4 ms·

Experimental Music Notation Resources

24 points by GuiA 11y ago

bane 11y ago
It's kind of surprising what a hard design problem musical notation is. Like modern mathematical notation, modern standard musical notation is incredibly elegant. - It can be read almost as fast as being played - It captures a tremendous level of complexity and expressiveness - It communicates the music almost exactly - It's flexible and can stretch to accommodate almost any instrument in the Western cultural inventory Like mathematical notation, it's incredibly general purpose, you can write jazz, rock and symphonies in pretty much the same system. It's not perfect, it doesn't perfectly encode every nuance of a performance in the same way a recording can. But it's possible, without ever hearing a piece, to read modern notation and be able to provide a very high quality replay of the original work. It's also paradoxically simple. A young child can learn the basics and be able to perform simple pieces reasonably well. In the early 20th century there was an explosion of ideas (seen here) for alternate systems, all part of the deconstruction of music movement, but they're almost all specialist systems, not really capable of encoding general purpose music. For a while, I was interested to see who else had come up with notation systems and I spent some time researching through history. It turns out, surprisingly (considering the often amazingly deep musical traditions many cultures have), that there aren't many [1] Most systems use a simple language glyph to note correspondence, but things like duration weren't encoded. A modern take would be like writing a song something like: A A E E A E D E F E and having only that kind of system to encode everything from symphonies to pop-music. A major innovation in Korea was the introduction of a system that did encode duration. Other systems used relative markings, early European chants would indicate things in such a way that notes were higher or lower than the preceeding notes. Both kinds of systems required lots of verbal information transmission to properly transfer the knowledge of the song's performance. With repetition a performer could learn the proper way to recreate the song, using the notation as a memory aid. Later Western efforts encoded things on a bar to provide more detail and the modern system is merely an extension of that. In the East, the Eastern Orthodox Christians developed a system known today as Byzantine Notation, and it's quite beautiful. But it's still a relative system that requires some significant contextual knowledge to perform from sight. For fun, I encourage any musicians here to try to come up with, from first principles, a good general purpose musical notation system. It's incredibly hard to do without sacrificing things like in-performance readability or compactness. If you aren't a musician, I encourage you to do the same with math notation, starting with numbers and see what you can come up with. I've found it's very hard to do so without more or less ending up with some variation on the current systems we use. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_notation#Notation_in_various_countries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_notation#Notation_in_v... 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_notation#Notation_in_various_countries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_notation#Notation_in_v...
- muraiki 11y ago
  I sing Byzantine Chant using Byzantine notation. I was initially reluctant to learn the traditional notation and instead used western notation. However, I eventually decided to learn it and was able to pick it up surprisingly quickly. I now believe that it best captures the "feel" of Byzantine music, and to explain this I think I can hopefully make a useful analogy to programming. :) But before continuing, take a look at this PDF as it conveniently shows the Byzantine notation above the western notation, along with a third line in western notation indicating the various things implied by the Byzantine notation: http://www.cappellaromana.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Cherubic-Western-Pl-IV_Divine-Liturgy-Music_Cappella-Romana.pdf http://www.cappellaromana.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Che... Here's also some music (but of a different song) so you can actually hear what it sounds like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHpOiX2sO-s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHpOiX2sO-s When we program we often find patterns that are repeated over and over. As such, we factor those patterns out into functions or perhaps macros in order to reduce the repetition and to make the intent both more clear and more terse. Likewise, in Byzantine notation there are certain rhythmic motifs, inflections, and various types of ornamentation which are captured using a particular neume rather than a series of notes. For instance, Byzantine music generally has a certain rhythmic feel that is often expressed in the context of a sequence of going up one note in the scale and then going up another note. In western notation this would be written as two notes, perhaps with a tie, but in Byzantine notation it is a single symbol that not only communicates the two notes but also the stylistic rhythm present behind them. A similar but generally un-notated concept in Western music would be "swing". Another thing we run into when programming is that while we might have a similar concept in two different programming languages, perhaps even with the same name, the semantics of that concept might be quite different underneath. For instance, both Go and Clojure have coroutines, but since Clojures' are implemented using macros you need to be sure not to call a blocking function inside of one, whereas in Go the runtime automatically does what it needs to do if you do something that invokes a blocking system call such as file IO. (Disclaimer: this might not be fully accurate, but you get the picture :) Likewise, in Byzantine notation the scale intervals used differ from that of Western notation, which is generally geared towards equal temperment. In Byzantine notation the scale is divided into 72 parts[1], not 12, and a step between two notes in a scale might be 6 parts, then 20 parts, then 4, etc. It's possible to use parts of Western notation to more accurately represent these pitches, but it ends up looking like a bit of a mess. A final example would be how some programming languages are geared towards particular tasks. For instance, R is awesome at statistics -- it's probably not the best for programming games. Likewise, Western notation is really great for expressing harmony, but Byzantine music is strongly focused on melody. For a chanter, western notation has a lot more "visual noise" due to the things required for expressing harmony, such as the staff, whereas having a single symbol which means "go up 2 notes in the scale" communicates exactly what is necessary. Anyways, I hope these examples help convey some of the reasons why crazy people like me still use Byzantine notation and encourage others to learn. If you'd like to learn more about Byzantine chant I encourage you to check out my friend's site, www.byzantinechant.org A great CD for English language Byzantine chant is Cappela Romana's "The Divine Liturgy in English" http://www.cappellaromana.org/audio/divine-liturgy-in-english/ http://www.cappellaromana.org/audio/divine-liturgy-in-englis... [1] Here's a good example: http://www.kelfar.net/orthodoxiaradio/HChromatic.html http://www.kelfar.net/orthodoxiaradio/HChromatic.html PS: The thing that got me into programming was wanting to make a free software Byzantine chant editor. I never ended up finishing it, but hopefully someday when I actually know what I'm doing I'll be able to. :) https://github.com/muraiki/byzscribe https://github.com/muraiki/byzscribe
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
ctdonath 11y ago
A pity there is no musical rendition to go with them. Well, Clouds For Piano did come out nice. http://llllllll.co/uploads/default/a5a394625f34fb9f61fa24832b779dcbae99961d http://llllllll.co/uploads/default/a5a394625f34fb9f61fa24832...

24 points by GuiA 11y ago

bane 11y ago

It's kind of surprising what a hard design problem musical notation is. Like modern mathematical notation, modern standard musical notation is incredibly elegant. - It can be read almost as fast as being played - It captures a tremendous level of complexity and expressiveness - It communicates the music almost exactly - It's flexible and can stretch to accommodate almost any instrument in the Western cultural inventory Like mathematical notation, it's incredibly general purpose, you can write jazz, rock and symphonies in pretty much the same system. It's not perfect, it doesn't perfectly encode every nuance of a performance in the same way a recording can. But it's possible, without ever hearing a piece, to read modern notation and be able to provide a very high quality replay of the original work. It's also paradoxically simple. A young child can learn the basics and be able to perform simple pieces reasonably well. In the early 20th century there was an explosion of ideas (seen here) for alternate systems, all part of the deconstruction of music movement, but they're almost all specialist systems, not really capable of encoding general purpose music. For a while, I was interested to see who else had come up with notation systems and I spent some time researching through history. It turns out, surprisingly (considering the often amazingly deep musical traditions many cultures have), that there aren't many [1] Most systems use a simple language glyph to note correspondence, but things like duration weren't encoded. A modern take would be like writing a song something like: A A E E A E D E F E and having only that kind of system to encode everything from symphonies to pop-music. A major innovation in Korea was the introduction of a system that did encode duration. Other systems used relative markings, early European chants would indicate things in such a way that notes were higher or lower than the preceeding notes. Both kinds of systems required lots of verbal information transmission to properly transfer the knowledge of the song's performance. With repetition a performer could learn the proper way to recreate the song, using the notation as a memory aid. Later Western efforts encoded things on a bar to provide more detail and the modern system is merely an extension of that. In the East, the Eastern Orthodox Christians developed a system known today as Byzantine Notation, and it's quite beautiful. But it's still a relative system that requires some significant contextual knowledge to perform from sight. For fun, I encourage any musicians here to try to come up with, from first principles, a good general purpose musical notation system. It's incredibly hard to do without sacrificing things like in-performance readability or compactness. If you aren't a musician, I encourage you to do the same with math notation, starting with numbers and see what you can come up with. I've found it's very hard to do so without more or less ending up with some variation on the current systems we use. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_notation#Notation_in_various_countries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_notation#Notation_in_v... 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_notation#Notation_in_various_countries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_notation#Notation_in_v...

muraiki 11y ago
I sing Byzantine Chant using Byzantine notation. I was initially reluctant to learn the traditional notation and instead used western notation. However, I eventually decided to learn it and was able to pick it up surprisingly quickly. I now believe that it best captures the "feel" of Byzantine music, and to explain this I think I can hopefully make a useful analogy to programming. :) But before continuing, take a look at this PDF as it conveniently shows the Byzantine notation above the western notation, along with a third line in western notation indicating the various things implied by the Byzantine notation: http://www.cappellaromana.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Cherubic-Western-Pl-IV_Divine-Liturgy-Music_Cappella-Romana.pdf http://www.cappellaromana.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Che... Here's also some music (but of a different song) so you can actually hear what it sounds like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHpOiX2sO-s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHpOiX2sO-s When we program we often find patterns that are repeated over and over. As such, we factor those patterns out into functions or perhaps macros in order to reduce the repetition and to make the intent both more clear and more terse. Likewise, in Byzantine notation there are certain rhythmic motifs, inflections, and various types of ornamentation which are captured using a particular neume rather than a series of notes. For instance, Byzantine music generally has a certain rhythmic feel that is often expressed in the context of a sequence of going up one note in the scale and then going up another note. In western notation this would be written as two notes, perhaps with a tie, but in Byzantine notation it is a single symbol that not only communicates the two notes but also the stylistic rhythm present behind them. A similar but generally un-notated concept in Western music would be "swing". Another thing we run into when programming is that while we might have a similar concept in two different programming languages, perhaps even with the same name, the semantics of that concept might be quite different underneath. For instance, both Go and Clojure have coroutines, but since Clojures' are implemented using macros you need to be sure not to call a blocking function inside of one, whereas in Go the runtime automatically does what it needs to do if you do something that invokes a blocking system call such as file IO. (Disclaimer: this might not be fully accurate, but you get the picture :) Likewise, in Byzantine notation the scale intervals used differ from that of Western notation, which is generally geared towards equal temperment. In Byzantine notation the scale is divided into 72 parts[1], not 12, and a step between two notes in a scale might be 6 parts, then 20 parts, then 4, etc. It's possible to use parts of Western notation to more accurately represent these pitches, but it ends up looking like a bit of a mess. A final example would be how some programming languages are geared towards particular tasks. For instance, R is awesome at statistics -- it's probably not the best for programming games. Likewise, Western notation is really great for expressing harmony, but Byzantine music is strongly focused on melody. For a chanter, western notation has a lot more "visual noise" due to the things required for expressing harmony, such as the staff, whereas having a single symbol which means "go up 2 notes in the scale" communicates exactly what is necessary. Anyways, I hope these examples help convey some of the reasons why crazy people like me still use Byzantine notation and encourage others to learn. If you'd like to learn more about Byzantine chant I encourage you to check out my friend's site, www.byzantinechant.org A great CD for English language Byzantine chant is Cappela Romana's "The Divine Liturgy in English" http://www.cappellaromana.org/audio/divine-liturgy-in-english/ http://www.cappellaromana.org/audio/divine-liturgy-in-englis... [1] Here's a good example: http://www.kelfar.net/orthodoxiaradio/HChromatic.html http://www.kelfar.net/orthodoxiaradio/HChromatic.html PS: The thing that got me into programming was wanting to make a free software Byzantine chant editor. I never ended up finishing it, but hopefully someday when I actually know what I'm doing I'll be able to. :) https://github.com/muraiki/byzscribe https://github.com/muraiki/byzscribe

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

ctdonath 11y ago

A pity there is no musical rendition to go with them. Well, Clouds For Piano did come out nice. http://llllllll.co/uploads/default/a5a394625f34fb9f61fa24832b779dcbae99961d http://llllllll.co/uploads/default/a5a394625f34fb9f61fa24832...