkypixel 3y ago
I think I'm closer to the target audience as I usually learn either by "ear" or by watching someone play the song. Actually, what I prefer is looking/finding the chords first, and then I fill up the melody and everything in-between. So, an app like this is very helpful. My only feedback is I find the UI piano at the bottom of the screen hard to read without black keys
RogerL 3y ago
I want to expand on this. Not only do I agree with what you wrote, but this app is trading access to millions of available sources in a very well known writing system to one more or less unique to this app. That's a terrible investment for anyone who wants to do more than learn 1-2 favored songs. If you need to sight read (and as rock/pop/jazz people point out, you don't have to for many genres), then you need to sight read. There are so many other virtues to sheet music. Look at the cover image. I can see a few notes. I can see vastly more notes in sheet music. I can easily evaluate if the piece is playable, I can scan and look for broader patterns. I can see that a bass note is being held for 8 measures (and I may choose to repeat it at some point). I can look ahead quite a bit. I can understand the repeat structures - don't gasp, but you don't have to take repeats, or you can repeat more times than written, especially with 20th+ century music, where you are often expected to do things like choose your own ordering of measures or blocks of measures. There are fingerings. I can see if the composer is writing out finger pedaling explicitly (Couperin normally does, Bach normally doesn't). I can see the pedal markings, general contours of dynamics. I can see the trills, etc., which are often just suggestions rather than hard requirements. I can see the meter, meter changes, keys, key changes, accidentals. I can see a big scary chord coming up and spend a bit more time looking at it while I play a few measures behind. I can see that Bach is repeating a phrase a 5th down, or inverting it, or reversing it. I can see the difference between passages meant to be played in time, and fioritura type writing. I haven't used these piano roll systems so there are undoubtedly some things that are nice about it for an experienced player that I don't know about, so that paragraph is one sided. But that one side is very important - I'd loathe to go without them, and can't imagine I'd ever trade them for whatever advantage the piano roll might bring. After all, a player can take a sheet of paper Chopin wrote, produce that music at a more or less performance level. So it gives you about everything you need. I could imagine a current composer might find something more expressive about the piano roll (maybe expressing note durations not evenly subdivided by 2 or 3). I suspect there is something neurological happening that stops some people from sight reading well, just like some people struggle with text. I've read accounts of people trying for years, with seemingly good practice techniques, still struggling. So things like this, synthasia, etc., seem to have a niche. But in general, I suggest, think about someone proposing an app that instead of displaying printed text output it sonically. Great boon for certain situations or people! Undoubtedly someone is using one to read this very post. But a terrible replacement for reading in general. If a six year old was relying on screen readers because reading is too hard to learn, after testing for dyslexia and vision problems, you'd urge them to make the effort; the advantages of reading text vastly outweighs the 1st grade difficulties of learning to read (yes, that time span will differ by language and writing system, not the point). Literacy is empowering, and arguing that the auto mechanic down the street can't read yet makes a good living is probably not a convincing argument to not teach a child to read. I learned to sight read at age 4-5 with a plastic brain (I recall my mother having to teach me the letters a-g, and how to write them, for example), so I may underestimate the difficulties of learning later in life. But if you are in a situation where some kind of notation is helpful (again, not all are), learn standard notation! edit: I thought of a counter-example. Say you play in a band. You can record your output to midi, and then share it with others. You can quantize midi and turn it into sheet music, but chances are you playing is not rhythmically exact. Sight reading that sort of thing is painful (notes carry 1/16th note into the next measure, that sort of thing), and I imagine a piano roll would often be easier.
shadowfoxx 3y ago
I'm someone who's quite interested in learning to play music - took some classes in highschool (but my focus was the visual arts which is why I struggle to find time amongst my other hobbies, I'll get there) I always wished that sheet music was rotated 90 degrees. The more I hear from musicians the more I think maybe that's not good... but there is something to be said about, "with experience you'll just get it, it become natural" especially with a system that's been around for hundreds of years...
- Madmallard 3y ago
  humans spent hundreds of years figuring out what the best option would be considering this isn't something that required the technological revolution
  - mdorazio 3y ago
    Bullshit. The world is absolutely packed with standards that are standards because of nothing to do with being "the best". Perfect example: the imperial measurement system. Another example: logographic writing systems. Another: qwerty keyboard layout. Etc. Just because a thing is accepted today doesn't mean it's the best.
    - frutiger 3y ago
      Overall a great point, but the world is not packed with the Imperial system, almost everyone uses Metric.
- klodolph 3y ago
  There are some musicians out there who rotate the sheet music 90 degrees. These people exist. But I don't see a particular reason why one orientation should be much better than the other—maybe your eyes are better at following horizontally or vertically. The standard layout matches instruments like the flute, the 90 degree rotated version matches instruments like a piano.
keithalewis 3y ago
> if you want to learn a thing, just start learning the thing This. After you have learned things feel free to come up with something others might want to spend their time on learning.
singingfish 3y ago
My former piano teacher tells me that these non-traditional systems enable people to learn specific stuff fluently and quickly but it engenders various habits that are difficult to unlearn, and limits people's development. Personally I believe there's no substitute to doing serious amounts of repetition of stuff that you're trying to learn to get it fluent, and using your ears (and on the piano to a lesser extent eyes) to get it. Personally I'm happiest when I'm able to step away from the sheet music, but I also read to an intermediate level. It turned out what got me much more fluent with sheet music reading was copying out some scores that were a little bit of a stretch for me, at the time, due to having multiple performances of same music at short notice. For most music I play (I'm on sax in a couple of street bands) I much prefer to have internalised the music and be able to operate from memory based on knowing the key and some intuition of the harmonic structure. In fact if I know a tune too well the sheet music starts to throw me if I try reading and playing. Intuition is important. The fact that I already had good intuition on the sax, but that it was a struggle on the piano is what made me stop piano lessons because getting better at piano was eating in to my getting better at the sax time too much.
dehrmann 3y ago
So it's a bit like the qwerty keyboard? Sure, there are better layouts, but it's good enough, and the benefits from switching aren't worth it in exchange for universality?
_gabe_ 3y ago
> Instead of looking at a measure as a collection of individual notes that must be perceived, interpreted and executed in sequence, they take it in as a chunk. I’m not professional, but I have been playing for awhile and can sight-read fairly easily. What you said here is 100% true, and I liken it to learning to read a language. Watch how kids learn to read, they have to look at each syllable and letter and sound out each word. Eventually, after enough practice, you don’t read individual letters, you read words. Then, you begin to observe the nuance of the grammatical structure. I feel like reading music notation has followed a similar trend for myself. I no longer read individual notes, I see chords and progressions. Just like stories tend to follow a plot line, and you can predict how the story may end, music follows a plot line, and you can predict the movement. This is also why certain styles of music is so interesting! We expect the plot to move in a direction and then are surprised by the twist. This video by 8 bit music theory gives a good overview of how that can be done[0]. I especially love when I’m playing through a new piece and every part of the song just makes sense. Yiruma’s music in particular feels very natural for me, and it’s an absolute joy to play through the song and have it all flow together so well. Anyways, I think a lot of people just don’t give it enough time and give up a bit too early. It’s magical when you pass that point of reading individual notes and enter into the territory of really reading pieces. I still have so far to go, but music will always be a relaxing and fulfilling hobby. [0]: https://youtu.be/gzK1CTxxRH0?si=H3aUQo83lVl-2BQK https://youtu.be/gzK1CTxxRH0?si=H3aUQo83lVl-2BQK
- smeej 3y ago
  I took nine years of piano lessons as a child and quit because I thought learning to read music should follow the progression of learning to read words. After nine years, since I couldn't just sit down with music and play it, I thought I must be completely inept because I still "couldn't read." It wasn't until well into adulthood that anyone told me sight reading like that (i.e., sit in front of unfamiliar music and just play it) is actually a rare and exceptional skill. Since then, I've been assuming it must not follow the "learn to read letters" path at all, but now you have me wondering if the reality is between these two ideas, and my dual misconceptions have more to do with never having actually "learned" to read in any ordinary sense. One day when I was 3, my mom finished reading me a story, and I said it was my turn to read the next one. I read the next one, and the one after that, and the one after that. It all sort of clunked into place at once. It also made me an unusual reader, which I also didn't know at the time. While I can read words one at a time, like when I have occasion to read aloud, by default, I read chunks of the paragraph/page at once. I don't subvocalize the words. I just know what they say. My brain apparently just handles letters and words funny. Your comment is so helpful for me because it's helping me realize I may just need to learn to read music the way most people learn to read words, and it's not useful to think of it in terms of how I did!
vidarh 3y ago
I'm a very mediocre pianist, and my take would be that I'm not looking for a bridge because I know I'll never spend enough time to be good and I don't care about getting good, but I enjoy sitting down and playing (butchering) some pieces now and again. So if I found something simpler that helped improve my playing with minimal effort that'd be good for me even if it actively hampered any effort to get good. I don't know whether or not this is it - judging purely from the screenshots I think it's too pared back and austere, e.g. making it harder (for me at least) to see expected duration of a note from length alone, but I love that people are trying.
- jacobp100 3y ago
  I'd love suggestions if you have any! The note length is maybe not possible, just due to the fact most midi files don't encode it very well
djtango 3y ago
Ha when you described reading things in chunk I started wondering if you were a programmer. I found that once I learned coding I started to internalise and conceptualise things about music I didn't before. The structure of music became so much more concrete and I also realised that not only are musical chunks (eg scale or arpeggio) an abstraction on paper but so too is the brain-muscle instruction to execute it. In some of the intermediate Beethoven and Chopin where it starts to get spicier you don't have time to think note by note...
jbaber 3y ago
I agree. Many comments point out analogies to reading code, alphabets, etc. Surely, this is just how it feels to grasp any written representation of something sufficiently complicated. I'm almost more interested in an example of gradually evolved notation being tossed completely when a simpler modern replacement actually is better. Maybe Hangul?

unc0n 3y ago

I'm an experienced musician and this really resonates with me. It's possible to see a scale written out in the score and know exactly what that means in terms of how it's supposed to sound, what fingering I should use, and whether there are any "aberrant" notes in there that I should watch out for. The same goes for many other common note patterns. Trying to decode something like this into something that makes sense to me musically is a huge additional burden that doesn't exist. That said, having been through the journey of being able to sight read music myself and then trying to teach it to a number of people, I agree that reading a score in real time is one of the greatest hurdles to beginner and intermediate players alike, and probably a huge impediment to many people learning to play a variety of instruments. There is one particular instance in which getting away from traditional notation can help. I have absolute pitch, and I've played transposing (woodwind) instruments before. The mental link between specific finger positions and specific tones / notes on the score, is one that causes me untold issues with transposing instruments. If I could just focus on the finger positions without the distraction of the score, that would help me. I don't think this is a common problem though.

nescioquid 3y ago
I think there might be two different basic strategies that could help you out of this: 1) just work on actually transposing whatever you're reading by a fixed interval. If you get fluent in doing this, you'll get past your "page says f but it sounds d" discomfort. 2) practice reading C clefs (+ octave transposition). You play a C on a clarinet in B-flat, it sounds a B-flat. So, imagine instead of a treble clef, it were a tenor clef (but 8va higher) instead. That third-space treble-clef C is now a tenor-clef B (you have to add the accidentals). In either case, it is probably matter of just getting used to it, and that means spending time with it, so no truly "easy" answer for you.
- unc0n 3y ago
  I'm actually quite good at transposing by any arbitrary interval (by ear), and can also play music both from sight reading and from ear. The problem is I have both an instinctive link between sounds and fingerings (or keys on a piano when I play that) and between the notes in the score and the keys they map to on the instrument. Alas I didn't encounter c clefs until rather late in my musical training (they weren't relevant for any of the instruments I played) and by that time I didn't have a compelling reason to practice reading scores. I'm adulthood I more or less only play solo piano so transposition is a moot point.
Blackthorn 3y ago
> If I could just focus on the finger positions without the distraction of the score, that would help me. Isn't this exactly what most guitar players do? Tablature is used instead of traditional staves.
- cratermoon 3y ago
  Classical and jazz guitar are written in traditional notation. Classical notation has implied positions on the fretboard - first, fifth, seventh, etc. Tablature is useful, but it is not musical notation. Its expressiveness is so limited that many tablature sites add various symbols borrowed from standard. Indeed, go on almost any guitar forum on the net and you'll find a beginner asking about some notation found on a tablature. There's a great deal more to performing on the guitar than knowing where to put the fingers of the fretting hand.

yieldcrv 3y ago

> There may well be some system of notation that is superior to the standard that has developed in Western music; but nothing I’ve seen matches the expressive flexibility and compactness of the way music is now notated. I like Ableton's Push system and associated sequencing software. I think it is superior. Its an LED grid and matrix, but primarily within that grid it highlights all the C notes for every octave for someone that doesn't have the discipline to already sense them, there is no need to ever gain or hone that sense anymore its hard to describe, as the combination of hardware and software is quite comprehensive, but in comparison it really does seem like this just wasn't revisited for the last 700 years. the matrix is for playing and reading. whereas these would be separate things in analog devices and things that simulate them. hm, lines blur with the term analog. I mean in comparison to traditional physical instruments.

squeaky-clean 3y ago
I love me a matrix sequencer, but they don't easily convey things like dynamics, or tempo changes, or key changes. It also requires a score for an 88 key piano be 88 rows tall. A 4 bar rest and 64 16th notes also all have the same length in the sequencer, which is some times helpful but often not helpful. The Ableton Push sequencer is also designed with using it in a scale-only mode in mind. It gets a fair bit uglier if you enable chromatic mode.

jrockway 3y ago

Looking at the screenshots, I think this notation was chosen because it's easy to generate from MIDI files. MIDI files just say what note is being played, when it starts, and when it stops. Sheet music is much richer than that (as you'll note if you've ever used a tool to turn MIDI into sheet music), so anything that takes MIDI as an input is going to be terrible if it produces traditional notation as output. (I bet AI could help a lot here, though.)

simonjgreen 3y ago
Very importantly, just to append, midi start note also contains velocity, and midi also contains and control changes.
bluGill 3y ago
The notation looks like what a player piano would have used, so predates midi by 100 years.

heleninboodler 3y ago

I spent decades not understanding music theory and thinking of music as a sequence of notes, and I never understood why music notation and the layout of a piano were so bizarre. It just seemed like something that we were stuck with due to tradition and lack of innovation. Ever since I started learning something about music theory (just in the past couple years... I'm far from an expert), I've realized that both sheet music and the piano layout are both very clever in unexpected ways that, as you point out, make the music notation both expressive and more compact than a straight timeline of linear note values, because they lean on the fact that sections of music tend to skip very predictable parts of the range of notes. They tend to use them in particular patterns that make it useful to reduce your focus to a subset of the available range at any given moment.

amelius 3y ago
However transposing music should not have a dramatic effect on notation. Melodies that sounds the same should look the same.
- heleninboodler 3y ago
  Part of me says yes and part of me says no. The thing that music notation recognizes is that which specific notes are important changes depending on which key you're in.
- pclmulqdq 3y ago
  I'm not convinced, personally. Melodies that sound the same don't really sound the same (hitting different registers on the same instrument), and they aren't played the same (different fingerings), so why would they look the same in notation?
- TylerE 3y ago
  Strong disagree. On many instruments there is a strong memory association between the place of the note on the staff and the physical movement to play that note, Wether it be a fingering, valve combination or lip tension or whatever.
- 3y ago

whartung 3y ago

Far from left field related. > Instead of looking at a measure as a collection of individual notes that must be perceived, interpreted and executed in sequence, they take it in as a chunk. This is how Morse code is done. Not as individual letters, but as the sound of the stream. You don’t listen for letters per se, just rhythms of the sounds and patterns of letter combinations and words.

chimpansteve 3y ago

As a kid, I learnt violin and trombone to a very high orchestra level standard, and could read sheet music from a very early age. I then moved on in my late twenties to guitar, bass and keyboard in a rock band, and never looked at a piece of sheet music again in my life, and would have no idea how to translate musical notation to those instruments. I know people who cannot play a tune without sheet music. I know some of the most talented musicians on this earth who cannot read sheet music. There is no right and wrong to this. It's what works for you. I do think some form of formal music theory training is an absolute cheat code when it comes to playing multiple instruments, or just jamming and playing by ear though

tkgally 3y ago
I’m similar to you, and I agree with your points completely. I learned to play classical piano as a child and teenager and got reasonably good at it. But as my interests expanded to music that is normally not written down, I had less need to read music notation. Fifty years later, I still play the piano every day, but the only reading I do is occasionally looking at the chords and melody lines for jazz standards. The music theory I learned when young has been very helpful over the years, and it would have been more difficult for me to absorb it then without using standard music notation. But I no longer think about music in terms of notes on a stave; I have gradually developed my own mental representation of it. I still listen to classical music, and I do wish that I had acquired and maintained better sight-reading skills so that playing it would be a pleasure for me now rather than a chore.

snarkypixel 3y ago

I think I'm closer to the target audience as I usually learn either by "ear" or by watching someone play the song. Actually, what I prefer is looking/finding the chords first, and then I fill up the melody and everything in-between. So, an app like this is very helpful. My only feedback is I find the UI piano at the bottom of the screen hard to read without black keys

RogerL 3y ago

I want to expand on this. Not only do I agree with what you wrote, but this app is trading access to millions of available sources in a very well known writing system to one more or less unique to this app. That's a terrible investment for anyone who wants to do more than learn 1-2 favored songs. If you need to sight read (and as rock/pop/jazz people point out, you don't have to for many genres), then you need to sight read. There are so many other virtues to sheet music. Look at the cover image. I can see a few notes. I can see vastly more notes in sheet music. I can easily evaluate if the piece is playable, I can scan and look for broader patterns. I can see that a bass note is being held for 8 measures (and I may choose to repeat it at some point). I can look ahead quite a bit. I can understand the repeat structures - don't gasp, but you don't have to take repeats, or you can repeat more times than written, especially with 20th+ century music, where you are often expected to do things like choose your own ordering of measures or blocks of measures. There are fingerings. I can see if the composer is writing out finger pedaling explicitly (Couperin normally does, Bach normally doesn't). I can see the pedal markings, general contours of dynamics. I can see the trills, etc., which are often just suggestions rather than hard requirements. I can see the meter, meter changes, keys, key changes, accidentals. I can see a big scary chord coming up and spend a bit more time looking at it while I play a few measures behind. I can see that Bach is repeating a phrase a 5th down, or inverting it, or reversing it. I can see the difference between passages meant to be played in time, and fioritura type writing. I haven't used these piano roll systems so there are undoubtedly some things that are nice about it for an experienced player that I don't know about, so that paragraph is one sided. But that one side is very important - I'd loathe to go without them, and can't imagine I'd ever trade them for whatever advantage the piano roll might bring. After all, a player can take a sheet of paper Chopin wrote, produce that music at a more or less performance level. So it gives you about everything you need. I could imagine a current composer might find something more expressive about the piano roll (maybe expressing note durations not evenly subdivided by 2 or 3). I suspect there is something neurological happening that stops some people from sight reading well, just like some people struggle with text. I've read accounts of people trying for years, with seemingly good practice techniques, still struggling. So things like this, synthasia, etc., seem to have a niche. But in general, I suggest, think about someone proposing an app that instead of displaying printed text output it sonically. Great boon for certain situations or people! Undoubtedly someone is using one to read this very post. But a terrible replacement for reading in general. If a six year old was relying on screen readers because reading is too hard to learn, after testing for dyslexia and vision problems, you'd urge them to make the effort; the advantages of reading text vastly outweighs the 1st grade difficulties of learning to read (yes, that time span will differ by language and writing system, not the point). Literacy is empowering, and arguing that the auto mechanic down the street can't read yet makes a good living is probably not a convincing argument to not teach a child to read. I learned to sight read at age 4-5 with a plastic brain (I recall my mother having to teach me the letters a-g, and how to write them, for example), so I may underestimate the difficulties of learning later in life. But if you are in a situation where some kind of notation is helpful (again, not all are), learn standard notation! edit: I thought of a counter-example. Say you play in a band. You can record your output to midi, and then share it with others. You can quantize midi and turn it into sheet music, but chances are you playing is not rhythmically exact. Sight reading that sort of thing is painful (notes carry 1/16th note into the next measure, that sort of thing), and I imagine a piano roll would often be easier.

shadowfoxx 3y ago

I'm someone who's quite interested in learning to play music - took some classes in highschool (but my focus was the visual arts which is why I struggle to find time amongst my other hobbies, I'll get there) I always wished that sheet music was rotated 90 degrees. The more I hear from musicians the more I think maybe that's not good... but there is something to be said about, "with experience you'll just get it, it become natural" especially with a system that's been around for hundreds of years...

Madmallard 3y ago
humans spent hundreds of years figuring out what the best option would be considering this isn't something that required the technological revolution
- mdorazio 3y ago
  Bullshit. The world is absolutely packed with standards that are standards because of nothing to do with being "the best". Perfect example: the imperial measurement system. Another example: logographic writing systems. Another: qwerty keyboard layout. Etc. Just because a thing is accepted today doesn't mean it's the best.
  - frutiger 3y ago
    Overall a great point, but the world is not packed with the Imperial system, almost everyone uses Metric.
klodolph 3y ago
There are some musicians out there who rotate the sheet music 90 degrees. These people exist. But I don't see a particular reason why one orientation should be much better than the other—maybe your eyes are better at following horizontally or vertically. The standard layout matches instruments like the flute, the 90 degree rotated version matches instruments like a piano.

keithalewis 3y ago

> if you want to learn a thing, just start learning the thing This. After you have learned things feel free to come up with something others might want to spend their time on learning.

singingfish 3y ago

My former piano teacher tells me that these non-traditional systems enable people to learn specific stuff fluently and quickly but it engenders various habits that are difficult to unlearn, and limits people's development. Personally I believe there's no substitute to doing serious amounts of repetition of stuff that you're trying to learn to get it fluent, and using your ears (and on the piano to a lesser extent eyes) to get it. Personally I'm happiest when I'm able to step away from the sheet music, but I also read to an intermediate level. It turned out what got me much more fluent with sheet music reading was copying out some scores that were a little bit of a stretch for me, at the time, due to having multiple performances of same music at short notice. For most music I play (I'm on sax in a couple of street bands) I much prefer to have internalised the music and be able to operate from memory based on knowing the key and some intuition of the harmonic structure. In fact if I know a tune too well the sheet music starts to throw me if I try reading and playing. Intuition is important. The fact that I already had good intuition on the sax, but that it was a struggle on the piano is what made me stop piano lessons because getting better at piano was eating in to my getting better at the sax time too much.

dehrmann 3y ago

So it's a bit like the qwerty keyboard? Sure, there are better layouts, but it's good enough, and the benefits from switching aren't worth it in exchange for universality?

_gabe_ 3y ago

> Instead of looking at a measure as a collection of individual notes that must be perceived, interpreted and executed in sequence, they take it in as a chunk. I’m not professional, but I have been playing for awhile and can sight-read fairly easily. What you said here is 100% true, and I liken it to learning to read a language. Watch how kids learn to read, they have to look at each syllable and letter and sound out each word. Eventually, after enough practice, you don’t read individual letters, you read words. Then, you begin to observe the nuance of the grammatical structure. I feel like reading music notation has followed a similar trend for myself. I no longer read individual notes, I see chords and progressions. Just like stories tend to follow a plot line, and you can predict how the story may end, music follows a plot line, and you can predict the movement. This is also why certain styles of music is so interesting! We expect the plot to move in a direction and then are surprised by the twist. This video by 8 bit music theory gives a good overview of how that can be done[0]. I especially love when I’m playing through a new piece and every part of the song just makes sense. Yiruma’s music in particular feels very natural for me, and it’s an absolute joy to play through the song and have it all flow together so well. Anyways, I think a lot of people just don’t give it enough time and give up a bit too early. It’s magical when you pass that point of reading individual notes and enter into the territory of really reading pieces. I still have so far to go, but music will always be a relaxing and fulfilling hobby. [0]: https://youtu.be/gzK1CTxxRH0?si=H3aUQo83lVl-2BQK https://youtu.be/gzK1CTxxRH0?si=H3aUQo83lVl-2BQK

smeej 3y ago
I took nine years of piano lessons as a child and quit because I thought learning to read music should follow the progression of learning to read words. After nine years, since I couldn't just sit down with music and play it, I thought I must be completely inept because I still "couldn't read." It wasn't until well into adulthood that anyone told me sight reading like that (i.e., sit in front of unfamiliar music and just play it) is actually a rare and exceptional skill. Since then, I've been assuming it must not follow the "learn to read letters" path at all, but now you have me wondering if the reality is between these two ideas, and my dual misconceptions have more to do with never having actually "learned" to read in any ordinary sense. One day when I was 3, my mom finished reading me a story, and I said it was my turn to read the next one. I read the next one, and the one after that, and the one after that. It all sort of clunked into place at once. It also made me an unusual reader, which I also didn't know at the time. While I can read words one at a time, like when I have occasion to read aloud, by default, I read chunks of the paragraph/page at once. I don't subvocalize the words. I just know what they say. My brain apparently just handles letters and words funny. Your comment is so helpful for me because it's helping me realize I may just need to learn to read music the way most people learn to read words, and it's not useful to think of it in terms of how I did!

vidarh 3y ago

I'm a very mediocre pianist, and my take would be that I'm not looking for a bridge because I know I'll never spend enough time to be good and I don't care about getting good, but I enjoy sitting down and playing (butchering) some pieces now and again. So if I found something simpler that helped improve my playing with minimal effort that'd be good for me even if it actively hampered any effort to get good. I don't know whether or not this is it - judging purely from the screenshots I think it's too pared back and austere, e.g. making it harder (for me at least) to see expected duration of a note from length alone, but I love that people are trying.

jacobp100 3y ago
I'd love suggestions if you have any! The note length is maybe not possible, just due to the fact most midi files don't encode it very well

djtango 3y ago

Ha when you described reading things in chunk I started wondering if you were a programmer. I found that once I learned coding I started to internalise and conceptualise things about music I didn't before. The structure of music became so much more concrete and I also realised that not only are musical chunks (eg scale or arpeggio) an abstraction on paper but so too is the brain-muscle instruction to execute it. In some of the intermediate Beethoven and Chopin where it starts to get spicier you don't have time to think note by note...

jbaber 3y ago

I agree. Many comments point out analogies to reading code, alphabets, etc. Surely, this is just how it feels to grasp any written representation of something sufficiently complicated. I'm almost more interested in an example of gradually evolved notation being tossed completely when a simpler modern replacement actually is better. Maybe Hangul?