13 ms·

Now I have something to refer to every time I hear someone complain about the standard notation. I am an orchestra musician, and about once a year someone comes

by bjoli 3y ago

Now I have something to refer to every time I hear someone complain about the standard notation. I am an orchestra musician, and about once a year someone comes up with a system with more shortcomings than benefits. I have started using the socratic method, but I have had conversations that ended with people saying that it isn't a problem to not be able to write triplets. "Then you switch to 6/8".

djtango 3y ago
yes - perhaps other systems can can capture the simpler cases, but standard music notation has been battle tested against many instruments and multi instrument. And iterated on for literally centuries. It's fine to acknowledge there is a barrier to entry and there may be better DSLs specific to particular use cases but it's also a shame that we have this one language that has captured so much of existing music already
- vintermann 3y ago
  The question is what is music notation even supposed to be. Is the purpose of music notation to be something you can set in front of a musician and make them play the music the way you want? In that case it performs pretty well, though it varies widely by instrument (both the ability to let them perform, and the actual notation). But if the purpose is music literacy, letting regular people read a score and be able to hear the music in their head, then it's not working well. Even experienced musicians (like I assume OP is) usually associate notation not with sound, but with finger and lip positions first, the means needed to reproduce it. And only then, sometimes, from finger positions to sounds. I remember the band kids in ear training classes in high school wiggling three fingers, playing an imaginary trumpet, in order to be able to sight sing. The reason I'm interested in alternative notation is that I dream of being able to read music like I read text. Who wouldn't want that? And despite having learned to sight read on some instruments and to sight sing reasonably, I don't feel like I can do that.
  - TylerE 3y ago
    99% of that is audition, not score reading. Reading a score mechanically is not difficult after a few not-especially steep hills are climbed.
    - vintermann 3y ago
      Audition? Sorry, I don't entirely understand what you mean by that in this context. > Reading a score mechanically is not difficult after a few not-especially steep hills are climbed. If it's so easy, why aren't we teaching everyone, like we teach them reading?
      - gwd 3y ago
        > If it's so easy, why aren't we teaching everyone, like we teach them reading? For the same reason we don't teach everyone the Greek alphabet -- because they're not really going to use it unless they're going to be reading Greek?
        vintermann 3y ago
        We teach kids a lot of things they're not really going to use. And it fact it seems we try to teach kids music notation - at least I had group recorder lessons in elementary school, and I thought this was pretty common? But we fail. On each step in my school career from elementary to high school, they assumed we hadn't learned anything in the previous level. Which was, for most people, true. A few, including me, learned to read traditional music notation well enough to play recorder pieces we weren't supposed to. But it didn't help me - or anyone I know - to be able to sight sing, for instance. It wasn't possible to build on for anything, except maybe becoming a better recorder player.
        cityofdelusion 3y ago
        Most kids hardly encounter musical notation in their daily lives though. Reading music is like any other kind of literacy — it needs daily practice and a lot of work. Most people are not music literate just like most people are not calculus literate or chemistry literate or programming language literate — it takes a lot more than a few classes in elementary. I took many more music classes than required and sing/read hymns regularly and I feel fairly musically literate. It just needs regular practice like anything else, especially singing. Another thing to keep in mind is that musical literacy is of limited practical use and most people get by with performing by ear just fine.
partomniscient 3y ago
That always did my head in and still does. Ok, so each bar has 6 notes and they're eighth notes. But there are only 6 of them, so why are they specified as an 8th note? They're sixth notes by definition surely? I'm with the crowd that 3/4 should be correctly written as 3/3 even though we were told that was a misnomer in school.
- UncleMeat 3y ago
  It isn't a fraction. The bottom number just refers to the size of a beat, with the added convention that certain time signatures imply a hidden 3x on the size of a beat. 6/8 has two beats of three eighth notes in a measure. It is just an idiom.
  - taylodl 3y ago
    People are worried about pitch and melody notation while a lot of people don't understand rhythm specifications!
  - navane 3y ago
    Technically its still a faction. It also says each whole bar has the duration of 3/4 note.
- mathw 3y ago
  No, they're eighth notes because there are eight of them in a whole note. In the UK we call them quavers, so we don't have this misconception. The time signatures are the same though - fortunately. They have to be represented somehow, although I'm sure we could do it better than we are it does the job. 3/4 is definitely meant to be 3/4, as it tells you are three beats in the bar, and those beats are represented by crotchets/quarter notes. They're not quarter notes because they're a quarter of the bar, but because you need four of them to make up the duration of a whole note. You can just as happily have a piece in 3/2, or 3/1, or 3/8, although in most genres all of those would imply different things about exactly how the rhythmic emphasis works. I do think we could do better around compound times like 6/8 and 9/8 vs simple times like 3/4 and 4/2, but we seem to manage okay. You do need genre knowledge to read music correctly, there's just no getting away from that. Any system which is capable of recording every nuance required would be unreadably dense. Although we have sound recording now, lucky us, so we can just use that...
josephg 3y ago
Eh. I watched the video and I hear him when he says it’s a hard problem. But music notation is still so far from ideal: - Why have a bass and treble cleft be different? We could just standardise one. It wouldn’t matter much for professional musicians but would make a massive difference to people learning music. - It’s unnecessary to have the second number in a key signature. Just standardise on / 4 - at least for beginners. 2/4. 3/4. 4/4. 6/4. Having different key signatures be denoted using different types of notes confused the hell out of beginners for seemingly no benefit. - So many music names are stupid. It’s not an “oct”ave. An “octave” has 7 or 12 notes depending on the scale. Seeing +8ve / +15ve drives me nuts. It’s +7/+14. Learn to count. And so on. Intel assembler is also a battle tested notation that has stood the test of time. But we don’t use it much. I understand that classical music notation is a good system for professional musicians. But that doesn’t mean it’s good for beginners. We don’t teach rust to high schoolers who’ve never programmed before. We start them off with something easier and they can learn rust later if they want. Even the video says piano roll notation is useful while composing. Why shouldn’t beginners use that? I get that it’s a hard problem. I know I don’t have all the answers. But surely there is room for improvement here. There’s no way this is the best music notation humanity will ever invent. We should celebrate the explorers, not demonise them. If they come up with something good, we all benefit.
- d1sxeyes 3y ago
  An “oct”ave is 8 intervals not 8 notes. The 1 is the root, and the 8 is the same note as the 1 again (2:1). There’s no specific reason to have 8, or 12, or 7, we just decided that way, same as we decided to count intervals not notes, and to start with 1 not 0. You could just as well say “let’s divide the frequency range between x and 2x by 10 instead of 12”. Or we do something between x and 3x instead. We just don’t. For what it’s worth, most guitarists (probably the largest group of amateur musicians in the west) use tab notation to begin with and many never graduate to standard notation. As others have said, music notation is often not much more than a “paint by numbers” - experienced musicians can “paint” the picture without reading every single number.
  - feoren 3y ago

by bjoli 3y ago

djtango 3y ago

yes - perhaps other systems can can capture the simpler cases, but standard music notation has been battle tested against many instruments and multi instrument. And iterated on for literally centuries. It's fine to acknowledge there is a barrier to entry and there may be better DSLs specific to particular use cases but it's also a shame that we have this one language that has captured so much of existing music already

vintermann 3y ago
The question is what is music notation even supposed to be. Is the purpose of music notation to be something you can set in front of a musician and make them play the music the way you want? In that case it performs pretty well, though it varies widely by instrument (both the ability to let them perform, and the actual notation). But if the purpose is music literacy, letting regular people read a score and be able to hear the music in their head, then it's not working well. Even experienced musicians (like I assume OP is) usually associate notation not with sound, but with finger and lip positions first, the means needed to reproduce it. And only then, sometimes, from finger positions to sounds. I remember the band kids in ear training classes in high school wiggling three fingers, playing an imaginary trumpet, in order to be able to sight sing. The reason I'm interested in alternative notation is that I dream of being able to read music like I read text. Who wouldn't want that? And despite having learned to sight read on some instruments and to sight sing reasonably, I don't feel like I can do that.
- TylerE 3y ago
  99% of that is audition, not score reading. Reading a score mechanically is not difficult after a few not-especially steep hills are climbed.
  - vintermann 3y ago
    Audition? Sorry, I don't entirely understand what you mean by that in this context. > Reading a score mechanically is not difficult after a few not-especially steep hills are climbed. If it's so easy, why aren't we teaching everyone, like we teach them reading?
    - gwd 3y ago
      > If it's so easy, why aren't we teaching everyone, like we teach them reading? For the same reason we don't teach everyone the Greek alphabet -- because they're not really going to use it unless they're going to be reading Greek?
      - vintermann 3y ago
        We teach kids a lot of things they're not really going to use. And it fact it seems we try to teach kids music notation - at least I had group recorder lessons in elementary school, and I thought this was pretty common? But we fail. On each step in my school career from elementary to high school, they assumed we hadn't learned anything in the previous level. Which was, for most people, true. A few, including me, learned to read traditional music notation well enough to play recorder pieces we weren't supposed to. But it didn't help me - or anyone I know - to be able to sight sing, for instance. It wasn't possible to build on for anything, except maybe becoming a better recorder player.
        cityofdelusion 3y ago
        Most kids hardly encounter musical notation in their daily lives though. Reading music is like any other kind of literacy — it needs daily practice and a lot of work. Most people are not music literate just like most people are not calculus literate or chemistry literate or programming language literate — it takes a lot more than a few classes in elementary. I took many more music classes than required and sing/read hymns regularly and I feel fairly musically literate. It just needs regular practice like anything else, especially singing. Another thing to keep in mind is that musical literacy is of limited practical use and most people get by with performing by ear just fine.

partomniscient 3y ago

That always did my head in and still does. Ok, so each bar has 6 notes and they're eighth notes. But there are only 6 of them, so why are they specified as an 8th note? They're sixth notes by definition surely? I'm with the crowd that 3/4 should be correctly written as 3/3 even though we were told that was a misnomer in school.

UncleMeat 3y ago
It isn't a fraction. The bottom number just refers to the size of a beat, with the added convention that certain time signatures imply a hidden 3x on the size of a beat. 6/8 has two beats of three eighth notes in a measure. It is just an idiom.
- taylodl 3y ago
  People are worried about pitch and melody notation while a lot of people don't understand rhythm specifications!
- navane 3y ago
  Technically its still a faction. It also says each whole bar has the duration of 3/4 note.
mathw 3y ago
No, they're eighth notes because there are eight of them in a whole note. In the UK we call them quavers, so we don't have this misconception. The time signatures are the same though - fortunately. They have to be represented somehow, although I'm sure we could do it better than we are it does the job. 3/4 is definitely meant to be 3/4, as it tells you are three beats in the bar, and those beats are represented by crotchets/quarter notes. They're not quarter notes because they're a quarter of the bar, but because you need four of them to make up the duration of a whole note. You can just as happily have a piece in 3/2, or 3/1, or 3/8, although in most genres all of those would imply different things about exactly how the rhythmic emphasis works. I do think we could do better around compound times like 6/8 and 9/8 vs simple times like 3/4 and 4/2, but we seem to manage okay. You do need genre knowledge to read music correctly, there's just no getting away from that. Any system which is capable of recording every nuance required would be unreadably dense. Although we have sound recording now, lucky us, so we can just use that...

josephg 3y ago

Eh. I watched the video and I hear him when he says it’s a hard problem. But music notation is still so far from ideal: - Why have a bass and treble cleft be different? We could just standardise one. It wouldn’t matter much for professional musicians but would make a massive difference to people learning music. - It’s unnecessary to have the second number in a key signature. Just standardise on / 4 - at least for beginners. 2/4. 3/4. 4/4. 6/4. Having different key signatures be denoted using different types of notes confused the hell out of beginners for seemingly no benefit. - So many music names are stupid. It’s not an “oct”ave. An “octave” has 7 or 12 notes depending on the scale. Seeing +8ve / +15ve drives me nuts. It’s +7/+14. Learn to count. And so on. Intel assembler is also a battle tested notation that has stood the test of time. But we don’t use it much. I understand that classical music notation is a good system for professional musicians. But that doesn’t mean it’s good for beginners. We don’t teach rust to high schoolers who’ve never programmed before. We start them off with something easier and they can learn rust later if they want. Even the video says piano roll notation is useful while composing. Why shouldn’t beginners use that? I get that it’s a hard problem. I know I don’t have all the answers. But surely there is room for improvement here. There’s no way this is the best music notation humanity will ever invent. We should celebrate the explorers, not demonise them. If they come up with something good, we all benefit.

d1sxeyes 3y ago
An “oct”ave is 8 intervals not 8 notes. The 1 is the root, and the 8 is the same note as the 1 again (2:1). There’s no specific reason to have 8, or 12, or 7, we just decided that way, same as we decided to count intervals not notes, and to start with 1 not 0. You could just as well say “let’s divide the frequency range between x and 2x by 10 instead of 12”. Or we do something between x and 3x instead. We just don’t. For what it’s worth, most guitarists (probably the largest group of amateur musicians in the west) use tab notation to begin with and many never graduate to standard notation. As others have said, music notation is often not much more than a “paint by numbers” - experienced musicians can “paint” the picture without reading every single number.
- feoren 3y ago