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I'm surprised you've not found more agreement. I studied music in university, and have run a music-theory centered website since 1998 or so, and I definitely f

by jtheory 12y ago

I'm surprised you've not found more agreement. I studied music in university, and have run a music-theory centered website since 1998 or so, and I definitely find the terminology to be rather bad. It sounds mathematical in some ways (there are certainly numbers in there); but when you look closer it's inconsistent and/or just plain weird. When you start writing code working with scales, intervals, triads, seventh chords, etc., the oddities really become obvious. The base unit of movement is the half-step; but the full-step is almost a useless concept -- a major scale is a seemingly random pattern of half and whole steps, major and minor intervals included in it. Whole notes refer to note duration. A whole tone scale is about the intervals between pitches. Looping the pitches from G back to A, but most starting counting at the C (for the simplest major scale). There are historical reasons for the oddities; but it wouldn't be too hard to come up with better... it's much like language that way, though. Think of all of the inconsistencies in English -- yes, we'd be better off in many ways if we could just fix all of the broken bits (e.g.: the past tense of "lead" is "led", but the past tense of "read" is written "read"... but pronounced "red"). But we can't -- because everyone's using the broken version, there is a huge corpus of knowledge written in the broken version, etc. etc..

lmg643 12y ago
I'm not so sure "it wouldn't be too hard to come up with better..." I read about a thing called hummingbird notation - uses the same clefs, but changes noteheads, staffs and sharps/flats. Your opinion may differ, but here is a group of folks who spent a lot of time coming up with a "system" and it does not strike me as an improvement. Have there been other attempts?
- baddox 12y ago
  The trouble with notation systems is that the primary thing they need isn't to be easy to learn, but rather to have a ton of people who have learned it. I've seen lots of alternative notation systems, particularly in pedagogy, and from my experience people tend to hack up their own systems for jotting down ideas or composing, but mainstream staff notation is very adequate and has an insane amount of momentum.
  - saraid216 12y ago
    Translation system, maybe?
    - hobs 12y ago
      Yeah, its the same with QWERTY, the only way you could replace the existing system is if the new system was so much better in some way that it replaces it by default. Mobile phone keyboards are the only thing to come close to replacing qwerty, and most of them just re-implement it anyway.
- jtheory 12y ago
  Alternate notation systems are another subject from music theory terminology. I have fewer problems with notation than with theory terminology & concepts, personally. There are alternatives that get a lot of use -- esp. TAB and various types of chord charts; but they're not as general purpose as standard notation.
analog31 12y ago
>>>> But we can't -- because everyone's using the broken version, there is a huge corpus of knowledge written in the broken version, etc. etc.. In addition to the amount of existing literature, there's also the matter of developing the skill to read it. I'm tethered to "standard" notation because I developed fluent sight-reading ability as a kid, and I continue to practice it. I daresay that learning a new notation system would be virtually prohibitive at my age. Every town has a cadre of musicians with similar skills, which in turn creates an incentive for composers and arrangers to continue using standard notation. And some notations are considered to be useful for one thing but not another. For instance, tabulature is used for teaching the electric bass, and documenting transcribed bass lines, but nobody can sight-read tab well enough for it to be an alternative to standard notation for performance use. I actually had such an experience not too long ago. I play mostly jazz, which has its own notational traditions. But a bandleader hired me, who had her repertoire written out using the Nashville Number System. Though her charts were simple, my brain had to work in overdrive for that entire gig.
tripzilch 12y ago
There's a thing called "Integer Notation", which is (from what I've seen) used a lot in the more mathematical regions of musical theory. It's pretty much what you'd expect, zero-based integers that represent semitone intervals. Sometimes they write chords in curly brackets, like {0,3,7} for the major triad. Integer Notation also happens to be pretty much equivalent to the 0-127 based MIDI notes--in the sense that it's also zero-based integers representing semitones. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integer_notation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integer_notation actually redirects you to "Pitch Class". Also very useful and mathematically sound, it's the same idea but with modulo-12 arithmetic.

by jtheory 12y ago

lmg643 12y ago

I'm not so sure "it wouldn't be too hard to come up with better..." I read about a thing called hummingbird notation - uses the same clefs, but changes noteheads, staffs and sharps/flats. Your opinion may differ, but here is a group of folks who spent a lot of time coming up with a "system" and it does not strike me as an improvement. Have there been other attempts?

baddox 12y ago
The trouble with notation systems is that the primary thing they need isn't to be easy to learn, but rather to have a ton of people who have learned it. I've seen lots of alternative notation systems, particularly in pedagogy, and from my experience people tend to hack up their own systems for jotting down ideas or composing, but mainstream staff notation is very adequate and has an insane amount of momentum.
- saraid216 12y ago
  Translation system, maybe?
  - hobs 12y ago
    Yeah, its the same with QWERTY, the only way you could replace the existing system is if the new system was so much better in some way that it replaces it by default. Mobile phone keyboards are the only thing to come close to replacing qwerty, and most of them just re-implement it anyway.
jtheory 12y ago
Alternate notation systems are another subject from music theory terminology. I have fewer problems with notation than with theory terminology & concepts, personally. There are alternatives that get a lot of use -- esp. TAB and various types of chord charts; but they're not as general purpose as standard notation.

analog31 12y ago

>>>> But we can't -- because everyone's using the broken version, there is a huge corpus of knowledge written in the broken version, etc. etc.. In addition to the amount of existing literature, there's also the matter of developing the skill to read it. I'm tethered to "standard" notation because I developed fluent sight-reading ability as a kid, and I continue to practice it. I daresay that learning a new notation system would be virtually prohibitive at my age. Every town has a cadre of musicians with similar skills, which in turn creates an incentive for composers and arrangers to continue using standard notation. And some notations are considered to be useful for one thing but not another. For instance, tabulature is used for teaching the electric bass, and documenting transcribed bass lines, but nobody can sight-read tab well enough for it to be an alternative to standard notation for performance use. I actually had such an experience not too long ago. I play mostly jazz, which has its own notational traditions. But a bandleader hired me, who had her repertoire written out using the Nashville Number System. Though her charts were simple, my brain had to work in overdrive for that entire gig.

tripzilch 12y ago

There's a thing called "Integer Notation", which is (from what I've seen) used a lot in the more mathematical regions of musical theory. It's pretty much what you'd expect, zero-based integers that represent semitone intervals. Sometimes they write chords in curly brackets, like {0,3,7} for the major triad. Integer Notation also happens to be pretty much equivalent to the 0-127 based MIDI notes--in the sense that it's also zero-based integers representing semitones. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integer_notation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integer_notation actually redirects you to "Pitch Class". Also very useful and mathematically sound, it's the same idea but with modulo-12 arithmetic.