3 ms·

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 p

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.
        vintermann 3y ago
        For any kind of literacy, there's going to be a chicken and egg problem. If you suggested to an ancient mediterranean scribe that everyone should learn reading and writing, they'd probably say, "Pah, it would be a huge waste of time for most of them. Very little practical use. They get by with memorization anyway." And they'd be right, in a sense! We don't know beforehand what the fruit of universal literacy will be.
      - gwd 3y ago
        Right, to be able to sight-sing, you need either perfect pitch, or you need to 1) have a sufficient musical theory framework to describe what to sing without perfect pitch 2) need to know how to translate the notes on the page into that musical theory framework. With #2 being the hardest bit. Having a "simplified musical notation system" might enable many more casual people to be able to sight-sing. But how useful is that, practically speaking? After all, you can just ask your musician friend to play through the melody a few times and then you know it well enough that the full musical notation system can remind you. In fact, one simple option would be to teach people basic music theory based on C being the root, then write the vocal parts transposed into C and on a C clef. No need for super fancy new notation. But such a system would have the opposite issue if anyone wanted to play it on a real instrument -- then they'd need to have enough musical theory to be able to transpose whatever they were looking at into the specific key they were supposed to be playing. Furthermore, if you're looking at music, you're almost certainly going to be playing with an instrument anyway; in which case, you ideally want to practice in the same key the instrument is going to be in. In which case, it's probably better to just teach singers enough piano to be able to plunk out the tune on the piano when practicing privately until they "get" it. On the whole, it's not clear that any possible improvements to the current system of "Have the people who can't sight-sing listen to the instrument until they get the idea" will be worth the extra costs.
  - AxEy 3y ago
    > Audition? Sorry, I don't entirely understand what you mean by that in this context. I think they mean "audiation".
  - djtango 3y ago
    The brain is incredibly plastic. Chinese is spoken by 1.7B people and ostensibly most of them can read Chinese. If you listened to accounts of Western learners' experiences learning to read and write Chinese, you'd probably believe it's some insurmountable and elitist language. They don't use an alphabet, how cruel and complex for newcomers. Immersion and necessity enable us all to accomplish really astounding things. When I consider my own personal journey - I learned how to code after a career switch, and if I were to enumerate all the things I have since internalised with respect to programming and software engineering, it would have seemed absolutely impossible looking at it from day one. From an education perspective, I wonder whether we lack the mechanisms to and culture to develop the tenacity to get over the initial learning barriers of difficult stuff. I love how YouTube is now finding more creative ways to show how music theory is relevant. Eg how contrapuntal music theory was critical to making music for Pokémon on the GB due to the very limited sound making capabilities.
    - vintermann 3y ago
      I don't see what this has to do with anything, unless it's a long winded way of calling reform proponents stupid.
Voultapher 3y ago
I think it's important to differentiate between music and melody here. A notation that allows reading a melody seems possible and from what I know some people can do that with classical notation. But music in the sense of a spotify song is so much more than just a melody. Especially modern music genres. There are so many layers, effects and complex instruments at play that it seems impossible to create a diverse and robust notation that is human readable for music in general.
taylodl 3y ago
There were many alternatives prior to the adoption of the music notation system we currently use. There have been many alternatives developed after the adoption of the music notation system we currently use. All these alternatives have one thing in common: they didn't work as well, let alone better, than the music notation system we currently use. It's not as though a lot of people haven't put a lot of effort into this for a very long time. What we have is simply the best system we've been able to devise.
- vintermann 3y ago
  This is not how it worked at all. There were not competing systems, there were not proposals, there were only practices, and there was certainly not critical evaluation of what worked best. There was a ton of path dependence. We use notation for the same reason they use Chinese characters in China: partly for cultural prestige reasons, but primarily because it would be such a hassle to switch, with a billion people having invested so much in learning it and so much being written in it. (It's interesting that China should go the exact opposite way of cumbersome inherited complexity in their own music notation system, which as I've noted elsewhere is an undeniable pedagogic success but struggles to get accepted as more than a stepping stone to "real" notation)

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.
      - vintermann 3y ago
        For any kind of literacy, there's going to be a chicken and egg problem. If you suggested to an ancient mediterranean scribe that everyone should learn reading and writing, they'd probably say, "Pah, it would be a huge waste of time for most of them. Very little practical use. They get by with memorization anyway." And they'd be right, in a sense! We don't know beforehand what the fruit of universal literacy will be.
    - gwd 3y ago
      Right, to be able to sight-sing, you need either perfect pitch, or you need to 1) have a sufficient musical theory framework to describe what to sing without perfect pitch 2) need to know how to translate the notes on the page into that musical theory framework. With #2 being the hardest bit. Having a "simplified musical notation system" might enable many more casual people to be able to sight-sing. But how useful is that, practically speaking? After all, you can just ask your musician friend to play through the melody a few times and then you know it well enough that the full musical notation system can remind you. In fact, one simple option would be to teach people basic music theory based on C being the root, then write the vocal parts transposed into C and on a C clef. No need for super fancy new notation. But such a system would have the opposite issue if anyone wanted to play it on a real instrument -- then they'd need to have enough musical theory to be able to transpose whatever they were looking at into the specific key they were supposed to be playing. Furthermore, if you're looking at music, you're almost certainly going to be playing with an instrument anyway; in which case, you ideally want to practice in the same key the instrument is going to be in. In which case, it's probably better to just teach singers enough piano to be able to plunk out the tune on the piano when practicing privately until they "get" it. On the whole, it's not clear that any possible improvements to the current system of "Have the people who can't sight-sing listen to the instrument until they get the idea" will be worth the extra costs.
- AxEy 3y ago
  > Audition? Sorry, I don't entirely understand what you mean by that in this context. I think they mean "audiation".
- djtango 3y ago
  The brain is incredibly plastic. Chinese is spoken by 1.7B people and ostensibly most of them can read Chinese. If you listened to accounts of Western learners' experiences learning to read and write Chinese, you'd probably believe it's some insurmountable and elitist language. They don't use an alphabet, how cruel and complex for newcomers. Immersion and necessity enable us all to accomplish really astounding things. When I consider my own personal journey - I learned how to code after a career switch, and if I were to enumerate all the things I have since internalised with respect to programming and software engineering, it would have seemed absolutely impossible looking at it from day one. From an education perspective, I wonder whether we lack the mechanisms to and culture to develop the tenacity to get over the initial learning barriers of difficult stuff. I love how YouTube is now finding more creative ways to show how music theory is relevant. Eg how contrapuntal music theory was critical to making music for Pokémon on the GB due to the very limited sound making capabilities.
  - vintermann 3y ago
    I don't see what this has to do with anything, unless it's a long winded way of calling reform proponents stupid.

Voultapher 3y ago

I think it's important to differentiate between music and melody here. A notation that allows reading a melody seems possible and from what I know some people can do that with classical notation. But music in the sense of a spotify song is so much more than just a melody. Especially modern music genres. There are so many layers, effects and complex instruments at play that it seems impossible to create a diverse and robust notation that is human readable for music in general.

taylodl 3y ago

There were many alternatives prior to the adoption of the music notation system we currently use. There have been many alternatives developed after the adoption of the music notation system we currently use. All these alternatives have one thing in common: they didn't work as well, let alone better, than the music notation system we currently use. It's not as though a lot of people haven't put a lot of effort into this for a very long time. What we have is simply the best system we've been able to devise.

vintermann 3y ago
This is not how it worked at all. There were not competing systems, there were not proposals, there were only practices, and there was certainly not critical evaluation of what worked best. There was a ton of path dependence. We use notation for the same reason they use Chinese characters in China: partly for cultural prestige reasons, but primarily because it would be such a hassle to switch, with a billion people having invested so much in learning it and so much being written in it. (It's interesting that China should go the exact opposite way of cumbersome inherited complexity in their own music notation system, which as I've noted elsewhere is an undeniable pedagogic success but struggles to get accepted as more than a stepping stone to "real" notation)