Most of the comments here seem to be about the qualities of the notation itself and whether it is good. I would like to ask why this notation of all possible no

Most of the comments here seem to be about the qualities of the notation itself and whether it is good. I would like to ask why this notation of all possible notations? Music notations - systems of analogies between visuals and sound - are tools for communication. If you have some new concept to communicate, inventing a suitable notation for it is a great way to gain recognizability for the concept. This holds with music notation as well as mathematics (ex: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphic_notation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphic_notation). If you have no new concepts to communicate, inventing a new notation is like changing all the words in the python language to other words. Some things may be easier and others harder, but overall, the change isn't worth the trouble for most. If there are no new concepts to communicate but there is a new medium to work with, that needs to be taken info account. Legacy notations were invented with the constraints of the media of the times they were developed in - in this case, paper and ink. There is no need to be bound by old media constraints when you're making something that has to be learned fresh anyway. Notice how hummingbird still does everything in black and white? We've had color displays for ages now (even on paper), so why not map note names to colors? Why map time to space when we've had dynamic displays for ages now and can just map time to time itself, or a mixture of time and space. Why should every instrument player see the same notation? Why can't we adapt the display to suit the instrument? Guitar Hero, Dance Dance, the Japanese drumming games in arcades all illustrate what "notation" can be using an interactive medium. The would-be-musicians don't read paper notation. Learning the display is so easy that they just pretty much pick up the controller and begin playing. For other kinds of "notation" that can help the fresh ones, check out the iOS apps by Smule (Note: I don't have anything to do with Smule. I just like their work.)