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What happens if you rotate that first image 90° counter-clockwise? http://i.imgur.com/i2V57On.png http://i.imgur.com/i2V57On.png You get a traditional sheet mus

by bbx 11y ago

What happens if you rotate that first image 90° counter-clockwise? http://i.imgur.com/i2V57On.png http://i.imgur.com/i2V57On.png You get a traditional sheet music with simpler graphics. What about the new features? - Easily printable: traditional scores already are - Screen and scroll-friendly: you can stack traditional score pages vertically - Chord names: already exist on traditional scores - Lyrics: same thing - Foot pedal arrows: same thing The only novelty here is to match a piano's physical horizontal pitch range, which forces the time axis to be vertical instead. I guess sheet music is like code: sometimes you just need to learn it the hard way.

amsilprotag 11y ago
I challenge "easily printable." This way of writing sheet music is vastly more space inefficient. Each beat requires an entire row of space, whereas a beat in sheet music might require 3 square inches at most. Having many pages of sheet music, like in coding, makes it much harder to understand the song as a whole and navigate repeats. I do like the fact that — unlike with sheet music - the 12 semi-tones are spaced evenly, as they are in reality. This allows for fast visual recognition of chord types and intervals.
- rspeer 11y ago
  As long as you're playing tonal music, chord types and intervals will be strongly associated with the 7 note names, not just the 12 semitones. A perfect fourth will always be the same size on the staff, for example. If it's "spelled" differently -- if an interval of that size is actually written as C-E#, for example -- then that's a sign that something weird is going on and you're not supposed to think of this interval as a fourth. The fact that we write music using the 7-note diatonic scale is kind of like compression: it optimizes notation for the notes and intervals you're most likely to play. It's just not suited for atonal music, much like compression is not suited for random-looking data.
  - ericmo 11y ago
    I know little music theory, but I've been playing instruments "by ear" for a long time and it made many things easier to me when I learned that if you're using diatonic scale, it's very unlikely that you'll use notes outside of the scale; e.g. if you're playing a song in C Major, most of the time you'll play C and D, not C# or Db, so if you need that note, it's easier to switch than having an almost unused line in the sheet.
- tacos 11y ago
  This is exactly what standard sheet music does. A "C" chord can be C-E-G, which makes one shape on a piano keyboard. It can also be "inverted" to E-G-C or G-C-E. These form distinct shapes and it takes about a week to learn to spot the patterns and play them. Organists even do it with both hands while playing notes with their feet. I remain firm in my belief that if you can touch type you can sight read music. I've seen five year olds learn to do it and I've seen 90 year old people learn to do it.
- gjm11 11y ago
  Actually, the semitones aren't spaced evenly here. The white notes on a piano keyboard are spaced evenly, and then the black notes are half-way between the white ones. So it's rather like conventional notation in that respect (the notes of the diatonic scale are equally spaced, as long as you're in the right key) but since it doesn't have a notion of key signature you can't arrange for that to remain true in (say) F minor. This preference for some keys over others is pretty much built into the piano keyboard too, and the notation is specifically intended for keyboard music, so it's not obviously crazy. But it certainly doesn't have the property that the semitones are equally spaced.
abecedarius 11y ago
The 90° isn't the big problem with traditional notation. It's that the same note in different octaves looks different. It's as if in programming you wrote a for loop differently for every level of nesting. The new notation draws against the same pattern of staff lines for each octave; plus, you don't have to remember sharps and flats from the key. I've long wished for these two improvements, especially the first one; OTOH I'd keep the traditional whole note, half note, etc., for precision and concision -- the piano-roll style feels more like training wheels.
- topogios 11y ago
  Notes in different octaves are different and hence should look different. Even if you restrict to keyboard instruments, I am not sure you describe an existing problem with classical notation. For the non-keyboard instruments I know how to play, tones in different octaves having different identifications is a must unless you want to add extra parts to the notation.
  - enf 11y ago
    I think the point is that the standard clefs would be better aligned if there were 6 lines instead of 5, so both bass and treble could be EGBDFA. It would put the low C one below the bass clef and the high C one above the treble clef, instead of two below and two above but only one in between.
    - abecedarius 11y ago
      Yes, that was my general thought -- (added:) but that still would have two octaves different, where a note between staff lines in one octave is on a staff line in the other. Also when you go above or below the two clefs and draw ledger lines for those notes, you're losing the background pattern once again -- you start having to count notes. With this proposed notation you'd draw another background octave (or enough of it for the notes used).
- gjulianm 11y ago
  Regarding remembering flats and sharps... That may be easy for beginners, but it's actually not good. You do have to remember the sharps and flats because you have to know in which key you are playing to see where is the music going. And when you're playing you end up not needing the flats in each note because they're always there. They end up being redundant, so by removing them you gain simplicity and you can see more clearly the flats and sharps that actually matter and change how the music sounds.
krick 11y ago
Totally agree. And it's less compact, more verbose, "too graphical" I might say. It's fine to show how to play "Der Flohwalzer" or something, but would be horrible for reading complicated pieces or reasoning about several parties at once. Not to say it's nearly impossible to read the music note-by-note as you play, so you are always thinking in patterns which are hard to recognize when written like that. So, no way it could replace traditional notation. It could be used to show how to play something to a newcomer, but it's not novel, then — I've seen visualizations with highlighted piano keys since like as long as I remember myself. And not that practical anyway, since it's not that hard to remember how to read musical notation and start using it right away (especially if there's no alteration symbols in the key signature and no somewhat obscure symbols like fermatas and stuff).
baby 11y ago
It's not like code, music sheets are unoptimized for learning. And at the end music sheets are just here for you to learn a music, they are nothing more. Personally I'm very fond of that kind of music sheets: http://herbalcell.com/static/sheets/legend-of-zelda-twilight-princess/trailer_labeled.pdf http://herbalcell.com/static/sheets/legend-of-zelda-twilight... I've learned complex musics in weeks while it would have taken me month with a real music sheet.
- eru 11y ago
  > And at the end music sheets are just here for you to learn a music, they are nothing more. Professional session musicians play directly from the sheet, and can promptly forget the piece afterwards. They do not intend to learn the music. Interesting enough, a similar observation can be made about writing prose. A printed book isn't usually a tool to learn a novel by heart for recitation.
  - baby 11y ago
    > Professional session musicians I forgot to add I wasn't talking about professionals. I'm talking about people who want to play music as a hobby, for pleasure. Learning Solfege shouldn't be a hassle.
  - fao_ 11y ago
    Professional session musicians play directly from the sheet, and can promptly forget the piece afterwards. They do not intend to learn the music. As someone who has had 'both sides' where classical and folk[1] music are concerned, I can say it is only[2] the professional classical session musicians that do this. From personal experience, I can say that most classical musicians miss out on one part of music learning entirely; that is, the 'learning things off by heart and playing it from memory' part. Whereas all the folk players I've met have not only the ability to efficiently sightread, but also to carry around the equivalent of several volumes of sheet music in their heads; ready to rattle off at a moment's notice. A few of the players I've met (myself included here) see the music as nothing more than a formality, and instead prefer to both learn by ear and play from memory. Another thing that the classical teachings seem to ignore (or view with distain (People in my orchestra viewed it as 'hard work')) is cultivating the ability to hear a long piece of music and replicate it -- something that a significant minority of folk players also seem to be able to do. [1]: celtic/irish folk, in my case [2]: Of course, there are always exceptions to the rule
fao_ 11y ago
You (and the OP) fail to mention the main advantage that sheet music has had over these alternate forms (I know that in celtic music they have tab, which is like this but for mandolins, banjos, etc), and one of the reasons that it has survived this long despite being pain to use: portability. It is extremely easy to port sheet music from one instrument to another, in most cases this doesn't require any change in written music itself (Or at least, if it does the change is usually very trivial). Conversely, this new format is limited to the piano. I doubt that it would be trivial to port this music to the violin, for example (assuming the violin has a similarily structured music format).

by bbx 11y ago

amsilprotag 11y ago

I challenge "easily printable." This way of writing sheet music is vastly more space inefficient. Each beat requires an entire row of space, whereas a beat in sheet music might require 3 square inches at most. Having many pages of sheet music, like in coding, makes it much harder to understand the song as a whole and navigate repeats. I do like the fact that — unlike with sheet music - the 12 semi-tones are spaced evenly, as they are in reality. This allows for fast visual recognition of chord types and intervals.

rspeer 11y ago
As long as you're playing tonal music, chord types and intervals will be strongly associated with the 7 note names, not just the 12 semitones. A perfect fourth will always be the same size on the staff, for example. If it's "spelled" differently -- if an interval of that size is actually written as C-E#, for example -- then that's a sign that something weird is going on and you're not supposed to think of this interval as a fourth. The fact that we write music using the 7-note diatonic scale is kind of like compression: it optimizes notation for the notes and intervals you're most likely to play. It's just not suited for atonal music, much like compression is not suited for random-looking data.
- ericmo 11y ago
  I know little music theory, but I've been playing instruments "by ear" for a long time and it made many things easier to me when I learned that if you're using diatonic scale, it's very unlikely that you'll use notes outside of the scale; e.g. if you're playing a song in C Major, most of the time you'll play C and D, not C# or Db, so if you need that note, it's easier to switch than having an almost unused line in the sheet.
tacos 11y ago
This is exactly what standard sheet music does. A "C" chord can be C-E-G, which makes one shape on a piano keyboard. It can also be "inverted" to E-G-C or G-C-E. These form distinct shapes and it takes about a week to learn to spot the patterns and play them. Organists even do it with both hands while playing notes with their feet. I remain firm in my belief that if you can touch type you can sight read music. I've seen five year olds learn to do it and I've seen 90 year old people learn to do it.
gjm11 11y ago
Actually, the semitones aren't spaced evenly here. The white notes on a piano keyboard are spaced evenly, and then the black notes are half-way between the white ones. So it's rather like conventional notation in that respect (the notes of the diatonic scale are equally spaced, as long as you're in the right key) but since it doesn't have a notion of key signature you can't arrange for that to remain true in (say) F minor. This preference for some keys over others is pretty much built into the piano keyboard too, and the notation is specifically intended for keyboard music, so it's not obviously crazy. But it certainly doesn't have the property that the semitones are equally spaced.

abecedarius 11y ago

The 90° isn't the big problem with traditional notation. It's that the same note in different octaves looks different. It's as if in programming you wrote a for loop differently for every level of nesting. The new notation draws against the same pattern of staff lines for each octave; plus, you don't have to remember sharps and flats from the key. I've long wished for these two improvements, especially the first one; OTOH I'd keep the traditional whole note, half note, etc., for precision and concision -- the piano-roll style feels more like training wheels.

topogios 11y ago
Notes in different octaves are different and hence should look different. Even if you restrict to keyboard instruments, I am not sure you describe an existing problem with classical notation. For the non-keyboard instruments I know how to play, tones in different octaves having different identifications is a must unless you want to add extra parts to the notation.
- enf 11y ago
  I think the point is that the standard clefs would be better aligned if there were 6 lines instead of 5, so both bass and treble could be EGBDFA. It would put the low C one below the bass clef and the high C one above the treble clef, instead of two below and two above but only one in between.
  - abecedarius 11y ago
    Yes, that was my general thought -- (added:) but that still would have two octaves different, where a note between staff lines in one octave is on a staff line in the other. Also when you go above or below the two clefs and draw ledger lines for those notes, you're losing the background pattern once again -- you start having to count notes. With this proposed notation you'd draw another background octave (or enough of it for the notes used).
gjulianm 11y ago
Regarding remembering flats and sharps... That may be easy for beginners, but it's actually not good. You do have to remember the sharps and flats because you have to know in which key you are playing to see where is the music going. And when you're playing you end up not needing the flats in each note because they're always there. They end up being redundant, so by removing them you gain simplicity and you can see more clearly the flats and sharps that actually matter and change how the music sounds.

krick 11y ago

Totally agree. And it's less compact, more verbose, "too graphical" I might say. It's fine to show how to play "Der Flohwalzer" or something, but would be horrible for reading complicated pieces or reasoning about several parties at once. Not to say it's nearly impossible to read the music note-by-note as you play, so you are always thinking in patterns which are hard to recognize when written like that. So, no way it could replace traditional notation. It could be used to show how to play something to a newcomer, but it's not novel, then — I've seen visualizations with highlighted piano keys since like as long as I remember myself. And not that practical anyway, since it's not that hard to remember how to read musical notation and start using it right away (especially if there's no alteration symbols in the key signature and no somewhat obscure symbols like fermatas and stuff).

baby 11y ago

It's not like code, music sheets are unoptimized for learning. And at the end music sheets are just here for you to learn a music, they are nothing more. Personally I'm very fond of that kind of music sheets: http://herbalcell.com/static/sheets/legend-of-zelda-twilight-princess/trailer_labeled.pdf http://herbalcell.com/static/sheets/legend-of-zelda-twilight... I've learned complex musics in weeks while it would have taken me month with a real music sheet.

eru 11y ago
> And at the end music sheets are just here for you to learn a music, they are nothing more. Professional session musicians play directly from the sheet, and can promptly forget the piece afterwards. They do not intend to learn the music. Interesting enough, a similar observation can be made about writing prose. A printed book isn't usually a tool to learn a novel by heart for recitation.
- baby 11y ago
  > Professional session musicians I forgot to add I wasn't talking about professionals. I'm talking about people who want to play music as a hobby, for pleasure. Learning Solfege shouldn't be a hassle.
- fao_ 11y ago
  Professional session musicians play directly from the sheet, and can promptly forget the piece afterwards. They do not intend to learn the music. As someone who has had 'both sides' where classical and folk[1] music are concerned, I can say it is only[2] the professional classical session musicians that do this. From personal experience, I can say that most classical musicians miss out on one part of music learning entirely; that is, the 'learning things off by heart and playing it from memory' part. Whereas all the folk players I've met have not only the ability to efficiently sightread, but also to carry around the equivalent of several volumes of sheet music in their heads; ready to rattle off at a moment's notice. A few of the players I've met (myself included here) see the music as nothing more than a formality, and instead prefer to both learn by ear and play from memory. Another thing that the classical teachings seem to ignore (or view with distain (People in my orchestra viewed it as 'hard work')) is cultivating the ability to hear a long piece of music and replicate it -- something that a significant minority of folk players also seem to be able to do. [1]: celtic/irish folk, in my case [2]: Of course, there are always exceptions to the rule

fao_ 11y ago

You (and the OP) fail to mention the main advantage that sheet music has had over these alternate forms (I know that in celtic music they have tab, which is like this but for mandolins, banjos, etc), and one of the reasons that it has survived this long despite being pain to use: portability. It is extremely easy to port sheet music from one instrument to another, in most cases this doesn't require any change in written music itself (Or at least, if it does the change is usually very trivial). Conversely, this new format is limited to the piano. I doubt that it would be trivial to port this music to the violin, for example (assuming the violin has a similarily structured music format).