23 ms·

It's pretty clear the person(s) who created this is/are not (a) very proficient musician(s). The current notation has been in use for hundreds of years because

by kunai 14y ago

It's pretty clear the person(s) who created this is/are not (a) very proficient musician(s). The current notation has been in use for hundreds of years because it works. The notes are large, bold, and easy to recognize and also easy to write. Memorizing GBDFA, EGBDF, ACEG, and FACE is not that difficult. This new notation has many egregious flaws. Removing the key signature is one of them. Not only does the key signature allow for instant recognition of the pitch and tones used and a general idea of what the piece should sound like, but it also makes writing sheets that much easier for arrangers and composers. Second, who thought it was a good idea to replace the accidental signs with squiggly marks? A huge step down in usability, I'm afraid. Maybe in sevenths and chords with very close note spacing, but unless you're playing Death Waltz, it is not a problem (usually). Also, the Consumer Reports-esque notes are also distracting and don't serve any purpose. If I saw what is an "E" on this note, I would play it for 4 beats -- that is, assuming that this is in x/4 time. It's more confusing for longtime music readers than musicians, but it would still throw off many, I'd guess. At any rate, however, if you can't memorize the staff lines and spaces, you aren't a musician. Period. The uselessness of this notation is compounded by the fact that practically no instructor will be willing to give up a notation that has been in use their entire life, and also for centuries. Do I see this being successful? Maybe, in small circles (no pun intended). But the harsh truth is that the current notation is easier to write, easier to read, and more efficient. Case closed.

ChuckMcM 14y ago
I'm not going to comment on their musical abilities but I noticed their pain points were common pain points that students have. Perhaps not surprisingly its similar when you learn a foreign language, for a while you see a word, translate it into your native language, and then understand it. But once you "get it" or reach a certain level of fluency, you read the word and you just know what it means. When I started playing Trombone I would see a note in the stave and count lines or spaces to figure out what note it was, and then play that note on my instrument. There were actually two translations going on, one from music to note 'name' and then from note 'name' to instrument configuration. At some point however it changed and I stopped seeing a 'B' or an 'A' or a 'C' and instead saw instrument positions (and alternates) so that playing stopped being a translation exercise and simply became execution. The other interesting thing is that looking at the sheet music I heard music. And that was when everything clicked together because initially I could play things "by ear" by recreating the same sounds in my instrument that my ear was hearing, and now my eyes would see the music, my ears would "hear" it, and my fingers would make it real. Notation stopped being an issue until I tried to play keyboards :-)
- kahawe 14y ago
  The problem is, before you had to count lines, then figure out it's an "A" and know which A on your instrument it is. With this, you have to learn some English associations by heart to decipher hard-to-see dots and/or count lines so you know it's an "A", even if the shortcut to "A" was mildly helpful you STILL got to know which "A" it is. This is hardly ANY improvement at all. Typical tab-focused players want an extremely clear and simple instruction while typical sheet-music players want the full musical information. This satisfies neither camp.
jimmyjazz14 14y ago
Funny I know plenty of proficient musicians who can't read music at all. I don't disagree with what you are saying per sey but saying the creators can't be good musicians because they want to try a new approach to teach music feels awfully elitist.
- rmk2 14y ago
  They are only "proficient" in a very limited sense, then. I'm sure we can argue semantics here, but a musician needs to understand the concepts that govern music. And these concepts can only be understood and visualised by using notation. The circle of fifth, musical modes and any advanced form of transposition, alongside the basic theory involved in cords, their components and their succession are necessary for a musician. [1] Technical proficiency does not make you a musician, just like being able to type really well doesn't make you a programmer if you can't...read code. [1]: This may not apply for percussionists, but even there, playing together with others necessitates the same understanding. Side note: it's per se
  - wl 14y ago
    You can understand music without being able to read music. I know a fairly famous guitarist who can tell you all about voicings, harmonization, and any other bit of music theory you'd care to know about. He uses all this to write and improvise music. You put a piece of music in front of him and he'll take five minutes to figure it out. He'll be counting lines and spaces and humming notes to do that.
    - rmk2 14y ago
      How is "counting lines and spaces" not reading?
      - RegEx 14y ago
        Technically it is "reading music", but it's so slow that learning a piece takes much longer than it should. Over the years I've had a couple motivational spurts where I felt like playing piano again, and lack of frequent exposure to sheet music slowed my reading skills down to a crawl.
RegEx 14y ago
> Case closed You overvalue the importance of your analysis.
- anigbrowl 14y ago
  So true - whenever I see that phrase my bullshit detector jumps up into the red.
aufreak3 14y ago
> The current notation has been in use for hundreds of years because it works. It is not necessarily just because "it works". Learning conventional music notation is optimal only in the same sense as learning a conventional language is optimal - i.e. it lets you communicate. That it is convention is more important than "it works". The human brain is adaptable enough to learn strange things like touch typing on a QWERTY keyboard.
- oblique63 14y ago
  Very much this. Tradition is a terrible way to measure something's merits. And even if it did 'work', that's no reason to not try and improve it (though, I'd agree that just throwing something out there that might fragment things isn't terribly helpful either). There are some good things about traditional sheet music notation, but that doesn't take away the fact that it's bloated with historical baggage. It's really not terribly efficient at communicating the 'essence' of music, it's just that we've all gotten used to translating piano notation into practical [insert_your_instrument_here] implementation in our heads. It's neither a useful 'source code' for other instruments to interpret, nor is it an efficient 'byte code' to describe the fundamental elements of music. That's not to say that I have a solution to these problems of course (yet -- been working on my own project for a while that will eventually try to address this), but the issues aren't hard to spot, and they certainly seem like areas that can be optimized. And there will always be the problem of adoption, but I don't think that's even an argument we should bother raising until somebody proposes either a system that's either truly an upgrade, or a system that starts getting so much traction and starts fracturing music notation without any added benefit. Personally, I sympathize with the aims of this project here, and think some of the ideas are clever, but considering how many things it changes, I don't think it really adds much efficiency when parsing/writing it in return. It actually strikes me as odd why they wouldn't just move to a chromatic grid system if they were getting rid of key signatures, that way they'd just eliminate accidentals all together -- or if not, then just combine them into one, since the key is a big reason for why they even have 2 designations in the first place. Which brings up the point that those symbols are all really quite complicated to be able to parse very quickly; the controversial 'note names' especially, but the accidentals really did not have much of a reason to be changed other than to just look 'fancier' -- which just makes them harder to parse, and to draw (IMO, but I have terrible hand writing). Oh well, I wish them the best anyway. This isn't a terribly progressive field so I'm just glad to see anything happening.
aidenn0 14y ago
I couldn't tell; is the key-signature completely elided in favor of putting explicit sharp/flats on all the notes? If so, it's a huge fail, as I play the clarinet, and regularly have to sight-read oboe parts, which means transposing. This means that accidentals need to be distinct from sharps/flats in the key-signature, and in particular an explicit natural on deviations from the key signature is also helpful.
zik 14y ago
> The current notation has been in use for hundreds of years because it works. But it doesn't. And that's why tablature notation is far and away more widely used these days. Old-style musical notation is horribly designed and is gradually dying a natural death.
- rdouble 14y ago
  Tab is only used by guitar players.

by kunai 14y ago

ChuckMcM 14y ago

I'm not going to comment on their musical abilities but I noticed their pain points were common pain points that students have. Perhaps not surprisingly its similar when you learn a foreign language, for a while you see a word, translate it into your native language, and then understand it. But once you "get it" or reach a certain level of fluency, you read the word and you just know what it means. When I started playing Trombone I would see a note in the stave and count lines or spaces to figure out what note it was, and then play that note on my instrument. There were actually two translations going on, one from music to note 'name' and then from note 'name' to instrument configuration. At some point however it changed and I stopped seeing a 'B' or an 'A' or a 'C' and instead saw instrument positions (and alternates) so that playing stopped being a translation exercise and simply became execution. The other interesting thing is that looking at the sheet music I heard music. And that was when everything clicked together because initially I could play things "by ear" by recreating the same sounds in my instrument that my ear was hearing, and now my eyes would see the music, my ears would "hear" it, and my fingers would make it real. Notation stopped being an issue until I tried to play keyboards :-)

kahawe 14y ago
The problem is, before you had to count lines, then figure out it's an "A" and know which A on your instrument it is. With this, you have to learn some English associations by heart to decipher hard-to-see dots and/or count lines so you know it's an "A", even if the shortcut to "A" was mildly helpful you STILL got to know which "A" it is. This is hardly ANY improvement at all. Typical tab-focused players want an extremely clear and simple instruction while typical sheet-music players want the full musical information. This satisfies neither camp.

jimmyjazz14 14y ago

Funny I know plenty of proficient musicians who can't read music at all. I don't disagree with what you are saying per sey but saying the creators can't be good musicians because they want to try a new approach to teach music feels awfully elitist.

rmk2 14y ago
They are only "proficient" in a very limited sense, then. I'm sure we can argue semantics here, but a musician needs to understand the concepts that govern music. And these concepts can only be understood and visualised by using notation. The circle of fifth, musical modes and any advanced form of transposition, alongside the basic theory involved in cords, their components and their succession are necessary for a musician. [1] Technical proficiency does not make you a musician, just like being able to type really well doesn't make you a programmer if you can't...read code. [1]: This may not apply for percussionists, but even there, playing together with others necessitates the same understanding. Side note: it's per se
- wl 14y ago
  You can understand music without being able to read music. I know a fairly famous guitarist who can tell you all about voicings, harmonization, and any other bit of music theory you'd care to know about. He uses all this to write and improvise music. You put a piece of music in front of him and he'll take five minutes to figure it out. He'll be counting lines and spaces and humming notes to do that.
  - rmk2 14y ago
    How is "counting lines and spaces" not reading?
    - RegEx 14y ago
      Technically it is "reading music", but it's so slow that learning a piece takes much longer than it should. Over the years I've had a couple motivational spurts where I felt like playing piano again, and lack of frequent exposure to sheet music slowed my reading skills down to a crawl.

RegEx 14y ago

> Case closed You overvalue the importance of your analysis.

anigbrowl 14y ago
So true - whenever I see that phrase my bullshit detector jumps up into the red.

aufreak3 14y ago

> The current notation has been in use for hundreds of years because it works. It is not necessarily just because "it works". Learning conventional music notation is optimal only in the same sense as learning a conventional language is optimal - i.e. it lets you communicate. That it is convention is more important than "it works". The human brain is adaptable enough to learn strange things like touch typing on a QWERTY keyboard.

oblique63 14y ago
Very much this. Tradition is a terrible way to measure something's merits. And even if it did 'work', that's no reason to not try and improve it (though, I'd agree that just throwing something out there that might fragment things isn't terribly helpful either). There are some good things about traditional sheet music notation, but that doesn't take away the fact that it's bloated with historical baggage. It's really not terribly efficient at communicating the 'essence' of music, it's just that we've all gotten used to translating piano notation into practical [insert_your_instrument_here] implementation in our heads. It's neither a useful 'source code' for other instruments to interpret, nor is it an efficient 'byte code' to describe the fundamental elements of music. That's not to say that I have a solution to these problems of course (yet -- been working on my own project for a while that will eventually try to address this), but the issues aren't hard to spot, and they certainly seem like areas that can be optimized. And there will always be the problem of adoption, but I don't think that's even an argument we should bother raising until somebody proposes either a system that's either truly an upgrade, or a system that starts getting so much traction and starts fracturing music notation without any added benefit. Personally, I sympathize with the aims of this project here, and think some of the ideas are clever, but considering how many things it changes, I don't think it really adds much efficiency when parsing/writing it in return. It actually strikes me as odd why they wouldn't just move to a chromatic grid system if they were getting rid of key signatures, that way they'd just eliminate accidentals all together -- or if not, then just combine them into one, since the key is a big reason for why they even have 2 designations in the first place. Which brings up the point that those symbols are all really quite complicated to be able to parse very quickly; the controversial 'note names' especially, but the accidentals really did not have much of a reason to be changed other than to just look 'fancier' -- which just makes them harder to parse, and to draw (IMO, but I have terrible hand writing). Oh well, I wish them the best anyway. This isn't a terribly progressive field so I'm just glad to see anything happening.

aidenn0 14y ago

I couldn't tell; is the key-signature completely elided in favor of putting explicit sharp/flats on all the notes? If so, it's a huge fail, as I play the clarinet, and regularly have to sight-read oboe parts, which means transposing. This means that accidentals need to be distinct from sharps/flats in the key-signature, and in particular an explicit natural on deviations from the key signature is also helpful.

zik 14y ago

> The current notation has been in use for hundreds of years because it works. But it doesn't. And that's why tablature notation is far and away more widely used these days. Old-style musical notation is horribly designed and is gradually dying a natural death.

rdouble 14y ago
Tab is only used by guitar players.