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My experience with classical musical notation (as a pianist) is that it gets much easier to read the more you understand the conventions of the music. After yo

My experience with classical musical notation (as a pianist) is that it gets much easier to read the more you understand the conventions of the music. After you have a sense of what conventional classical music sounds like, of the kinds of scales and melodies and patterns that it usually uses, then when you look at a new piece, you aren't starting from scratch; you are pattern matching against a document that contains mostly familiar idioms. And that makes it much, much faster and easier than reading something completely unfamiliar or avant-garde. This is true with some kinds of jazz too: after you've played enough jazz standards, it gets easier to sight-read a jazz piece from a fake book, and have it come out pretty much right the first time. The chords are mostly what you expect, the melody uses familiar scales, and so on. It's not that things have to be 100% in genre, but if they are 80% in genre, then that reduces cognitive load immensely, and it's easy to cope with the 20% that is more surprising. It's easy to think of a musical genre as being something that provides comfort and familiarity (if not boredom) to the listeners, but it's interesting to think about musical genres as a sort of shortcut that helps the performers as well. I don't think there is any truly universal musical language and notation. It depends on the specific kind of music you care about. That being said - the other thing that made sheet music easier for me was taking a year of voice lessons. I came away more attuned to melodies than I used to be and better at understanding them on the page.

bombcar 3y ago
People not “used” to music don’t realize that for any particular segment, there’s really not an infinite number of possible “next notes” - just like when reading English and you see a three letter word starting “ca” it’s only got a few options to finish it up: b,d,m,n,p,r,t,w kinda thing.
- feoren 3y ago
  That's not reading. That's guessing. Look up the "three cueing system" for reading. It's a workaround for bad readers. You're saying that people can read music, unless the music does something unexpected, and then they'd play the wrong thing. And possibly never know it. So they're not reading music at all. Why bother? Can you pronounce these fake words? I'll bet your pronunciation is basically the same as everyone else with a similar accent. Yet none of the middle letters are on your list. That's because you can read. Advocating for guessing what the next note is when sight-reading is terrible advice. You will learn the song wrong and never fully un-learn it. Caquin Caanin Cazin Cayin Cacin
  - bombcar 3y ago
    It's not advocating for guessing, it's pointing out that for people who can sight-read, they're mostly confirming the expected pattern, and they only have to spend extra "effort" on the unexpected, the Cacin words in your example.
ajross 3y ago
> [X] gets much easier to read the more you understand the conventions of the [form] This is speciously true for almost everything though. You can learn Rust or C or COBOL to the point where you understand idiomatic code well at first glance. But (1) newbies still get confused by these languages and (2) COBOL remains a terrible choice for new code. That any language can be "sight read" isn't really at issue. It's whether or not the language we've picked is a good one or not.
- decasia 3y ago
  I see what you mean. For what it's worth, I wasn't mainly trying to comment on whether classical music notation is a good general language of music. My view, to emphasize, is that classical notation is very useful in certain contexts, absolutely not in others. Some cases where Western classical musical notation is a really poor fit: - anything with pitch bending and non-Western or microtonal scales - non-tonal or percussion instruments - folk or popular styles of guitar (which anyway has a whole subculture of guitar tab) On the other hand, if you want to learn classical piano... I don't think it would make much sense not to learn classical musical notation. In this sense, I don't really agree with the COBOL analogy; COBOL is obsolete in a way that sheet music just isn't. I can't say I really have any opinion on what is the best general case musical notation style for newbies. I guess I leave it to school music teachers to figure that out!
  - ajross 3y ago
    > COBOL is obsolete in a way that sheet music just isn't. Is it not? I mean, look at teenagers playing with garage band. They're making music, but not using anything remotely like traditional notation. Pop guitarists have long since abandoned staves for tablature. Even very talented professional singers on broadway are often unable to sight read a melody. You're right that if you want to learn, I dunno, the clarinet, there is a long tradition of tutorial and practice material in traditional notation that will take you all the way up to master level. And that's good and worth celebrating and preserving. But it's not an argument that there isn't a better way to notate music for the clarinet! Again: no one writes COBOL. No one writes COBOL even for the tasks (c.f. batch processed accounting systems) COBOL was good at. And the reason is that we invented better tools and adopted them. It strains reason to argue that a 4-century old collection of kludges and hacks can't be improved upon.
feoren 3y ago
> it gets easier to sight-read a jazz piece from a fake book There's a reason they call these "fake books". The purpose is to get close enough that you've effectively re-created the music without hitting all the exact notes. If that's your goal, then you're totally correct: familiarity with the genre will be enough to make it so that you probably played something that basically sounds roughly kinda mostly like basically what the author kinda roughly wanted it to sound like. That's real music! But it is not sight-reading. If you tried this in an Orchestra they'd tell you to GTFO. If you actually care about playing the music exactly (and many don't, and that's fine!) then you can't be guessing at what note comes next. You have to actually read the music. Conventions have nothing to do with that. If you find it easy to sight-read a complex piece of piano music, you either: - Are an absolute phenom wunderkind professional piano player, one of the top in the world - Have actually heard the song played before and are using your ears as much as your eyes (nothing wrong with this!) - Are guessing and getting it wrong sometimes (not necessarily anything wrong with this either, but you'll learn it wrong and then never master it exactly if that's your goal)

bombcar 3y ago

People not “used” to music don’t realize that for any particular segment, there’s really not an infinite number of possible “next notes” - just like when reading English and you see a three letter word starting “ca” it’s only got a few options to finish it up: b,d,m,n,p,r,t,w kinda thing.

feoren 3y ago
That's not reading. That's guessing. Look up the "three cueing system" for reading. It's a workaround for bad readers. You're saying that people can read music, unless the music does something unexpected, and then they'd play the wrong thing. And possibly never know it. So they're not reading music at all. Why bother? Can you pronounce these fake words? I'll bet your pronunciation is basically the same as everyone else with a similar accent. Yet none of the middle letters are on your list. That's because you can read. Advocating for guessing what the next note is when sight-reading is terrible advice. You will learn the song wrong and never fully un-learn it. Caquin Caanin Cazin Cayin Cacin
- bombcar 3y ago
  It's not advocating for guessing, it's pointing out that for people who can sight-read, they're mostly confirming the expected pattern, and they only have to spend extra "effort" on the unexpected, the Cacin words in your example.

ajross 3y ago

> [X] gets much easier to read the more you understand the conventions of the [form] This is speciously true for almost everything though. You can learn Rust or C or COBOL to the point where you understand idiomatic code well at first glance. But (1) newbies still get confused by these languages and (2) COBOL remains a terrible choice for new code. That any language can be "sight read" isn't really at issue. It's whether or not the language we've picked is a good one or not.

decasia 3y ago
I see what you mean. For what it's worth, I wasn't mainly trying to comment on whether classical music notation is a good general language of music. My view, to emphasize, is that classical notation is very useful in certain contexts, absolutely not in others. Some cases where Western classical musical notation is a really poor fit: - anything with pitch bending and non-Western or microtonal scales - non-tonal or percussion instruments - folk or popular styles of guitar (which anyway has a whole subculture of guitar tab) On the other hand, if you want to learn classical piano... I don't think it would make much sense not to learn classical musical notation. In this sense, I don't really agree with the COBOL analogy; COBOL is obsolete in a way that sheet music just isn't. I can't say I really have any opinion on what is the best general case musical notation style for newbies. I guess I leave it to school music teachers to figure that out!
- ajross 3y ago
  > COBOL is obsolete in a way that sheet music just isn't. Is it not? I mean, look at teenagers playing with garage band. They're making music, but not using anything remotely like traditional notation. Pop guitarists have long since abandoned staves for tablature. Even very talented professional singers on broadway are often unable to sight read a melody. You're right that if you want to learn, I dunno, the clarinet, there is a long tradition of tutorial and practice material in traditional notation that will take you all the way up to master level. And that's good and worth celebrating and preserving. But it's not an argument that there isn't a better way to notate music for the clarinet! Again: no one writes COBOL. No one writes COBOL even for the tasks (c.f. batch processed accounting systems) COBOL was good at. And the reason is that we invented better tools and adopted them. It strains reason to argue that a 4-century old collection of kludges and hacks can't be improved upon.

feoren 3y ago

> it gets easier to sight-read a jazz piece from a fake book There's a reason they call these "fake books". The purpose is to get close enough that you've effectively re-created the music without hitting all the exact notes. If that's your goal, then you're totally correct: familiarity with the genre will be enough to make it so that you probably played something that basically sounds roughly kinda mostly like basically what the author kinda roughly wanted it to sound like. That's real music! But it is not sight-reading. If you tried this in an Orchestra they'd tell you to GTFO. If you actually care about playing the music exactly (and many don't, and that's fine!) then you can't be guessing at what note comes next. You have to actually read the music. Conventions have nothing to do with that. If you find it easy to sight-read a complex piece of piano music, you either: - Are an absolute phenom wunderkind professional piano player, one of the top in the world - Have actually heard the song played before and are using your ears as much as your eyes (nothing wrong with this!) - Are guessing and getting it wrong sometimes (not necessarily anything wrong with this either, but you'll learn it wrong and then never master it exactly if that's your goal)