8 ms·

I'm very skeptical that this is an improvement (but kudos for thinking outside the box). Here's something that was intended as constructive criticism, but maybe

by arnarbi 14y ago

I'm very skeptical that this is an improvement (but kudos for thinking outside the box). Here's something that was intended as constructive criticism, but maybe ended up more as just criticism: Removing the key signature is not a good idea. When playing in G major, the sharp accidental on the Fs is not put at the beginning of the line just to avoid printing it in the score. Rather, it fits there because when I play in G major, I put my brain in G major mode, in which case it would be distracting to have an accidental on every single F. Similarly, writing a special symbol for each pitch seems it would get heavily in the way of transposing on the fly. The position already encodes the pitch, and the ABCDEFG names kind of get in the way of understanding the melody, which is more about relative intervals than absolute values. And what does the little parenthesis on the length line mean? For half- and whole notes it seems to mean it doubles the length (a quarternote with one or two parentheses), but for sixteenth-notes it seems to indicate that it halves it (an eighth-note with a single parenthesis mark). I also question removing the stem of a note. I have a feeling that is one of the stronger queues for reading rhythm. Spacing is not very important, and indeed especially in dense scores for solo instruments, that need to have few page turns, notes are often just spaced as tightly as possible. The author also recognized that the beams on eighth- and sixtheenth-notes (e.g. in the left hand) are very important rhythmic cues, and replaced them with that horizontal thing with the arrow on the left. This is a bit hard to read though when there are no stems to link them to the note and the pitch interval is big. The part about it being easy to write by hand looks good, and made me feel good at first. Then you realize that hand-written traditional notation is quite different from typeset one, just like handwritten text is very different from printed text. Drawing all the little balls and filling in the halfmoon C, up and down thingies seems tedious, when traditionally one writes a simple dot or a little slash instead of the note head.

podperson 14y ago
The mnemonics are also anglocentric visual puns (e is for empty). I'd suggest a set of symbols with natural ordering that can be distinguished by shape (vs. all circles)
- arnarbi 14y ago
  Yes, I realized I misunderstood those, and edited my comment a bit.
- jeffamcgee 14y ago
  That's actually already been done: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shape_note http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shape_note . The hymnals at my grandparent's church actually have shaped notes.
brodney 14y ago
On your last question, it took me a minute to get that those various "Above" or "Below" correspond to the notes they represent, A and B. The pitch is revealed both in the symbol and in the position on the staff. I found that pretty useful, certainly easier to read than homogenous black dots where you only have spatial information.
- arnarbi 14y ago
  Thanks, turns out I totally misunderstood those at first - and edited my comment in the meantime. Sorry about that.
- MBCook 14y ago
  I read through the whole page and didn't get that. It didn't click until I started looking at the second page on the site (which goes more in depth). My immediate thought once I figured that out was "this depends on English". For speakers of Japanese or Russian or French, can you find easy to remember words that can go with the first symbol, and that start with an "a" sound? I actually found the terms extremely confusing. At first I thought the above/below referred to sharp/flat, but that didn't turn out. I couldn't even come up with concepts for dot and groove. I know how to read music, but I'm not very good at it. I'll say that the idea of giving each note it's own shape seems like it could fix the problem of losing my place and having to count lines/spaces to figure out what a note it. The thing I've never liked about musical notation is that the X axis has nothing to do with time. A staff can have 8 32nd notes and then a dotted half note. Those first notes take up 1/4 the time but 3/4 the space. While it would take more space, I find a consistent relationship much easier (such as piano roles or Guitar Hero note charts).
  - jfim 14y ago
    As a native French speaker, we don't use the CDEFGAB notation but rather the "do ré mi fa sol la si do", so the symbols make no sense whatsoever.
- HNLogInShit 14y ago
  The "above" is supposed to stand for the A note? I didn't get that from any part of this. How can such a basic point be so poorly (or not explained)? Using icons that translate to English words to stand for note letters is a terrible idea.
icarus_drowning 14y ago
What you mean by this is that the key signature tells you what the tonic is, and, conversely, what the supertonic, mediant, subdominant, dominant, etc. are. Whenever I teach key signatures this is the biggest thing I try to impart: key signatures are more than just accidentals, they define the roles each pitch plays.
- valdiorn 14y ago
  ehm, I would disagree. The key signature tells you what key the piece is in, period. What the particular notes in that key do (their role, as you put it) is a property of that key.
  - jofer 14y ago
    I believe he was referring to the "put my brain in G" comment. It's all about recognizing when to build tension and when to resolve tension. Yes, the roles that the notes play is defined by the key, but if you don't mentally make the switch, you'll often perform things poorly because you don't anticipate where things are going correctly. Or at least that's how it works for me, at any rate. Take anything I say with a grain of salt. I can't sight-read much at all.
  - icarus_drowning 14y ago
    How is "tell[ing] you what key the piece is in" different that defining tonic/dominant/leading tone relationships? Those relationships are the product of the whole/half step pattern that the key signature communicates. It isn't just important that G has 1 sharp, and it is F. That sharp actually defines the leading tone.
    - colomon 14y ago
      That's only if the tonic is G. I play tunes all the time with one sharp, but a tonic of D. (ie D mixolydian.)
      - icarus_drowning 14y ago
jpwagner 14y ago
Your critique is spot on for those trained in music. Is that his target audience? What about for those being exposed to music and its notation for the first time? What if you had never had a concept of putting your brain in G major mode. But if complete beginners are his target audience, it begs the question why stop there? Why maintain the use of the staff at all.
- microtherion 14y ago
  I don’t think acquiring a sense of key signature is a dispensable part of the music learning experience, unless you plan to stick to twelve tone music.
- silencio 14y ago
  No matter what people come up with and who the target audience is, there needs to be a good bridge between the traditional and the new. Staff or not, great for beginners or not, this will only fail because of the total lack of sheet music and other materials with nothing in sight to automate the translation of even a limited subset of music and materials. (Of course, caveat, I've been playing piano for 20+ years as a hobby. Maybe the ties to the traditional are really not a big deal.)
  - shardling 14y ago
    I certainly hope that in the near future, digital transcriptions are easy enough to come by that you could effectively just change the font from one notation to another. I know there are a lot of judgement calls in typesetting music, but that's true of text too, and we have some pretty good algorithms for doing so these days. All that said, I have a lot of reservations about this particular notation, but I think there's certainly room for improvement even inside the current system. Letting the back catalog of work hold notation back isn't healthy.
  - PeterisP 14y ago
    The whole point of any new, better musical notation is avoiding the need to deeply understand the current traditional notation. It is enough if machines can translate the existing sheet music to the new system.
eranation 14y ago
All I can say is this, I play guitar for 15 years, learned piano since I was 7, and I never got the classic notation. I can't read notes. And I tried learning a few times. I looked at hummingbird, and it took me 30 seconds to memorize the symbols, and now I can read any hummingbird note sheet easily. I would say this is a big win. Same feel I got when I saw Tau, mathematicians might argue it's incorrect, but for me, I don't care, Tau made math easy for me. Hummingbird makes music easy for me. That's all I care. About transposing, you got a point, I think there should be apps that do it for you (e.g. convert MIDI files to hummingbird notation, I'm sure we'll see a few of these as Show HN sometime soon)
- gcr 14y ago
  You can now sightread pages of hummingbird after 30 seconds of cursory inspection? Hummingbird feels like a crutch to me. Hiding key signatures stunts your understanding of how music works. Forcing time to be marked explicitly as well as by altering spacing places odd constraints on typesetters. Humans use several subtle visual cues¹ to read music quickly and efficiently, and hummingbird just throws them all away. I'm not sure this is worth the overhaul. 1: http://lilypond.org/web/about/automated-engraving/software http://lilypond.org/web/about/automated-engraving/software
  - eranation 14y ago
    Yes, I can, very, very slowly, but much faster than with the regular notation, and mostly because I'm not used to sightreading regardless of how it's written. I think it will never appeal to classic / professional musicians or anyone who already feels comfortable with the regular notation, but for people lbike me, that for whatever neurological reason just can get the old notation to stick, this is priceless. The Above Below C Dot Empty Full Groove is such a great wiring that I will never be able to forget it. I might not read it fast as you read regular notes, but I will at least be able to practice. Reading regular notes to me was always counting lines, always missing the global # or b, and simply giving up serious music. I recorded music, had songs on the radio, I can play anything by ear, but not being able to read notes always bothers me. Now I can.
cliffbean 14y ago
Right, key signatures aren't just shorthand, they're useful information to give the performer up front. In fact, it's so useful to state the key up front, I might even suggest the opposite; base the notation on relative pitches, as in "movable do" solfege. Then we could replace "all F's and C's are sharp" with just "do is D". Of course, there'd be tradeoffs to this as compared to the traditional notation, but it's fun to think about.
- andrewflnr 14y ago
  Why would you go to the trouble of designing a new music notation and not make it based on relative pitches? What are the tradeoffs?
  - cliffbean 14y ago
    My thought was that a relative-pitch notation might present a steeper learning curve. But I don't really know. I've worked with intermediate-level musicians who are skilled at regular sight-reading, but who struggle to learn to transpose on the fly. A relative-pitch notation might be like requiring everyone to "transpose" all the time, forcing them to learn this skill before they can proceed. On the other hand, maybe you'd teach it differently. Instead of learning transposition as carrying around an offset to add to each pitch, you'd learn it as carrying around a scale to which the relative pitches would be mapped. I wonder whether this would be easier or harder to learn.
    - andrewflnr 14y ago
      You're going to stay in one scale for a long time anyway (C for piano). For that duration, pitches in the notation correspond obviously to fingerings (keys, frets, whatever). This includes other instruments which have a different "natural" key (D for the viola, my other sort of instrument): their notation maps just as nicely. When you get beyond that, "mapping relative pitches to a scale" is, IMO, the correct approach. The "offset to each pitch" thing obscures what's really going on, as if they were all weird derivatives of the key of C. I can see how it might be harder, among other reasons because you have to understand how a scale works more clearly, but I suspect it would be worth it. Of course, it's hard to really know without getting people to switch for a couple generations.
sixothree 14y ago
My first observation was that it was difficult to discern the notes on my screen. Imagine that on paper farther than arms length away in a darkened room. That's plenty enough to disqualify it. But yes, classical notation could certainly use some refinements.
- vwinsyee 14y ago
  I had the same reaction. No matter how small the notes are in classical notation, I can tell if they're filled or hollow, and whether an accidental is a sharp or flat. Distinguishing between hollow, partially and directionally filled, and filled notes, with diacritical accidentals seems more difficult.
yayitswei 14y ago
Here's an interesting alternative notation that emphasizes relative pitches: http://muto-method.com/images/fig11-e.png http://muto-method.com/images/fig11-e.png. It was invented for the Chromatone, a keyboard that eliminates black and white keys and treats all keys the same way, similar to a guitar fretboard. http://muto-method.com/en/index.html http://muto-method.com/en/index.html Transposing then becomes easy because every scale has the same shape.
- arnarbi 14y ago
  Thanks for that link, that is very interesting indeed. Being able to read the intervals more easily is certainly valuable, especially if you are playing on a chromatic keyboard. However, I do like the fact that accidentals in traditional notation say something important: This note is out of the scale you are playing in. This is usually audibly very noticeable, so it makes sense to have it very noticeable in the score as well. The three line system could be enhanced to show the notes that are in and out of the scale slightly differently, e.g. with color, or the size of the note-head. This would still have the benefit of being easily transposable.
danhodgins 14y ago
Solid points, although I think you're zeroing in on too many low-level details too early even though your criticisms are valid. Also, maybe you could make your feedback constructive by providing ideas, alternatives and suggestions instead of just ripping it apart but adding no value or solid suggestions beyond that. The point here is much bigger and more significant than any of your individual criticisms. The point is this - these people are rethinking the problem of notation, and redesigning it from the ground up. I think their approach is totally badass, and I love the fact that someone is tackling this!
- tjic 14y ago
  > Also, maybe you could make your feedback constructive by providing ideas, alternatives and suggestions instead of just ripping it apart but adding no value or solid suggestions beyond that. Pointing out flaws IS constructive criticism. This happens all the time and it bugs me: person A comes up with an idea person B gives good reasons why it's flawed person A - the one who wants to innovate - says that fixing those flaws isn't his problem, and that person B should fix them. WRONG. The person who generates an idea, the person who wants to do something new, is the one who is responsible for brainstorming, finding problems, finding solutions, and pivoting as needed. To say "your criticisms should be bundled with solutions" just raises the bar on criticism, and when it costs more to generate criticism, you get less of it. We should all encourage criticism, and then we should make finding solutions OUR problem.
  - arnarbi 14y ago
    Thank you, my thoughts exactly. I much prefer someone to criticize my work, rather than sitting quiet just because they can't think of improvements. After all, I'm probably much more likely to come up with a solution than they are, and the reason I didn't is just because I didn't think of that problem.
- tjic 14y ago
  > Also, maybe you could make your feedback constructive by providing ideas, alternatives and suggestions instead of just ripping it apart but adding no value or solid suggestions beyond that. Pointing out flaws IS constructive criticism. This happens all the time and it bugs me: person A comes up with an idea person B gives good reasons why it's flawed person A - the one who wants to innovate - says that fixing those flaws isn't his problem, and that person B should fix them. WRONG. The person who generates an idea, the person who wants to do something new, is the one who is responsible for brainstorming, finding problems, finding solutions, and pivoting as needed. To say "your criticisms should be bundled with solutions" just raises the bar on criticism, and when it costs more to generate criticism, you get less of it. We should all encourage criticism, and then we should make finding solutions OUR problem.
andrewguenther 14y ago
If you look at the guide, the key signatures are still included, but written in plain English. Look at the Fur Elise example: http://www.hummingbirdnotation.com/songs/Fur%20Elise%20(Final).pdf http://www.hummingbirdnotation.com/songs/Fur%20Elise%20(Fina...
- vacri 14y ago
  Not all musicians work in plain English. There's the German note H, for example, or half of Europe using solfege: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solf%C3%A8ge#Fixed_do_solf.C3.A8ge http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solf%C3%A8ge#Fixed_do_solf.C3.A... Musical notation needs to be spoken-language-free.
  - eru 14y ago
    > Musical notation needs to be spoken-language-free. Tempi and volume are usually given in Italian, aren't they?
  - marssaxman 14y ago
    Musical notation has never been spoken-language-free: the scores I play are all full of Italian words. I have never learned any Italian; these words are simply part of the notation, much as English words are parts of the notation in many popular programming languages.
    - vacri 14y ago
      Fair enough, I stand corrected.
sjy 14y ago
You don't have to omit the key signature.

by arnarbi 14y ago

podperson 14y ago

The mnemonics are also anglocentric visual puns (e is for empty). I'd suggest a set of symbols with natural ordering that can be distinguished by shape (vs. all circles)

arnarbi 14y ago
Yes, I realized I misunderstood those, and edited my comment a bit.
jeffamcgee 14y ago
That's actually already been done: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shape_note http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shape_note . The hymnals at my grandparent's church actually have shaped notes.

brodney 14y ago

On your last question, it took me a minute to get that those various "Above" or "Below" correspond to the notes they represent, A and B. The pitch is revealed both in the symbol and in the position on the staff. I found that pretty useful, certainly easier to read than homogenous black dots where you only have spatial information.

arnarbi 14y ago
Thanks, turns out I totally misunderstood those at first - and edited my comment in the meantime. Sorry about that.
MBCook 14y ago
I read through the whole page and didn't get that. It didn't click until I started looking at the second page on the site (which goes more in depth). My immediate thought once I figured that out was "this depends on English". For speakers of Japanese or Russian or French, can you find easy to remember words that can go with the first symbol, and that start with an "a" sound? I actually found the terms extremely confusing. At first I thought the above/below referred to sharp/flat, but that didn't turn out. I couldn't even come up with concepts for dot and groove. I know how to read music, but I'm not very good at it. I'll say that the idea of giving each note it's own shape seems like it could fix the problem of losing my place and having to count lines/spaces to figure out what a note it. The thing I've never liked about musical notation is that the X axis has nothing to do with time. A staff can have 8 32nd notes and then a dotted half note. Those first notes take up 1/4 the time but 3/4 the space. While it would take more space, I find a consistent relationship much easier (such as piano roles or Guitar Hero note charts).
- jfim 14y ago
  As a native French speaker, we don't use the CDEFGAB notation but rather the "do ré mi fa sol la si do", so the symbols make no sense whatsoever.
HNLogInShit 14y ago
The "above" is supposed to stand for the A note? I didn't get that from any part of this. How can such a basic point be so poorly (or not explained)? Using icons that translate to English words to stand for note letters is a terrible idea.

icarus_drowning 14y ago

What you mean by this is that the key signature tells you what the tonic is, and, conversely, what the supertonic, mediant, subdominant, dominant, etc. are. Whenever I teach key signatures this is the biggest thing I try to impart: key signatures are more than just accidentals, they define the roles each pitch plays.

valdiorn 14y ago
ehm, I would disagree. The key signature tells you what key the piece is in, period. What the particular notes in that key do (their role, as you put it) is a property of that key.
- jofer 14y ago
  I believe he was referring to the "put my brain in G" comment. It's all about recognizing when to build tension and when to resolve tension. Yes, the roles that the notes play is defined by the key, but if you don't mentally make the switch, you'll often perform things poorly because you don't anticipate where things are going correctly. Or at least that's how it works for me, at any rate. Take anything I say with a grain of salt. I can't sight-read much at all.
- icarus_drowning 14y ago
  How is "tell[ing] you what key the piece is in" different that defining tonic/dominant/leading tone relationships? Those relationships are the product of the whole/half step pattern that the key signature communicates. It isn't just important that G has 1 sharp, and it is F. That sharp actually defines the leading tone.
  - colomon 14y ago
    That's only if the tonic is G. I play tunes all the time with one sharp, but a tonic of D. (ie D mixolydian.)
    - icarus_drowning 14y ago

jpwagner 14y ago

Your critique is spot on for those trained in music. Is that his target audience? What about for those being exposed to music and its notation for the first time? What if you had never had a concept of putting your brain in G major mode. But if complete beginners are his target audience, it begs the question why stop there? Why maintain the use of the staff at all.

microtherion 14y ago
I don’t think acquiring a sense of key signature is a dispensable part of the music learning experience, unless you plan to stick to twelve tone music.
silencio 14y ago
No matter what people come up with and who the target audience is, there needs to be a good bridge between the traditional and the new. Staff or not, great for beginners or not, this will only fail because of the total lack of sheet music and other materials with nothing in sight to automate the translation of even a limited subset of music and materials. (Of course, caveat, I've been playing piano for 20+ years as a hobby. Maybe the ties to the traditional are really not a big deal.)
- shardling 14y ago
  I certainly hope that in the near future, digital transcriptions are easy enough to come by that you could effectively just change the font from one notation to another. I know there are a lot of judgement calls in typesetting music, but that's true of text too, and we have some pretty good algorithms for doing so these days. All that said, I have a lot of reservations about this particular notation, but I think there's certainly room for improvement even inside the current system. Letting the back catalog of work hold notation back isn't healthy.
- PeterisP 14y ago
  The whole point of any new, better musical notation is avoiding the need to deeply understand the current traditional notation. It is enough if machines can translate the existing sheet music to the new system.

eranation 14y ago

All I can say is this, I play guitar for 15 years, learned piano since I was 7, and I never got the classic notation. I can't read notes. And I tried learning a few times. I looked at hummingbird, and it took me 30 seconds to memorize the symbols, and now I can read any hummingbird note sheet easily. I would say this is a big win. Same feel I got when I saw Tau, mathematicians might argue it's incorrect, but for me, I don't care, Tau made math easy for me. Hummingbird makes music easy for me. That's all I care. About transposing, you got a point, I think there should be apps that do it for you (e.g. convert MIDI files to hummingbird notation, I'm sure we'll see a few of these as Show HN sometime soon)

gcr 14y ago
You can now sightread pages of hummingbird after 30 seconds of cursory inspection? Hummingbird feels like a crutch to me. Hiding key signatures stunts your understanding of how music works. Forcing time to be marked explicitly as well as by altering spacing places odd constraints on typesetters. Humans use several subtle visual cues¹ to read music quickly and efficiently, and hummingbird just throws them all away. I'm not sure this is worth the overhaul. 1: http://lilypond.org/web/about/automated-engraving/software http://lilypond.org/web/about/automated-engraving/software
- eranation 14y ago
  Yes, I can, very, very slowly, but much faster than with the regular notation, and mostly because I'm not used to sightreading regardless of how it's written. I think it will never appeal to classic / professional musicians or anyone who already feels comfortable with the regular notation, but for people lbike me, that for whatever neurological reason just can get the old notation to stick, this is priceless. The Above Below C Dot Empty Full Groove is such a great wiring that I will never be able to forget it. I might not read it fast as you read regular notes, but I will at least be able to practice. Reading regular notes to me was always counting lines, always missing the global # or b, and simply giving up serious music. I recorded music, had songs on the radio, I can play anything by ear, but not being able to read notes always bothers me. Now I can.

cliffbean 14y ago

Right, key signatures aren't just shorthand, they're useful information to give the performer up front. In fact, it's so useful to state the key up front, I might even suggest the opposite; base the notation on relative pitches, as in "movable do" solfege. Then we could replace "all F's and C's are sharp" with just "do is D". Of course, there'd be tradeoffs to this as compared to the traditional notation, but it's fun to think about.

andrewflnr 14y ago
Why would you go to the trouble of designing a new music notation and not make it based on relative pitches? What are the tradeoffs?
- cliffbean 14y ago
  My thought was that a relative-pitch notation might present a steeper learning curve. But I don't really know. I've worked with intermediate-level musicians who are skilled at regular sight-reading, but who struggle to learn to transpose on the fly. A relative-pitch notation might be like requiring everyone to "transpose" all the time, forcing them to learn this skill before they can proceed. On the other hand, maybe you'd teach it differently. Instead of learning transposition as carrying around an offset to add to each pitch, you'd learn it as carrying around a scale to which the relative pitches would be mapped. I wonder whether this would be easier or harder to learn.
  - andrewflnr 14y ago
    You're going to stay in one scale for a long time anyway (C for piano). For that duration, pitches in the notation correspond obviously to fingerings (keys, frets, whatever). This includes other instruments which have a different "natural" key (D for the viola, my other sort of instrument): their notation maps just as nicely. When you get beyond that, "mapping relative pitches to a scale" is, IMO, the correct approach. The "offset to each pitch" thing obscures what's really going on, as if they were all weird derivatives of the key of C. I can see how it might be harder, among other reasons because you have to understand how a scale works more clearly, but I suspect it would be worth it. Of course, it's hard to really know without getting people to switch for a couple generations.

sixothree 14y ago

My first observation was that it was difficult to discern the notes on my screen. Imagine that on paper farther than arms length away in a darkened room. That's plenty enough to disqualify it. But yes, classical notation could certainly use some refinements.

vwinsyee 14y ago
I had the same reaction. No matter how small the notes are in classical notation, I can tell if they're filled or hollow, and whether an accidental is a sharp or flat. Distinguishing between hollow, partially and directionally filled, and filled notes, with diacritical accidentals seems more difficult.

yayitswei 14y ago

Here's an interesting alternative notation that emphasizes relative pitches: http://muto-method.com/images/fig11-e.png http://muto-method.com/images/fig11-e.png. It was invented for the Chromatone, a keyboard that eliminates black and white keys and treats all keys the same way, similar to a guitar fretboard. http://muto-method.com/en/index.html http://muto-method.com/en/index.html Transposing then becomes easy because every scale has the same shape.

arnarbi 14y ago
Thanks for that link, that is very interesting indeed. Being able to read the intervals more easily is certainly valuable, especially if you are playing on a chromatic keyboard. However, I do like the fact that accidentals in traditional notation say something important: This note is out of the scale you are playing in. This is usually audibly very noticeable, so it makes sense to have it very noticeable in the score as well. The three line system could be enhanced to show the notes that are in and out of the scale slightly differently, e.g. with color, or the size of the note-head. This would still have the benefit of being easily transposable.

danhodgins 14y ago

Solid points, although I think you're zeroing in on too many low-level details too early even though your criticisms are valid. Also, maybe you could make your feedback constructive by providing ideas, alternatives and suggestions instead of just ripping it apart but adding no value or solid suggestions beyond that. The point here is much bigger and more significant than any of your individual criticisms. The point is this - these people are rethinking the problem of notation, and redesigning it from the ground up. I think their approach is totally badass, and I love the fact that someone is tackling this!

tjic 14y ago
> Also, maybe you could make your feedback constructive by providing ideas, alternatives and suggestions instead of just ripping it apart but adding no value or solid suggestions beyond that. Pointing out flaws IS constructive criticism. This happens all the time and it bugs me: person A comes up with an idea person B gives good reasons why it's flawed person A - the one who wants to innovate - says that fixing those flaws isn't his problem, and that person B should fix them. WRONG. The person who generates an idea, the person who wants to do something new, is the one who is responsible for brainstorming, finding problems, finding solutions, and pivoting as needed. To say "your criticisms should be bundled with solutions" just raises the bar on criticism, and when it costs more to generate criticism, you get less of it. We should all encourage criticism, and then we should make finding solutions OUR problem.
- arnarbi 14y ago
  Thank you, my thoughts exactly. I much prefer someone to criticize my work, rather than sitting quiet just because they can't think of improvements. After all, I'm probably much more likely to come up with a solution than they are, and the reason I didn't is just because I didn't think of that problem.
tjic 14y ago
> Also, maybe you could make your feedback constructive by providing ideas, alternatives and suggestions instead of just ripping it apart but adding no value or solid suggestions beyond that. Pointing out flaws IS constructive criticism. This happens all the time and it bugs me: person A comes up with an idea person B gives good reasons why it's flawed person A - the one who wants to innovate - says that fixing those flaws isn't his problem, and that person B should fix them. WRONG. The person who generates an idea, the person who wants to do something new, is the one who is responsible for brainstorming, finding problems, finding solutions, and pivoting as needed. To say "your criticisms should be bundled with solutions" just raises the bar on criticism, and when it costs more to generate criticism, you get less of it. We should all encourage criticism, and then we should make finding solutions OUR problem.

andrewguenther 14y ago

If you look at the guide, the key signatures are still included, but written in plain English. Look at the Fur Elise example: http://www.hummingbirdnotation.com/songs/Fur%20Elise%20(Final).pdf http://www.hummingbirdnotation.com/songs/Fur%20Elise%20(Fina...

vacri 14y ago
Not all musicians work in plain English. There's the German note H, for example, or half of Europe using solfege: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solf%C3%A8ge#Fixed_do_solf.C3.A8ge http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solf%C3%A8ge#Fixed_do_solf.C3.A... Musical notation needs to be spoken-language-free.
- eru 14y ago
  > Musical notation needs to be spoken-language-free. Tempi and volume are usually given in Italian, aren't they?
- marssaxman 14y ago
  Musical notation has never been spoken-language-free: the scores I play are all full of Italian words. I have never learned any Italian; these words are simply part of the notation, much as English words are parts of the notation in many popular programming languages.
  - vacri 14y ago
    Fair enough, I stand corrected.

sjy 14y ago

You don't have to omit the key signature.