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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 d

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
  > 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. The reasons for this are much much more complicated than "we just don't", and include "we sometimes do". The history of tunings and the emergence and dominance of 12-TET is fascinating and rooted in both math and myth.
- josephg 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). Double counting the root note is ridiculous. Thats like saying there's 11 numbers in decimal - 0, 1, 2, 3 all the way to 10. You end up with weird distortions like "8 notes in 1 octave, 15 notes in 2 octaves". It makes way more sense to just admit there are 7 notes in each octave (in diatonic scales), and then we can just multiply like we do everywhere else. Also, thats not what "interval" means - at least not in common parlance. An interval implies we're measuring the gap between 2 things. We usually measure intervals by subtraction. The interval between 10 and 15 is 5. The interval between 12:10 and 12:15 is 5 minutes. Likewise, we should count the interval between two notes by subtraction. The interval between the tonic and itself is 0. The interval between the tonic and the "major 2nd" (ugh) is a gap of 1 (diatonically) or 2 (chromatically). In music's defense, I think the notation system might predate the number 0. But keeping and defending the status quo seems ridiculous. There are clearly real improvements to be made.
zozbot234 3y ago
> Why have a bass and treble cleft be different? We could just standardise one. This has been tried, the sub-bass clef is just the treble clef two octaves down. But then the notes sit too high on the staff, with too many ledger lines. Most musicians find that learning a different clef is doable with a bit of effort. The meaning of relative intervals on the staff is the same, only the actual pitches are different. > It’s unnecessary to have the second number in a key signature. 3/4 has different style implications than 3/8, same with 6/4 wrt. 6/8 or even 2/4 wrt. 2/2. These distinctions are quite convenient, that's why they're kept around. An octave or etc. has seven or twelve distinct pitch classes, but if you want to linearly write out a full octave in sheet music in a way that can be heard clearly, you need eight notes--similar for other intervals. It's useful to be aware of both notions--the written-out 'interval' one usually finds and the zero-based 'distance', which is what you reference here.
- josephg 3y ago
  I understand that these distinctions might make sense for professional musicians. My point is that they're overwhelming for beginners. Its too much stuff! I suspect the ideal notation for beginners might be different from that of professional musicians. Thats certainly the case in programming, where we have different languages which are better suited for different use cases. We don't write webpages in assembler, or operating systems in Squeak. I've only been playing for 18 months at this point. I don't understand the subtle style implications of the time signature being 2/4 or 2/2. Is the best way to express those style difference really swapping crotchets for quavers in every measure? Seems a weird choice. Why not just have more marks at the top of the song naming how it should be played? Then beginners can ignore that mark and experts can play accordingly. But what do I know? I'm just a beginner with a beginners' perspective. If sheet music isn't designed to cater for my needs, well, honestly thats a bit crap.
deleted 3y ago
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flappyeagle 3y ago
you're largely arguing against concepts, not notation
brudgers 3y ago
Staff notation is ideal for writing music in staff notation. The politics of music are what makes it a hard problem. Staff notation is the notation of music written for clergy and kings. So there are banal incentives to premise arguments about music on the idea that staff notation notates everything that is properly/fully/truly music. And the politics of music is so pervasive we don't even think about it as politics. So pervasive that describing the music we listen to is often a shorthand for deeply describing ourselves...and perhaps describing the music we do not listen to, even more so. To put it another way, there are very well-established financially-backed conventions for what constitutes an informed opinion about music, and a corresponding canon of compositions.
mathw 3y ago
Bass and treble clefs are different because they need to cover different ranges. Likewise with alto and tenor clefs, the other two you see most often in modern notation. Or baritone clef, great bass clef, soprano clef, French violin clef... it goes on and on. Actually the mass codification of treble and bass clefs is a problem, because people don't learn to adapt. Once you can read four or five clefs fluently, new ones are pretty easy to deal with. If you only ever learn one or two they all seem difficult. The "second number in the key signature" is actually in the time signature, and it's pretty important. Although we didn't always have it - some older music just says "3" and you have to figure out 3 whats by looking at the music. Or go earlier than that and you'd have a circle, a broken circle, or one of those with a line through it. And no bar lines. I think most musicians agree the current system is an improvement on these in general. But take modern convention, look at how we write out English traditional music and you'll see that the 3/4 or 3/2 distinction is quite important as the first one is a waltz and the second is a hornpipe. You might not care about that, but anybody trying to dance to that tune will. If it helps, intervals are named in a 1-based system not a 0-based system. They're called octaves because you go to the eighth note in the sequence, not because you add seven. And yes I know there are actually 12 notes in an octave in Western music, but you're usually operating in a key or mode that has picked out eight of them to be used in that moment, because that's how Western harmony works. Of course we can improve music notation, and we will - it is still changing. Composers need to write down things that haven't been written down before, so they come up with a way to represent it. If that thing catches on, the notation will become standardised. Time signatures, which you called out, have changed completely over the centuries. You used to get a circle, a broken circle, or one of those with a line through it. That was it. They'll probably change again when someone has a really good reason to do it. Even our conventions for what note values to use have changed. There's a reason the semibreve - a whole bar of 4/4 - has a name which means "half a short note". Yet many musicians today don't know what a breve or a long or a longa even look like, because there's been a shift towards using quavers, semiquavers, demisemiquavers and so forth. The whole US system for note naming kind of enforces that, with the idea of a semibreve being a "whole note" as if 4/4 is somehow special (it's not).
tzs 3y ago
> Why have a bass and treble cleft be different? There are actually even more clefs than just those two, but those two are by far the most common. A while back I was curious why guitar music is written transposed up an octave and why it is written on the treble clef instead of using both bass and treble clefs like piano music. One of the thing I found when searching for the answer to that is that piano music is written using two clefs at least partly because the hands are largely independent on piano so it can essentially function as two instruments. Music that for strings might take two instruments to play, such as cello and a violin, can be played on one piano with one handed taking the part for the bass instrument and one taking the part for the treble instrument. It thus makes some sense to notate the left hand part with the same clef common for bass instruments and the right hand part with the same clef common for treble instruments. The answer I found for why guitar uses just one clef and why it is transposed is that (1) using the transposed treble clef was cheaper and faster back in the days when printing music was expensive and hard, (2) guitar doesn't have the hand independence piano does. Here's where guitar in EADGBE tuning would fit without transposition on the piano bass/treble clefs, on just the bass clef, and on just the treble clef: Actual Actual Actual Grand Bass Treble --E- --E- --E- D D D --C- --C- --C- B B B --A- --A- --A- G G G ---------F- --F- ---------F- | E 12 E 12 | E 12 ---------D- --D- ---------D- | C C | C ---------B- --B- ---------B- | A A | A ---------G- --G- ---------G- | F F | F ---1st---E- 1st --E- ---1st---E- D D D middle --C- middle --C- middle --C- 2nd B 2nd B 2nd B ---------A- ---------A- --A- | 3rd G | 3rd G 3rd G ---------F- ---------F- --F- | E | E E ---4th---D- ---4th---D- 4th --D- | C | C C ---------B- ---------B- --B- | 5th A | 5th A 5th A ---------G- ---------G- --G- F F F 6th --E- 6th --E- 6th --E- The 1st, 2nd, 3rd etc mark the notes on the open strings. I've also marked middle C for reference. The 12 to the left of the second highest E marks the E on the 12th fret of the first string, which is the highest fret before the neck joins the body on a normal classical guitar. The fretboard has frets beyond that, but unless the guitar has a cutaway body they are harder to play so aren't used as much. Classic guitars usually have another 7 frets beyond that which would go up 4 more notes to B. Acoustic guitars often have the neck join the body a little later and have one more total frets so go up to the C above the 12th. Electric guitars typically have the neck join the body way higher and have 12 frets above the 12th fret, going all the way to the E an octave above the 12th fret. Still, most guitar music is going to mostly stay below that 12th fret. Given that, it fits pretty well on the piano style bass/treble clefs. If music had been cheap and easy to print, and we didn't get hung up on the guitar not having the hand independence of the piano, I think notating guitar without transposition on the bass/treble clefs like piano would have worked out fine. If that's too hard and expensive, then it becomes clear why it gets transposed. If it was notated just using bass clef you'd need ledger lines for everything on the top two strings, which is often most or all of your melody. When your printed music involves hand typesetting on primitive equipment that is annoying. Even worse would by untransposed on the treble clef. Now almost everything played on strings 3-6, and much of string 2, would need ledger lines. Transposing up an octave gives this: Transposed Transposed Treble Bass E E --D- --D- C C --B- --B- A A --G- --G- F F --E- 12 --E- 12 D D --C- --C- B B --A- --A- G G ---------F- -F- | 1st E 1st E ---------D- -D- | middle C middle C ---2nd---B- 2nd -B- | A A ---3rd---G- 3rd. -G- | F F ---------E- -E- 4th D 4th D --C- --C- B B 5th --A- ---5th---A- G | G --F- ---------F- 6th E | 6th E ----------- | ----------- | ----------- Transposed up an octave on the treble clef needs the same number of ledger lines to cover from the lowest note on the 6th string up to the 12th fret on the 1st string as does untransposed on the bass clef, but it it puts the bulk of more music in or next to the lines of the staff so there will usually be fewer times you actually need to use ledger lines.
liveoneggs 3y ago
Isn't the bass clef just an arbitrary position on "the grand staff" with a reminder that "This line is F"?
- josephg 3y ago
  Yeah. But its exhausting for beginners needing to memorize all the note positions in the staff twice - once for the treble clef and once for the bass clef. Maybe having both is better for professional musicians. But its much worse for beginners.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    I'm a couple of years into playing piano by now and I still get confused at times.

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
> 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. The reasons for this are much much more complicated than "we just don't", and include "we sometimes do". The history of tunings and the emergence and dominance of 12-TET is fascinating and rooted in both math and myth.
josephg 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). Double counting the root note is ridiculous. Thats like saying there's 11 numbers in decimal - 0, 1, 2, 3 all the way to 10. You end up with weird distortions like "8 notes in 1 octave, 15 notes in 2 octaves". It makes way more sense to just admit there are 7 notes in each octave (in diatonic scales), and then we can just multiply like we do everywhere else. Also, thats not what "interval" means - at least not in common parlance. An interval implies we're measuring the gap between 2 things. We usually measure intervals by subtraction. The interval between 10 and 15 is 5. The interval between 12:10 and 12:15 is 5 minutes. Likewise, we should count the interval between two notes by subtraction. The interval between the tonic and itself is 0. The interval between the tonic and the "major 2nd" (ugh) is a gap of 1 (diatonically) or 2 (chromatically). In music's defense, I think the notation system might predate the number 0. But keeping and defending the status quo seems ridiculous. There are clearly real improvements to be made.

zozbot234 3y ago

> Why have a bass and treble cleft be different? We could just standardise one. This has been tried, the sub-bass clef is just the treble clef two octaves down. But then the notes sit too high on the staff, with too many ledger lines. Most musicians find that learning a different clef is doable with a bit of effort. The meaning of relative intervals on the staff is the same, only the actual pitches are different. > It’s unnecessary to have the second number in a key signature. 3/4 has different style implications than 3/8, same with 6/4 wrt. 6/8 or even 2/4 wrt. 2/2. These distinctions are quite convenient, that's why they're kept around. An octave or etc. has seven or twelve distinct pitch classes, but if you want to linearly write out a full octave in sheet music in a way that can be heard clearly, you need eight notes--similar for other intervals. It's useful to be aware of both notions--the written-out 'interval' one usually finds and the zero-based 'distance', which is what you reference here.

josephg 3y ago
I understand that these distinctions might make sense for professional musicians. My point is that they're overwhelming for beginners. Its too much stuff! I suspect the ideal notation for beginners might be different from that of professional musicians. Thats certainly the case in programming, where we have different languages which are better suited for different use cases. We don't write webpages in assembler, or operating systems in Squeak. I've only been playing for 18 months at this point. I don't understand the subtle style implications of the time signature being 2/4 or 2/2. Is the best way to express those style difference really swapping crotchets for quavers in every measure? Seems a weird choice. Why not just have more marks at the top of the song naming how it should be played? Then beginners can ignore that mark and experts can play accordingly. But what do I know? I'm just a beginner with a beginners' perspective. If sheet music isn't designed to cater for my needs, well, honestly thats a bit crap.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

flappyeagle 3y ago

you're largely arguing against concepts, not notation

brudgers 3y ago

Staff notation is ideal for writing music in staff notation. The politics of music are what makes it a hard problem. Staff notation is the notation of music written for clergy and kings. So there are banal incentives to premise arguments about music on the idea that staff notation notates everything that is properly/fully/truly music. And the politics of music is so pervasive we don't even think about it as politics. So pervasive that describing the music we listen to is often a shorthand for deeply describing ourselves...and perhaps describing the music we do not listen to, even more so. To put it another way, there are very well-established financially-backed conventions for what constitutes an informed opinion about music, and a corresponding canon of compositions.

mathw 3y ago

Bass and treble clefs are different because they need to cover different ranges. Likewise with alto and tenor clefs, the other two you see most often in modern notation. Or baritone clef, great bass clef, soprano clef, French violin clef... it goes on and on. Actually the mass codification of treble and bass clefs is a problem, because people don't learn to adapt. Once you can read four or five clefs fluently, new ones are pretty easy to deal with. If you only ever learn one or two they all seem difficult. The "second number in the key signature" is actually in the time signature, and it's pretty important. Although we didn't always have it - some older music just says "3" and you have to figure out 3 whats by looking at the music. Or go earlier than that and you'd have a circle, a broken circle, or one of those with a line through it. And no bar lines. I think most musicians agree the current system is an improvement on these in general. But take modern convention, look at how we write out English traditional music and you'll see that the 3/4 or 3/2 distinction is quite important as the first one is a waltz and the second is a hornpipe. You might not care about that, but anybody trying to dance to that tune will. If it helps, intervals are named in a 1-based system not a 0-based system. They're called octaves because you go to the eighth note in the sequence, not because you add seven. And yes I know there are actually 12 notes in an octave in Western music, but you're usually operating in a key or mode that has picked out eight of them to be used in that moment, because that's how Western harmony works. Of course we can improve music notation, and we will - it is still changing. Composers need to write down things that haven't been written down before, so they come up with a way to represent it. If that thing catches on, the notation will become standardised. Time signatures, which you called out, have changed completely over the centuries. You used to get a circle, a broken circle, or one of those with a line through it. That was it. They'll probably change again when someone has a really good reason to do it. Even our conventions for what note values to use have changed. There's a reason the semibreve - a whole bar of 4/4 - has a name which means "half a short note". Yet many musicians today don't know what a breve or a long or a longa even look like, because there's been a shift towards using quavers, semiquavers, demisemiquavers and so forth. The whole US system for note naming kind of enforces that, with the idea of a semibreve being a "whole note" as if 4/4 is somehow special (it's not).

tzs 3y ago

> Why have a bass and treble cleft be different? There are actually even more clefs than just those two, but those two are by far the most common. A while back I was curious why guitar music is written transposed up an octave and why it is written on the treble clef instead of using both bass and treble clefs like piano music. One of the thing I found when searching for the answer to that is that piano music is written using two clefs at least partly because the hands are largely independent on piano so it can essentially function as two instruments. Music that for strings might take two instruments to play, such as cello and a violin, can be played on one piano with one handed taking the part for the bass instrument and one taking the part for the treble instrument. It thus makes some sense to notate the left hand part with the same clef common for bass instruments and the right hand part with the same clef common for treble instruments. The answer I found for why guitar uses just one clef and why it is transposed is that (1) using the transposed treble clef was cheaper and faster back in the days when printing music was expensive and hard, (2) guitar doesn't have the hand independence piano does. Here's where guitar in EADGBE tuning would fit without transposition on the piano bass/treble clefs, on just the bass clef, and on just the treble clef: Actual Actual Actual Grand Bass Treble --E- --E- --E- D D D --C- --C- --C- B B B --A- --A- --A- G G G ---------F- --F- ---------F- | E 12 E 12 | E 12 ---------D- --D- ---------D- | C C | C ---------B- --B- ---------B- | A A | A ---------G- --G- ---------G- | F F | F ---1st---E- 1st --E- ---1st---E- D D D middle --C- middle --C- middle --C- 2nd B 2nd B 2nd B ---------A- ---------A- --A- | 3rd G | 3rd G 3rd G ---------F- ---------F- --F- | E | E E ---4th---D- ---4th---D- 4th --D- | C | C C ---------B- ---------B- --B- | 5th A | 5th A 5th A ---------G- ---------G- --G- F F F 6th --E- 6th --E- 6th --E- The 1st, 2nd, 3rd etc mark the notes on the open strings. I've also marked middle C for reference. The 12 to the left of the second highest E marks the E on the 12th fret of the first string, which is the highest fret before the neck joins the body on a normal classical guitar. The fretboard has frets beyond that, but unless the guitar has a cutaway body they are harder to play so aren't used as much. Classic guitars usually have another 7 frets beyond that which would go up 4 more notes to B. Acoustic guitars often have the neck join the body a little later and have one more total frets so go up to the C above the 12th. Electric guitars typically have the neck join the body way higher and have 12 frets above the 12th fret, going all the way to the E an octave above the 12th fret. Still, most guitar music is going to mostly stay below that 12th fret. Given that, it fits pretty well on the piano style bass/treble clefs. If music had been cheap and easy to print, and we didn't get hung up on the guitar not having the hand independence of the piano, I think notating guitar without transposition on the bass/treble clefs like piano would have worked out fine. If that's too hard and expensive, then it becomes clear why it gets transposed. If it was notated just using bass clef you'd need ledger lines for everything on the top two strings, which is often most or all of your melody. When your printed music involves hand typesetting on primitive equipment that is annoying. Even worse would by untransposed on the treble clef. Now almost everything played on strings 3-6, and much of string 2, would need ledger lines. Transposing up an octave gives this: Transposed Transposed Treble Bass E E --D- --D- C C --B- --B- A A --G- --G- F F --E- 12 --E- 12 D D --C- --C- B B --A- --A- G G ---------F- -F- | 1st E 1st E ---------D- -D- | middle C middle C ---2nd---B- 2nd -B- | A A ---3rd---G- 3rd. -G- | F F ---------E- -E- 4th D 4th D --C- --C- B B 5th --A- ---5th---A- G | G --F- ---------F- 6th E | 6th E ----------- | ----------- | ----------- Transposed up an octave on the treble clef needs the same number of ledger lines to cover from the lowest note on the 6th string up to the 12th fret on the 1st string as does untransposed on the bass clef, but it it puts the bulk of more music in or next to the lines of the staff so there will usually be fewer times you actually need to use ledger lines.

liveoneggs 3y ago

Isn't the bass clef just an arbitrary position on "the grand staff" with a reminder that "This line is F"?

josephg 3y ago
Yeah. But its exhausting for beginners needing to memorize all the note positions in the staff twice - once for the treble clef and once for the bass clef. Maybe having both is better for professional musicians. But its much worse for beginners.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  I'm a couple of years into playing piano by now and I still get confused at times.