[HN Gopher] Clairnote: An alternative music notation system
___________________________________________________________________
Clairnote: An alternative music notation system
Author : agmand
Score : 161 points
Date : 2022-05-04 13:21 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (clairnote.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (clairnote.org)
| KaiserPro wrote:
| As someone who has a difficult time reading music, at first
| glance this looks like it might help.
|
| My main issue is that note in the middle of the stave are
| essentially unknowable for me. middle c-f is doable. but in the
| middle it get very fuzzy, too many lines.
|
| I thought this notation might solve that, but instead of having
| notes with lines through them to indicate notes on a line, they
| are slightly above/below. That for me makes it very hard, even
| though most of the stave has been removed.
| the_other wrote:
| At first I thought the "missing" line in the middle of each stave
| would help me. My myopia, astigmatism and nystagmus make
| traditional notation incredibly difficult to read, on top of its
| inherent complexity. The "missing" line actually clarifies the
| top and bottom two lines. However, the multiple positions notes
| can sit relative to a line, and the seemingly arbitrary number of
| optional lines make this system completely unworkable, for me.
| TOGoS wrote:
| I like it. As a kid (and well into my 30s[1]), any time I tried
| to learn 'music theory' I was put off by the feeling that what I
| was learning was more about the goofy and confusing standard
| notation than it was about music. By fixing the notation that
| barrier could be removed and students could get straight into the
| interesting stuff sooner. At least I think it would have helped
| me!
|
| [1] I eventually came to understand a lot of the concepts about
| scales/keys/etc by ignoring the notation and just horsing around
| on my MIDI keyboard a lot.
| throwaway675309 wrote:
| The problem with something like this is that it's basically the
| musical equivalent of the artificially constructed language
| Esperanto. It will NEVER gain any significant traction in the
| existing world of musicians.
| jancsika wrote:
| Has anyone tried turning the entire grand staff 90 degrees
| counterclockwise and animate the notes toward the player, Guitar-
| hero style?
| aikiplayer wrote:
| I'm a still learning guitar player (I think I've been taking
| lessons for ~8.5 yrs and did some piano lessons as a kid and was
| in school bands).
|
| I usually work on solo style arrangements of popular songs but
| sometimes dabble into learning solos, different parts of songs,
| etc.
|
| I try to transcribe what I'm working on in standard notation
| generally. For me the hard part isn't writing down the pitch;
| it's the rhythm and timing. Trying to document vocal parts and/or
| solos is hard, because they float all around.
|
| As others have mentioned, different genres of music document
| their music differently. Standard notation is probably actually
| pretty rare.
|
| I don't think the pitch notation system in standard notation is
| harder than learning the underlying concepts (scales are 7 notes,
| there are half steps between the 3rd and 4th degree and 7th and
| 8th degree (the octave) of the scales, etc.). It's an interesting
| approach but I don't think it's solving the harder problem.
| abecedarius wrote:
| > In traditional music notation notes an octave apart do not
| resemble each other.
|
| This is what I'd emphasize. To sight read, the mapping from sign
| to note has to be so automatic it's unconscious. In standard
| notation this mapping looks different at every one of the middle
| four octaves, which nearly quadruples the size of the
| "multiplication table" you're installing in memory. Since your
| exposure in practice to the further ends of that range is less
| frequent, you're still slowed down by some notes even once the
| middle ones are automatic to you. (And there's probably some
| "cross talk" for a long time -- at least, that's how it felt to
| me.)
|
| It's strange to me when people are like "eh, what's the big deal"
| about a UX failure that seems this big.
| bentcorner wrote:
| At least for me as a very casual musician, I instinctively know
| how to map all the notes on the staff and maybe 2/2.5 lines
| above/below. Most sheet music uses the octave above/below
| notation when necessary too, so it's not common (for me) to
| need more than that.
|
| When I was younger and played more complex pieces, my teacher
| and I would sometimes write down notes that were way out there
| just to help things along.
|
| Personally at first glance this notation is jarring to read,
| and I don't know if it would make sense investing in learning
| this when literally everything else I've seen and own is
| traditionally notated. Where I find challenge in music is not
| understanding notes quickly enough, it's my physical mechanics,
| memory, and expressiveness.
| reikonomusha wrote:
| I don't agree with this "multiplication table" idea. Octaves
| have the same physical distance between notes on the page in
| traditional notation, so they can be identified at a glance.
| People typically do _not_ read octaves by deciphering the
| bottom note, deciphering the top note, and saying "ah, this is
| an octave".
| abhorrence wrote:
| And even if they did, the stems of the notes (excluding half
| and whole notes) traditionally are as long as the distance
| between octaves. One of the things that I think makes
| traditional notation more robust for experts is the
| redundancy of information.
|
| It also helps that for many instruments there's a mapping
| between the layout of the instrument and the notation! This
| is less true for brass and the violin family, though I think
| even with them there are probably some arguments to be made
| about the harmonic series, or the spacing of strings in
| fifths.
| midenginedcoupe wrote:
| I'm not entirely sure who's the target audience of this new
| notation. I've been reading music for 40 years and don't think
| I've once needed the vertical gaps between notes to tell me
| whether an interval was a major or a minor third. In fact, I
| think in terms of steps in the scale, not whether those steps are
| flattened or not. So equi-distant vertical spacing for the notes
| in a major scale better fits my mental model.
|
| But that's just my own preference/habit. The real sticking point
| for me is the ambiguity of whether a note head is exactly on a
| line or just below. Sight reading needs that decision to be
| immediate - picking out whether the note is just below the line
| inamongst some large and rapid intervallic jumps is going to be
| almost impossible.
|
| Also, I'm not sure the author has understood one of the key
| rationales for these other clefs - that the number of ledger
| lines can be minimised. E.g. Playing in the upper register of the
| trombone is an exercise in parsing 4-6 ledger lines, which can
| get tricky especially with rough hand-written charts. Switching
| to tenor or even alto clef keeps everything nicely within the
| stave and easier to read. Where in the staff the 'C' sits is just
| a detail, and it's surprisingly quick to get used to different
| clefs with different centres.
| sfblah wrote:
| I basically agree. On a piano, this notation has the
| significant negative of making it unclear which notes are
| played on "white" keys and which are played on "black" keys, in
| the key of C. It's pretty useful to have that explicitly
| marked.
| spicyusername wrote:
| Very cool. Every domain is always in need of fresh ideas. Even if
| they don't directly take off, they still provide valuable
| perspective and help bolster the process of slow, constant
| improvement.
|
| It would be interesting to see how this, or a similar system,
| could be extended for any X-TET system, not just 12-TET.
| yboris wrote:
| There's also _Hummingbird_ notation:
|
| https://www.hummingbirdnotation.com/
| InitialLastName wrote:
| At a glance, this is a neat concept, but doesn't seem to come at
| the problem from the perspective of the most common users of
| music notation (experienced musicians); rather, it appears to
| have been written by somebody who was frustrated by trying to
| learn to read music. For experienced musicians, the priorities
| are a) legibility for sight-reading and transcription (which this
| system, with indistinguishable sitting/hanging notes and
| pervasive ledger lines fails) and b) musical context for
| expressive decisions, such as information about key, mode,
| modulation and harmonic content as hinted at by the key
| signatures and accidentals (which this system downplays as
| unnecessary).
| chrismorgan wrote:
| I've gained that impression from every single alternative
| notation system that's come up here (a new one comes up every
| year or two). They have a habit of solving problems that just
| aren't problems for experienced readers, while causing problems
| for experienced readers. (They may also solve some real
| problems, but when they do, they always involve compromises.
| Inconsistent octave positioning on the staff _is_ a problem,
| even if it becomes comparatively minor for fairly experienced
| readers, but the solution offered for that particular issue
| here looks lousy to me, the compromises made being considerably
| worse than the original problem.)
|
| In this instance, I look at the subtle vertical placements
| alone and first guessed rendering imprecision, because I've
| seen that bad and worse from some digital scores, to say
| nothing of older scores especially with inconsistent ledger
| line spacing, especially when they've been scanned or reprinted
| or are otherwise aged. I also see something that my dad would
| struggle to distinguish visually except under fairly strong
| lighting. This notation looks terribly unsuitable if you don't
| have (a) a high-precision, high-resolution display, (b) good
| lighting, and (c) good eyesight. And it certainly won't scale
| down as well, nor is it in any way suitable for hand notation.
| _moof wrote:
| _> They have a habit of solving problems that just aren't
| problems for experienced readers, while causing problems for
| experienced readers._
|
| If I had a dollar for every "new way of doing XYZ" made by
| someone inexperienced who just doesn't want to learn the way
| we're all doing XYZ just fine...
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| Brew vs macports in a nutshell.
| Elidrake24 wrote:
| What's great is I'm not even sure which one you're
| disparaging; they both "just work" and stay out of my
| way.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Isn't that the reactionary response to all innovation, such
| as in tech? 'That's not the way we do it.'
| [deleted]
| _moof wrote:
| It rhymes with it, sure. The key difference is that the
| phenomenon I'm talking about comes from people who
| haven't taken the time to understand the problem, or they
| come up with "solutions" that have already been tried and
| found not to work. The reactionary, conversely, is simply
| afraid: of change, that they won't be able to learn the
| new thing, of not being important because they aren't the
| one who came up with it, of losing status gained from
| being an expert in the old thing, etc.
| mkr-hn wrote:
| There's a gradient between "there's a reason we do things
| this way and you should understand it before you try to
| change it" and "don't roll your own notation."
| munificent wrote:
| It so hard for an outsider to tell the difference between:
|
| 1. It is this way for logical but obscure reasons that will
| become clearer later when you have deeper understanding.
|
| 2. It is this way only because of path dependence and
| historical baggage and it's arbitrarily annoying for a new
| person to learn but we don't switch because we all learned
| it the old hard way.
|
| It's valuable for inexperienced people to question designs
| that appear bad from the outside because there _are_ a lot
| of examples of 2 and experienced users of a system aren 't
| incentivized to fix them because they've already climbed up
| the learning curve and don't personally benefit. But that
| baggage is a worthless drain for every new user.
|
| The tax for having new users point out and sometimes fix #2
| is having to deal with them sometimes erroneously "fixing"
| cases that are #1.
| scrozier wrote:
| As a very experienced "tech guy" and a very experienced
| musician, I notice this happens a _lot_ on HN. Maybe
| because there 's a very math-y, notation-rich aspect to
| music that appeals to technology types. I am absolutely all
| for everybody getting to music whichever way works for
| them, but there has been a lot of effort spent by
| technologists trying to "fix" music or make it better, when
| a little humble learning would have paid big rewards.
|
| I wonder in what fields _I_ do this same thing....
| jnovek wrote:
| How does one learn to _actually_ read music, then?
|
| I have been learning to play the keyboard for about a year
| and I find the layout of the keys to make a lot of sense for
| figuring out things like scales and chords. When I was in
| high school I never really learned to sight-read a staff, it
| was always a struggle for me and probably what turned me off
| to playing an instrument for so long.
|
| If simplified notations are essentially a crutch for newbies,
| how does one "git gud"?
| holri wrote:
| > How does one learn to actually read music, then?
|
| The same way millions of musicions before you. By reading
| music, training, time and patience.
| jnovek wrote:
| Please don't take this personally, but this isn't very
| helpful advice.
|
| I've learned how to do many things in my life, and I've
| come to appreciate that it's very easy to practice the
| wrong thing and never make any progress.
|
| Another way to phrase my question might be, "What and how
| should I practice to develop my music reading skills?"
| MandieD wrote:
| I can only give advice for "one note at a time"
| instruments like the flute or trumpet: practice sight
| reading children's songs you know (and therefore can tell
| if you've made a huge mistake) - sight reading, not
| memorizing! As you get more proficient at reading those,
| slowly choose harder things - melody lines from a
| familiar church hymnal are ideal for this. If you make
| mistakes, finish the phrase, then repeat it, but here,
| you should be going for quantity, not quality.
|
| Treat this as a separate part of your practice.
|
| I would imagine it's similar for piano or guitar.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| For all of its strengths as an instrument, piano has some
| drawbacks for learning to read traditional staff, as there
| isn't an (obvious-to-the-uninitiated) differentiation
| between notes or across octaves (you just sit in front of a
| wide line of keys). I think I learned to read first on a
| recorder, where you can develop a more intuitive link
| between fingerings and notes (especially as the first note
| you learn is the B dead in the center of the treble staff).
|
| I'd suggest a few paths to learning the note positioning:
|
| - If you're already comfortable with note locations on the
| keyboard, don't be afraid of the line/space mnemonics. If
| they get you to where you're making ID's faster in the
| parts of the staff where your hands normally live, it can
| make life much easier, and you can easily extend from
| there. There are really only ~26 note/staff associations to
| learn that will cover the majority of the music you'll see
| day to day (with octave shifts) and knowing a few will make
| the rest come more easily.
|
| - Similarly (and I think this is the way piano is taught to
| beginners, but it's been a long time) you can make a lot of
| progress by starting your thumbs on middle C, which is dead
| between the staves and operating from there to play simple
| music. As you play and read more music, you'll find
| yourself starting to recognize the locations of more notes
| across the staff, until they all come to you intuitively.
| [deleted]
| duped wrote:
| Honest answer is to find a tutor and take private lessons.
| Books and videos can't show you how to correct bad
| technique and habits, and it's hard to follow the right
| pedagogy without someone to guide you.
| scrozier wrote:
| The distinction between reading music and sight reading
| aside (others have addressed it), learning to read music is
| honestly just rote practice. In the grand scheme of things,
| it's really not that hard. To play simple songs (all within
| one octave, say) from music on a staff on an instrument,
| you really only have to learn twelve associations of
| positions on the staff to a key on the keyboard or a
| fingering or an embouchure and a fingering, etc. It's far
| easier than learning a language or a programming language
| or the rules of hockey. From there, it's just extending
| those associations higher and lower, and learning other
| aspects of music notation, like note durations. It's just
| standard repetitive learning. No magic or particular talent
| is involved.
| bambax wrote:
| I'm working on a webapp to help learn sight reading; the v1
| is almost ready; I will do a show hn soon (hopefully next
| week).
|
| People often associate sight reading with keyboard playing,
| but they're different things. Reading the staff, as it is
| traditionally taught in conservatories, means associating
| the position of a note on the staff with the _name_ of the
| note (in a given clef). And that 's it.
|
| This means, for instance, that the octave is a different
| problem (I was going to say that it doesn't matter, which
| isn't exactly true, but close). A C3 is a C4 is a C5 is a
| C. Same with accidentals. A sharp G is a flat G is a G.
|
| There are many problems associated with learning to read
| staff on sight. The main and obvious one is that it's
| tedious and offers no immediate reward. But another is that
| we are trying to learn too many things at once.
|
| My app is trying to make learning to read notes engaging,
| competitive and (maybe?) addictive. I don't know if it'll
| have any success, but during the weeks I've been working on
| it, it was very effective at improving my own performance.
| reikonomusha wrote:
| Learning to sight-read is different than just reading.
| Sight-reading takes an enormous amount of daily dedication
| and practice for years to get to even an intermediate
| level.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| I don't recall it being that difficult to achieve.
| Probably the difference is in early teaching and
| expectations: if you learn to read music as an aid to
| remembering pieces that are perfected over a long time,
| sight-reading would be slow to develop, but if you learn
| it as a way to be able to play new music frequently, it
| will come more quickly. Probably like the difference
| between learning a foreign language by studying grammar
| and working translation exercises as opposed to on-the-
| fly immersion -- you develop different strengths.
| jnovek wrote:
| This is a great perspective that I hadn't considered
| before.
|
| My previous experience, years ago in high school, was
| absolutely the former. I think it makes tons of sense to
| try playing a wide variety of pieces at my skill level.
| ghostpepper wrote:
| I am just beginning to learn piano and when I told my
| teacher that I was memorizing the pieces I was supposed
| to be reading, he told me to simply play each piece once,
| mistakes and all, and continue on to the next -
| specifically to practice playing a piece on first sight.
| alar44 wrote:
| Literally practice. Don't look at your hands. It takes
| years and years, there is no quick way to learn piano.
| phkahler wrote:
| I'm not sure it's possible to say it's worse. You suffer from
| having learned the traditional notation, so some of this is
| going to look weird regardless. I'm not good at reading music
| and agree with some of the issues it has, but looking at this
| does seem like a different set of issues to me as well. I
| think the only fair comparison could be done by someone with
| a lot of experience using both.
|
| I think it's fair to say the staff has to be spread out more
| for this notation since is doesn't compress 12 notes into 7
| places like traditional notation.
|
| OTOH be glad you're not reading guitar tablature ;-)
| blagie wrote:
| The vast majority of users of music notation are amateurs, and
| being more friendly to amateurs would mean even more users.
|
| The vast majority of decision-makers are experienced users with
| a vested interest in the status quo.
|
| The issue is very similar to why corporate systems have such
| horrible user interfaces. The people making the decisions in IT
| aren't the normal users of the system. IT cares about features,
| integrations, and high-level analytics. Employees care to be
| able to sanely input their time sheets, file an expense report,
| or buy a stapler.
|
| I'd like a system simple enough to use by all the kids in my
| local elementary school music class, much more than I care
| about what happens in the local orchestra.
| danachow wrote:
| This analogy doesn't fit at all.
|
| > I'd like a system simple enough to use by all the kids in
| my local elementary school music class, much more than I care
| about what happens in the local orchestra.
|
| Amateur doesn't mean lack of experience or skill - what you
| seem to be meaning is "casual". There are _already_ a number
| of simplified notation systems for casual use. And this
| alternative notation is definitely not positioning itself for
| casual use based on its examples - and it sits in a sort of
| uncanny valley.
| apendleton wrote:
| > The vast majority of users of music notation are amateurs
|
| I'm not sure the claims you and OP are making here are
| actually in tension. They said:
|
| > the most common users of music notation (experienced
| musicians)
|
| which is ambiguous, and _might_ mean something like "of all
| the people that ever do any music-reading at all, the
| majority are experienced musicians," which would indeed be
| the opposite of your claim. But it might also be "of all the
| people that are reading music at any given moment, the
| majority are experienced musicians," which would be a proxy
| for "most hours spent reading music are spent by experienced
| musicians"; this could be true simultaneously with your claim
| (it stands to reason that experienced or professional
| musicians spend comparatively more time reading music than do
| novices or amateurs).
|
| I don't think it's a foregone conclusion that the thing you
| want to optimize for is maximizing the average quality of
| experience for all users regardless of how much they use the
| thing, vs. maximizing the quality of the average hour of use.
| tgv wrote:
| The problem, IMO, is that once you have acquired a notation
| system is that you can't/won't make the jump the another one.
| So if you train beginners with eg. clairnote, they will have
| a hard time making the jump to a higher difficulty level.
| It's not unlike a walled garden.
| dehrmann wrote:
| It's a bit like the Dvorak keyboard problem. It's slightly
| better, but too much of a hassle to bother with. You need
| something between 2x and 10x better to displace an
| entrenched incumbent.
| blagie wrote:
| I think a better music notation system would easily be at
| least 2x better for beginners. A rationalized system
| could mean 100% of kids learn to read and write music,
| and anyone could understand how to play an instrument
| like a piano from music (even if not able to do it at
| full speed).
|
| My point was that it could be 10x better, and it wouldn't
| lead to a switch. The decision-makers aren't the same as
| the people whom it would benefit.
|
| Coincidentally, there are a lot of scientific fields
| where jargon could be dramatically simplified, to where
| anyone could learn them too. Same entrenched walled
| garden problem. That's especially true of fields like
| medicine, chemistry, and biology where things were named
| before we understood them.
| reikonomusha wrote:
| To be clear though, a lot of kids do understand the
| current notation system fine. Most kids aren't saying
| "hey! this chord is a minor third in frequency space but
| occupies the same vertical distance on the page as a
| major third! so confusing!" They instead approach it very
| much "monkey see, monkey do".
|
| That's not to say many folks don't have trouble with
| notation, but if I had to place a bet, almost any
| notational system that abstracts away from letter names
| or (in the case of piano) keyboard positions will pose
| difficulties.
| MandieD wrote:
| Over a third of the students at my middle school were in
| band, and lots of them had academic problems. By eighth
| grade, they were all ok enough at reading music to get
| through multi-page pieces together.
|
| Only a few of us could have told you what a major third
| or the circle of fifths was, but frankly, even that
| meager level of theory was useless for the immediate task
| of playing the same note at the same time as all the
| other second clarinets.
| danachow wrote:
| > A rationalized system could mean 100% of kids learn to
| read and write music, and anyone could understand how to
| play an instrument like a piano from music (even if not
| able to do it at full speed).
|
| I played in school bands and marching band - very very
| few of my classmates took up music seriously beyond high
| school, but music reading just was a complete non-issue
| for everyone involved. I don't see how the current system
| is limiting anyone.
|
| > My point was that it could be 10x better, and it
| wouldn't lead to a switch. The decision-makers aren't the
| same as the people whom it would benefit.
|
| Who are these "decision makers" you keep speaking of.
| There is no global cabal of music notation
| protectionists. I don't think the forces that lead to
| internal corporate IT decision making really have
| anything to do with a music notation system.
|
| There are already simplified notation systems like tabs
| and piano rolls and annotated staves. Your argument seems
| to assume there is a notation system that really is 2 to
| 10 times better (which obviously is mostly subjective) -
| but you haven't even given an existence proof of this, so
| it is all hypothetical.
|
| > Coincidentally, there are a lot of scientific fields
| where jargon could be dramatically simplified, to where
| anyone could learn them too. Same entrenched walled
| garden problem.
|
| Example?
| scrozier wrote:
| As an experienced (semi-professional) musician, I think this
| is probably a false dichotomy. For one thing, "users of music
| notation" implies that these users know how to use it. Very
| many "amateur" musicians read traditional notation just fine.
| It's not that hard.
|
| There is really no such thing as a "decision-maker" for music
| notation systems. That ship sailed a long time ago. There is
| no orchestra conductor anywhere pondering whether or not they
| should abandon a millennium or two of traditional notation
| for something "better."
|
| You would be doing your elementary music students an enormous
| disservice by teaching them some "alternative" music notation
| system. And for what reason? As I've said elsewhere, learning
| to "read music" is far easier than many things we ask
| elementary students to learn.
|
| Apologies for excessive "quotation marks."
| Aidevah wrote:
| Many people seem to not realise that there is already an
| alternative to staff notation; it is called the piano roll.
| It has all the advantages that alternative notations propose
| (proportional intervals and note lengths), is already in
| widespread use, is available in all professional music
| software, and is by far simpler and easier to learn. For many
| professional musicians the piano roll may be the only type of
| notation they deal with on a regular basis.
|
| Any eclectic modification of standard western notation
| therefore needs to justify itself not just against staff
| notation, but also the simple piano roll.
| armagon wrote:
| Is there a nice way (ie. not screenshots) to print piano
| roll notation?
| zozbot234 wrote:
| I might agree with the general claim, but diatonic notation
| is a lot friendlier to amateurs. Traditionally, kids in early
| education learn solfege (Do, Re, Mi...) which is very much
| based on diatonicism.
| mkr-hn wrote:
| You see the same with people suggesting MIDI is a replacement
| for notation. I program MIDI in a MIDI roll and still
| appreciate notation. MIDI is to notation as a play is to a
| script. Notation is more like a script. It's there to guide the
| performance. Notation has persisted and evolved for centuries
| for a reason!
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Right, some highly chromatic music would be better represented
| in this notation, but it seems a poor fit for traditional
| western music.
|
| Also, a single, brief, look at a piano keyboard will expose why
| whole-steps and half-steps always being equidistant on the
| sheet music might not be a desirable goal. There are similar
| affordances on woodwinds as well. Maybe a string-instrument
| player could comment on usefulness for string music?
|
| [edit]
|
| I'd also be interested in seeing examples of transposing in
| Clairnote; all of the examples in TFA were in the key of C and
| I don't have an intuition for how easy/hard this would be. As
| an amateur clarinetist I was often handed oboe music...
| LegionMammal978 wrote:
| > Maybe a string-instrument player could comment on
| usefulness for string music?
|
| Speaking from my experience playing violin (as an ameteur),
| players generally practice their scales until the finger
| positions become muscle memory. This way, the key provides
| the entire note position -> finger position mapping, and
| accidentals simply become half-step modifications. Since the
| scales would need to be learned anyway to play tonal music, I
| don't see how this notation would simplify anything.
| _moof wrote:
| Can concur as a bass player. Tell me to play (for example)
| a B and without even thinking, my hand will move to the
| second fret on the A string. Put a flat sign on it and I
| just move one fret down.
|
| I also know the "shapes" of intervals though, and they are
| constant. A half-step is always one fret, a whole step is
| always two. A minor third is a minor third is a minor
| third: one finger on fret N of string M, the other finger
| on fret N-2 of string M+1; the names of the notes are
| irrelevant.
| MandieD wrote:
| I pulled my flute out of its case after over five years,
| and within minutes was playing all my scales, and able to
| play the melody lines out of a hymnal. My tone was awful,
| and my lips got tired long before my hands.
|
| To this day, I still associate flute fingerings with
| music I read for singing.
|
| Or piano, which gets messy...
| jhasse wrote:
| As a guitar player I find this very useful as half-steps
| _are_ equidistant on my instrument.
| taylodl wrote:
| Exactly! It's like designing a language making _Hello World!_
| programs trivial to create but makes the actual programs we
| write a little more difficult to create and doesn 't solve the
| actual problems experienced by day-to-day developers. Not
| useful.
| balabaster wrote:
| Well I can't speak for everyone else obviously, but I find
| traditional notation much easier to read than Clairnote's
| alternative. Even with the description, I find it harder to
| glance at the Clairnote notation and see what it means.
| tomComb wrote:
| But isn't that because the Clairenote alternative is new to
| you?
|
| Seems like an unfair comparison.
| WhitneyLand wrote:
| >for experienced musicians priorities are legibility....
|
| For novices too! Just increasing the physical size of standard
| notation would be a big help. 13x19 sheet music would be nice.
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| That does appear to be its origin. And if you take 12 equal
| divisions of the octave as a given, Clairnote seems more
| natural. OTOH once you're thinking in terms of a 7-tone subset,
| maybe traditional notation is more natural. (It certainly is to
| me, but I haven't given Clairnote a try.)
|
| Traditional notation uses the scale degree as the fundamental
| unit, whereas this uses the 12-edo chromatic tone as the
| fundamental unit. While it's not a big deal to most musicians,
| there are a lot of microtonal variations of traditional
| notation (my favorite is HEWM[1]). A 12-edo notation like
| CLairnote could be similarly modified, but it seems awkward,
| because (most) microtonal systems don't start from 12 equal
| divisions of the octave.
|
| I don't think the sitting/hanging notes are indistinguishable.
| But they do need to be distinguished, which means it's more
| work than looking at a traditional between-two-lines note. I
| find it difficult.
|
| Clairnote does make key signatures available. Surely any real
| composer would include them, or something equally or more
| informative (e.g. the text "G dorian").
|
| [1] http://www.tonalsoft.com/enc/h/hewm.aspx
| iainmerrick wrote:
| I'm very surprised they don't make the sitting/hanging notes
| semicircular, so they're much more visually distinct (like
| stalactites and stalagmites).
|
| Instead they seem to have tried two different systems for the
| sitting/hanging notes, both of which look very hard to read
| to me: https://clairnote.org/clairnote-dn-clairnote-sn/
| (although as you say, if you already know traditional
| notation it's hard to look at this with an unbiased eye).
| dwringer wrote:
| I always thought one of the main benefits of a 7-tone subset
| is that it fits inside working memory. It's also what anyone
| who grew up with commercial pop music or western classical
| music has a natural ear for. Not to mention that even just
| looking at it harmonically, all 12 tones are most certainly
| not equal from a given root.
|
| AFAIU, historically 12-TET is really a compromise,
| sacrificing some harmonicity to simplify and enable having
| symmetrical 7-note tonality in any traditional mode starting
| from any point in any scale. Some modern styles definitely
| subvert this idea, embracing the full range of chromaticity -
| but without abandoning 12-TET, they are still playing with
| the audience's harmonic preconceptions that are based in
| conventional tonality.
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| > AFAIU, historically 12-TET is really a compromise,
| sacrificing some harmonicity to simplify and enable having
| symmetrical 7-note tonality in any traditional mode
| starting from any point in any scale
|
| It is. And it's a surprisingly lucky compromise. By some
| metrics 19-EDO, 22-EDO and 31-EDO dominate 12-EDO for
| traditional (5-limit) music theory. (And of course every
| multiple of 12 does.) But if you want strictly better
| thirds and fifths, the smallest EDO that qualifies is 41.
|
| For anyone interested in big microtonal scales, there's a
| great website[1] that will render a touchscreen-friendly
| virtual keyboard with whatever scale and layout (provided
| it's hexagonal) you want. Don't worry about all the menus
| to start, just pick something from the first menu,
| "Tuning\Layout Quick Links".
|
| [1] http://terpstrakeyboard.com/web-app/keys.htm
| InitialLastName wrote:
| > I don't think the sitting/hanging notes are
| indistinguishable.
|
| They aren't indistinguishable when rendered by a computer.
| When rendered by hand (where space notes have a tendency to
| float from the line to avoid being interpreted as line
| notes), the F and G especially would be indistinguishable.
| exabrial wrote:
| > microtonal variations
|
| The vast majority of music probably doesn't need this
| nameless912 wrote:
| The vast majority of _Western_ music doesn't need it, but
| microtonal music is extremely important in a number of
| Asian, Middle Eastern, African, and even Eastern European
| systems.
| exabrial wrote:
| Ok... so? Use a different notation, duh. See my point
| about letting edge cases drive the bus off a cliff.
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| Continuing to use the status quo notation would hardly
| constitute driving the bus off a cliff. And the cases of
| microtonality are not that edge. Beyond allowing
| interoprability among musicians from different cultures,
| western notation has been critical to most (and there's a
| lot of it) western microtonal music.
| exabrial wrote:
| Who the hell cares? Use a different notation for the
| .00000000001% of the time you ever have to interop with a
| non 12-tone equal temperament scale.
| ajkjk wrote:
| Yeah, agreed. I'm totally on board with fixing the fact that
| you have to learn ledger lines / note placements separately for
| each clef. Besides that, none of this seems necessary, and the
| legitimately of sitting/hanging notes is a big problem.
|
| I'm all for a notation system that distinguishes major/minor
| thirds more clear. It's a neat idea.
| throwaway675309 wrote:
| Even _if_ the system was superior, at this point in history it
| 's irrelevant because you simply won't be able to gain traction
| or hit critical mass for large scale adoption for all existing
| musicians.
|
| The only thing this will do is teach you a completely different
| system and as soon as you move out of your own isolated
| learning and into working with other musicians and gigging or
| other public functions you will just get frustrated.
|
| At the very least you would wanna system that would be somewhat
| transferable to the existing sheet notation and tablature
| systems.
| rawling wrote:
| I couldn't figure out the justification for middle C being on a
| ledger line, and then the D above it being higher up, but on the
| higher of two ledger lines.
| projektfu wrote:
| It follows the same pattern in the middle of the staff. Between
| the two bottom lines is another whole step represented by a
| ledger line.
|
| I thought it was odd too but I can see how it makes sense,
| given that they want to unambiguously represent half steps.
| karmakaze wrote:
| [I don't read music.] From stories/videos I've watched on the
| topic, musician's don't so much read absolute notes but notes of
| a scale. A trained one knows their scales and can represent them
| with the letters A-G once each, using sharps or flats as
| necessary. I'd also expect them to know exactly where each note
| name/sharp/flat is on the instrument they play.
|
| There's also an affinity for piano being a sort-of reference
| instrument pertaining to mapping of scales as it has the least
| idiosyncratic placement of notes compared to other instruments.
|
| What about a scale that has lines for the white keys of the piano
| and larger spaces where black keys appear would be 1:1 with
| piano, but there would be too high a density of lines.
|
| So how about we make the black keys the lines and we can have
| single spaces for single white keys and double spaces where two
| white keys intervene the black ones? That almost makes sense as
| the lines are black and the page/spaces are white.
| gnulinux wrote:
| I don't like it because it's not backwards compatible with
| traditional Western notation. This will cause problems with
| anyone transcribing Clairnote work without being an expert. What
| looks like G, actually notates G#. Major problem imho.
| iainmerrick wrote:
| I hate to be too much of a downer as there are some nice ideas
| here, but I can see at least three problems with this:
|
| 1) First and foremost, of course, the massive entrenched
| investment in traditional notation. It's like trying to replace
| the QWERTY keyboard.
|
| 2) More risk of transcription errors in written music. The
| difference between "sitting just above the line" and "sitting on
| the line" is quite subtle.
|
| 3) This is strictly tied to the 12-note equal temperament scale,
| with enharmonic sharps and flats. Traditional notation works
| fairly well with many alternate tunings, e.g. 19-note equal
| temperament (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/19_equal_temperament)
| _Edit to add:_ looking more closely, it does include a notation
| to distinguish between e.g. G# and Ab, but as it 's optional for
| most music it comes across as an afterthought that most people
| won't learn; and as in the previous point, it looks ripe for
| transcription errors. # and b are a little weird but at least
| they look very different!
|
| I really like that this tries to be a more general-purpose system
| without being biased towards western classical diatonic music,
| but it looks significantly worse for that style of music (point
| 2) while not necessarily being significantly better for other
| styles (point 3).
|
| Easy transposition across octaves is nice, but not exactly a
| killer feature. That's already one of the easiest things you can
| do on most instruments.
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| > the massive entrenched investment
|
| At first I thought it would be like switching from Facebook to
| Mastodon. But if there is automatic translation software, it
| wouldn't actually be as hard -- you can just wear your own
| Clairnote lenses when you want, without bothering the other
| musicians.
|
| > The difference between "sitting just above the line" and
| "sitting on the line" is quite subtle.
|
| Agreed. It seems worth using different heads for the two kinds
| of notes.
| iainmerrick wrote:
| That's a good point; if/when all the scores are fully
| electronic, they could easily be transcribed automatically.
|
| Anyone know how close we are to that? I feel like I'm seeing
| many more professional classical musicians using iPads rather
| than paper scores, but I don't know if they're just looking
| at scanned scores, or something like MIDI that can be freely
| transliterated.
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| We are very, very far away from that. To get a feel of what
| scorewriter software is like nowadays, Tantacrul's
| videos[0] on the subject of UI are very good at showing
| what the state of the art is. On one of his videos he shows
| that the best score engraving can only be achieved by using
| a closed source, now-unsupported command line program from
| the 80s called Score[1]
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKx1wnXClcI [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCORE_(software)
| reikonomusha wrote:
| At least in Western classical music, there's a lot of
| emphasis put on Urtexts (scores that contain exactly the
| information the composer wrote and no more), composer intent,
| distinguished voices (stem up v down), diatonic scales
| (enharmonic choices matter), etc. This would make it
| nontrivial to simply switch notations.
|
| In some sense it's like saying "finally, I can read Don
| Quixote in whatever language I want because of Google
| Translate!"
| jhasse wrote:
| IMHO that's a very bad example because there's a big loss
| of information with Google Translate (you wouldn't get the
| Urtext when translating back), but there isn't with
| Clairnote.
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| Yeah, if the original score is digitally encoded such
| that everything really is a first-class citizen (and not,
| say, a GIF of some scribbles) -- a very big if -- but if
| so, it's not obvious that any information has to be lost
| in translation to Clarinote, nor that Clairnote would
| impose any additional information. If you want to know
| the scale you could encode the key signature, which
| Clairnote seems to make possible, just unnecessary.
| jef_leppard wrote:
| I'm a musician who can't read music notation and found it hard to
| pick up when I've tried. I assume I'm the target demographic for
| this system. At first glance I can't for the life of me
| understand why I'd put the time into learning this. For one, it
| doesn't appear to make anything that I personally struggle with
| any simpler. For two, the entire point of learning to read music
| is to communicate with other musicians. If I am writing my ideas
| in some bespoke system that no one else knows, what's the point?
| kadenwolff wrote:
| This music would be extremely hard to sight-read. The only aspect
| of it that I like is that it is key-agnostic. It would be cool to
| see atonal music written in this notation system. But for
| professional musicians this isn't worth learning.
| harry-wood wrote:
| Top search result for "alternative music notation" is
| https://www.dodekamusic.com which looks like it has the same
| ideas, plus a rectangular rhythm design which makes it all _look_
| different at a glance (for better or worse)
| Toutouxc wrote:
| What I like about Dodeka is not their notation, but the Dodeka
| keyboard.
|
| I'm learning to play the piano now and the amount of stupid
| unnecessary complexity stemming from the fact that we've
| designed the keyboard to make playing in a single specific key
| easier and fuck everything else, is hurting my programmer
| brain.
|
| That, and the fact that small-handed male players like me (and
| like 80 % of women) are gate-kept forever from a significant
| portion of music, just because.
|
| It's a shame that our most versatile instrument is actually not
| that versatile. We could do better as a humanity.
| stephen_g wrote:
| Would their keyboard really be better for hand size? Seems to
| me that unless the keys were uncomfortably narrow, it would
| actually require bigger hands to play big chords than on a
| standard piano because they're fitting all the notes in a
| single row instead of two? But I've never seen one in real
| life, let alone tried to play one.
|
| I wouldn't say that the standard keyboard is designed the way
| it is to make any one key "easier", it's more just the result
| of mapping the mapping based on how our notation works, and
| it's just happens to be that one key doesn't have sharps or
| flats so you don't need the black keys, so it's easier at
| first... Thinking of it in the way you said is probably
| unhelpful.
|
| Eventually every scale becomes as easy with muscle memory if
| you practice enough, but the best thing to do is to try and
| do scales and chords by thinking about what the intervals
| should be. Getting intuition for that is a killer skill,
| especially for playing by ear when you can hear something and
| your fingers instantly know where to go to play it after
| finding the first note.
| abhorrence wrote:
| I'm curious, which key do you think is the easiest to play on
| piano?
|
| I've found that newer folks tend to prefer keys with fewer
| accidental: C, G, F, D and Bb
|
| Whereas there is a tendency for more experienced players to
| prefer keys with many flats: Db, Ab, and so on...
|
| And (appropriately for the submissions topic), I think lot of
| this preference comes down to the fact that we tend to learn
| keys like C first, because the notation is simpler and it's
| easier to remember the spacing. However most of the pianists
| I've talked to who prefer the flat keys will prefer them
| because of "how they fit under the hand".
| Toutouxc wrote:
| > which key do you think is the easiest to play on piano?
|
| Sorry, "easiest" may not be the best word. C major is THE
| key of the piano keyboard and playing in C major is so easy
| because all of the non-exotic chords (sorry, I don't know
| the english nomenclature) are played on the same kind of
| keys and they have identical, predictable shapes.
|
| On a keyboard like Dodeka, all chords in all keys have
| predictable shapes, because why shouldn't they? You should
| be able to transpose any song by simply moving your hands a
| little to the side, anything else is just bad UI.
| yboris wrote:
| Makes me think of the _Janko keyboard_ which has so many
| benefits I would love to get one someday.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jank%C3%B3_keyboard
| jedimastert wrote:
| The main "problem" I see this notation style as trying to "solve"
| is that the standard 5 line western notation is built around a
| very strong affinity and "default" of the western diatonic
| scales. For any key/mode, if you're within that pattern then
| relationships of notes and notation is very clear. This is also
| enforced by the note names themselves, with A to A being a
| Aeolian/natural minor scale that fits into this same pattern.
|
| It's interesting (and useful) to step outside of this default,
| but IMO in for a penny in for a pound; there really should be a
| commitment to a complete separation, at least as a "default". The
| examples are trying to connect a notation decoupled from the
| diatonic scale back to that same diatonic.
|
| Even if you do stick with the other "assumptions" made here:
| - 12 equal tones per octave - octave-equivalent -
| divisive rhythm
|
| IMO you should change the note names. Numbers would be preferable
| to me, although maybe confusing given the use of numbers in
| western music analysis. Perhaps O-Z?
| andrewzah wrote:
| To my eyes this is way harder to read than traditional notation,
| which really isn't hard to learn and works well for most music
| (and non-12TET music). It's hard to see if a note is on a line or
| just above/under it.
| nameless912 wrote:
| Same. Maybe it's my bias from having played piano for going on
| 25 years, but this notation is just irritating to look at, and
| has way more ambiguity than the standard system to my eyes. It
| also seems like it's less compact, which is a _huge_ problem.
| If you ever look at older urtexts and the like, music notation
| is traditionally very dense to save paper and engraving costs.
| I don't think anything that makes music less dense is going to
| fly in the industry.
| MattPalmer1086 wrote:
| Same here. The different notes look too similar.
| skybrian wrote:
| I play both piano and chromatic button accordion (a little). One
| thing that seems a bit harder on button accordion is going up the
| scale playing thirds or sixths, because you need to be aware of
| which are major versus minor thirds (or sixths) in the diatonic
| scale you're using. With a piano, the keyboard mostly takes care
| of this, at least in easier keys.
|
| It seems like this notation has similar issues in emphasizing the
| chromatic scale over diatonic scales maybe a little too much?
| scrozier wrote:
| Interesting, well thought out, and well-presented. Just not sure
| that it solves a problem. It certainly isn't _radically_ easier
| to learn than traditional notation. And despite other comments
| here, huge numbers of young people learn traditional notation all
| the time, with little stress. Maybe, as is true with spoken
| languages, it becomes harder to learn musical notation as we get
| older?
|
| All the "problems" that this notation "fixes" are essentially
| non-issues for musicians who already know traditional notation.
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| Huge numbers of young people learn traditional music notation
| all the time, yes, but I wouldn't say with little stress. Music
| notation evolved much like English, and much like English it's
| widely recognized to be full of kludges and unnatural
| constructions. And similarly, changing it would resemble
| switching to Esperanto.
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| To add to your point, many people already use other systems.
| Tablatures are very, very common for guitar. Lead sheets are
| used in jazz, and they do away with many of the problems of
| regular notation (notably, the legibility of chords, and
| different clefs) by only using it for melodies. In a way,
| traditional music notation is really only used in classical
| music. And they're never ever going to adopt another system.
| The people who wanted another system have already split off.
| code_runner wrote:
| tabulature is really just used for starting out on guitar
| in my experience and it works because the alternative is SO
| approachable and SO instrument specific.
|
| lead sheets are solving a whole different problem and
| almost ALWAYS have the melody in traditional notation in
| addition to the chords. some lead sheets assume you already
| know the melody and can transpose to whatever key is
| relevant.... but still a lead sheet is there to give you
| hooks in order to aide improvisation.
|
| jazz musicians have not "split off", they have added some
| chord notation above the traditional stuff.
| scrozier wrote:
| > traditional music notation is really only used in
| classical music
|
| And jazz and pop and rock and.... It is a universal
| language that allows musicians from many backgrounds to
| come together and play a tune together. Jazz is the most
| obvious example--where musicians often sightread a tune
| together. (Although, to be fair, a substantial part of jazz
| notation is chord symbols, which are not (directly) a part
| of traditional notation.)
| olau wrote:
| Well, it says it fixes visual representation of intervals and
| huge inconsistencies between how similar notes are notated.
|
| Meaning new students would have a much easier time learning
| naming notes and where they are - in my experience the typical
| child that has taken lessons for a couple of years is still
| scarcely capable of naming notes outside perhaps the 6-10
| they're most comfortably with. Accidentals do not help.
|
| And everyone would benefit from visual support for the
| intervals.
|
| Here's an anecdote: I have been playing piano for many years
| but recently discovered, because my son is learning to play
| cello, that I have trouble taking his cello scores and playing
| them with my right hand. I can play bass clefs no problem in
| piano music with my right hand, but my brain is apparently
| trained to do the translation in that context. Without it, I
| have to focus to not accidentally read his single system scores
| as a G clef.
|
| Similarly, I've seen his teacher, a cellist giving concerts,
| get temporarily confused over a G-clef violin score.
|
| Yes, these are not huge problems, but I'm personally willing to
| believe we could have something better.
| scrozier wrote:
| Good points. I haven't thought a lot about it, but I still
| don't see how this new system is radically easier to learn.
| Looks like I have to be concerned with notes partially on
| lines, an irregular staff, two notes occupying the same
| "space" on the staff, etc. Then there are clefs with
| numbers...now I have to remember what "number" octave I'm in.
| And for piano, you lose the white key/black key distinction,
| which is obvious with accidentals in traditional notation.
| (This is specific to piano, and maybe not terrible.) I just
| don't see any tremendous reduction in cognitive load.
| chki wrote:
| > you lose the white key/black key distinction
|
| I'm not sure what I think about this new system but the
| "black key = accidental" association is probably not very
| helpful to anybody playing on/after an intermediate level
| as there are cases where accidentals mean white keys (for
| example f flat or g double sharp). It might be helpful if
| you're a beginner though.
| scrozier wrote:
| While we certainly run into Fbs or G##s, they are
| relatively rare. I don't think they undo the visual cue
| of seeing G# and knowing that's a black key. But you
| might be right. After all, if we're playing in the key of
| E, G#s are not notated other than in the key signature
| (and some other exceptions that don't really matter
| here). So yeah, maybe accidentals <-> black keys isn't
| such a big deal.
| stephen_g wrote:
| Yeah, I had the same reaction. I can't really imagine this
| would be any easier to learn, and doesn't seem to solve any
| problem I've ever had with standard notation (this is with 20
| years of music experience across several instruments).
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I mean, English isn't hard to learn if you grew up with it
| either, but it's still three languages in a trenchcoat with a
| ton of weird things.
|
| I mean, pronounce all of these words that have the same
| combinations of the letters "ough": though, through, rough,
| cough, thought, bough, plough, ought and borough. The notation
| is the same, but it's clearly not adequate to express the
| difference between pronunciation. If you grew up with it, you
| Know how they're pronounced, but as a non-native you wouldn't.
| scrozier wrote:
| This isn't a parallel argument. There are no ambiguities in
| standard musical notation that parallel the pronunciation
| issue you point out in English. Further, there are no non-
| traditional-music-notation "speakers" trying to learn musical
| notation. One is (almost) always learning it anew, unless
| perhaps you're coming at it from a different notation system,
| which is a different discussion.
| wl wrote:
| Intervals are ambiguous on the staff in the traditional
| system. They're disambiguated by reference to the clef and
| key signature. The whole point of this new system is to
| remove that ambiguity so you don't constantly have to keep
| the clef and key signature in mind when analyzing
| intervals.
| scrozier wrote:
| Fair point. I can see how that might be nice. I will say
| that, if you play music a lot from traditional notation,
| that ambiguity completely disappears into the background.
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| > English [is] three languages in a trenchcoat
|
| I love it.
| abanayev wrote:
| Applause for the effort but I doubt that this will become
| popular. Music notation has been a certain way for hundreds of
| years for musicians around the world - a notation with the
| universal legibility of mathematics.
|
| However, as someone who sight-reads all of his piano music, I'd
| be interested in experiencing if this makes sight-reading any
| easier or harder. It's taken many years of experience to be able
| to spot and predict patterns several measures ahead of where I'm
| playing, and I wonder if future musicians could get to advanced
| sight-reading levels more quickly using an alternative notation.
| iainmerrick wrote:
| The current piano layout (seven white keys and five black keys)
| is pretty closely tied to traditional music notation (sharps
| and flats => black keys), so I'd guess sight-reading with this
| notation would be harder on current pianos.
|
| In principle you could imagine a more regular piano layout that
| maps well to this more regular notation. In practice, attempts
| to do that have generally failed and it's hard to see how to
| make it work.
|
| The irregular spacing of the current piano layout can be
| frustrating, but it fits under the fingers pretty well, and
| it's very useful to be able to identify notes at a glance.
| jan_Inkepa wrote:
| >Applause for the effort but I doubt that this will become
| popular. Music notation has been a certain way for hundreds of
| years for musicians around the world - a notation with the
| universal legibility of mathematics.
|
| This system is really compatible with the standard one though?
| It's essentially a visual skin.
|
| Removing the middle line is kinda nice - I remember as a kid
| having trouble and counting lines a lot to figure out what not
| something was.
|
| The sharp/flat notation seems pretty week though/visually
| unclear?
|
| I'm not sold on the the numbers in the clef symbols - I don't
| find it so helpful, and don't have a very intuitive sense of
| what the number of the octaves are. Especially because the rest
| of the notation is quite visual/geometric, it's odd to see it
| resorting to adding numbers here (where the normal notation
| leaves them out unless the clefs are in non-standard octaves).
| exabrial wrote:
| Electric bass player here. Oh and I'm quite mediocre too.
|
| I think a musical notation system should not be driven by edge
| cases, which is what a bunch of HNers pointing out where this
| system falls short (microtonals, equal temperment sucks, etc,
| blah blah). Second, I think standard notation is designed for
| piano soloists, not for bands.
|
| I've found the most effective system for sharing musical ideas
| with a band is the so called "Nashville Numbers System." Why is
| this? Well because you can't apply a capo to a vocalist. Every
| time I play with a different vocalist, there's going to be a key
| change. When we talk in terms of scale degrees "hey guys play 6m,
| 5/7, root", rather than "oh hey play a Em, D, G, wait j/k, that's
| too low, can you play G#m, F#, B? oh wait, earl over there says
| playing G#m on acoustic is impossible, go another half step up"
| everything is easy.
|
| What does this require? Every musician needs to memorize scales,
| which isn't very hard. The process is: decide on the root as a
| band, then jam. And you handle accidentals as they come up as
| edge cases, rather than have them drive the bus off a cliff.
|
| So how can we take this successful concept and apply it to
| notation?
|
| I think there are two main issues with standard notation: First,
| the key signature is embedded into the notation. This was like
| HTML before CSS: the presentation should be separated from the
| content.
|
| Here's the hill I'll die on: given that you're going to be
| playing in equal temperament, we don't need to have _any_
| information about the key in musical notation. The only thing
| that matters is intervals. 99.95% of the audience doesn't have
| perfect pitch and they don't care either. All notes on the staff
| should be relative to some arbitrary root.
|
| Which brings us to the second problem: Standard notation does not
| represent octaves consistently. This is the dumbest UX failure
| that annoys the absolute shit of out me as a bass player. If I
| want to mirror the melody line in a song for a section, I have to
| switch my brain from reading Bass clef where I live, to fumbling
| through Treble cleff notes, and they're all in the wrong spots.
|
| Looking at the link, there are some improvements on the above two
| points. I do think there is still a leaky abstraction about the
| key signature. Given that I write things down as relative scale
| degrees anyway, I'd take this over standard notation any day if I
| learned to read it.
| moultano wrote:
| I've struggled with reading music despite years of piano lessons,
| years of church and school choirs, and being the main arranger
| for my college a cappella group. Watching the video of the Blue
| Danube Waltz on that page was amazing. I felt for the first time
| like the shapes of the things on the page actually corresponded
| well to the musical concepts in my head.
|
| I know it's an extremely uphill battle to actually get anything
| like this adopted, but I think it would do wonders for teaching
| and working with music. How many musical concepts would suddenly
| be obvious to people if they could actually see them directly on
| the page without layers of translation in between?
| recursive wrote:
| I'm not an apologist for music notation as it exists today, but
| it doesn't seem obvious that this is a net improvement. I
| watched the Blue Danube video. Apparently, I still don't
| understand the notation. There are some notes in the bottom
| staff that are sitting on the middle ledger line in a group of
| three. I don't see a thing where it's explained what that
| means. I don't get it.
| code_runner wrote:
| I get the same feelings whenever somebody comes up with a
| "better" flavor of SQL that is "more logical" or "more
| expressive".... I know SQL well, it does what I want, and I think
| its _great_. When people "solve problems" with it, they're
| complaining about things they never tried to understand.
|
| This is a lot like that. I wish I was better at music.... I wish
| I had more skill etc... but the barrier is not my ability to read
| music....
|
| a multi-note instrument like guitar/piano is much harder (in my
| personal experience) than a single note like trumpet/saxophone...
| and guitar tabulature exists for that reason... but its guitar
| specific and is probably a bridge for most in the beginning of
| their learning (not unlike a saxophone fingering chart).... but I
| don't see general use music notation being revolutionized anytime
| soon.... mostly because it does not need to be.
| jedimastert wrote:
| Tantacrul made a really interesting video about how _incredibly_
| difficult it is to make a notation font that might be a good
| watch[0], and I say that to say this:
|
| I see an issue here that left me confused for several minutes:
| the little bit of overlap when a note is attached to a line but
| not intersecting it looks like an alignment mistake and leaves
| ambiguity. My recommendation would be to have _no_ overlap, with
| the top /bottom pixel of the note head in line with the
| top/bottom pixel of the staff line, like traditional notation.
|
| [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGo4PJd1lng
| EamonnMR wrote:
| It's really hard to see the difference between sitting on top vs
| inside the line.
| forthetrees wrote:
| I don't like it!
| severak_cz wrote:
| reminds me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodeka_music_notation
| lc9er wrote:
| This is interesting. Growing up, I had 8 years of music theory,
| so reading standard notation is second nature. In high school and
| later on in rock/metal bands, I never actually used it. It was
| far more common to use guitar tablature (even though I was the
| drummer). Tab is more of a short-hand system, giving you fret
| markings and measures, but usually omitting rhythmic notation.
|
| To me, this system is actually more confusing. The spacing is
| kind of hard to see. Maybe it's because I keep trying to read it
| as if it were standard notation. I wonder if it would help
| someone starting from scratch.
| michelpp wrote:
| > In high school and later on in rock/metal bands, I never
| actually used it. It was far more common to use guitar
| tablature
|
| I know you know this, but I'd like to point out for others that
| Tab is specific to the guitar family (basses, ukulele, etc) it
| does not work for any other kind of instrument.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Tabs are so much better than old school sheet music for guitar
| (drum sheet music I don't mind), maybe some people want to
| figure out their own fretting but I'm fine being spoon fed
| (even being a finger style weirdo).
| [deleted]
| acjohnson55 wrote:
| This is interesting!
|
| As weird as the standard notation system is, it works pretty well
| for tonal music. If you know how to play your instrument within a
| given key, music takes the same basic shape on the staff, even if
| it's transposed. It also keeps most pieces pretty compact, even
| if they have a wide range.
|
| However, standard notation is also notoriously difficult to
| learn, to the point that many virtuoso players never actually
| learn it (especially guitar players).
|
| Clairnote appears to respect most of the most useful properties
| of standard notation, except maybe efficiency with vertical
| space. Maybe some day I'll give it a try.
| nine_k wrote:
| To me, this notation fixes a number of annoying bugs of the
| traditional notation. They clearly show each fix. Each fix
| clearly makes sense.
|
| (I wish this notation were adopted since Bach's WTK was
| published. Alas.)
| aidenn0 wrote:
| The fixes are all about directness, consistency, and
| intuitiveness. Legibility is never mentioned Tonal music is
| arguably more suited to the original than this is, where
| small differences in distance from the lines can make for a
| different note.
|
| For example, I claim that the tonic scale will be more
| legible in traditional notation than in clarinote; portions
| of the tonic scale make up a significant fraction of music
| that many people read. TFA never claims that chords and/or
| arpeggios will be easier to read under the new notation, and
| I don't have a strong opinion on that one after my brief time
| with it.
| jerf wrote:
| I like the idea with the octaves. I'm not as sure about the
| chromatic stuff; the key signatures are there for a reason and
| I'm not sure it reduces the cognitive load in an expert. It would
| in an novice, sure. Possibly said novice would then move on to
| prefer it as they become an expert, so it's hard to tell. On-the-
| fly transposition would probably be a bit harder, but perhaps
| that's a skill level already so high that it's hardly worth
| optimizing for in the notation anyhow.
|
| But definitely there's too much dependency on where note heads
| are versus the staff. Even in the typography used in the example,
| the note heads seem to noticeably hang below the line. I'm not
| sure the vaguely elliptical blobs really work with this system
| and I'd consider pushing another step away from conventional
| notation and distinguishing with something more visually clear,
| e.g., normal heads on the lines, squared-off heads if they are a
| half step away or something. Something that makes it completely
| unambiguous whether a note is on or in the line. ("Unfortunately"
| conventional notation that this is trying to be compatible with
| has already consumed whether the head is hollow.)
|
| I would also like to see something less trivial on the intro
| page. In HN terms, visual programming _always_ looks awesome as
| long as you 're demonstrating something drop-dead simple like
| simply traversing a linked list or something. Show something with
| a bit more crunch in it, like even something as simple as a
| quicksort, and the vast majority of visual programming pitches
| suddenly look a lot less compelling. All the PDFs on the bottom
| of the page 404'd for me, but I'd like to see something inline.
|
| Still, some interesting ideas here. The standard system is
| definitely a bit wrapped around a piano. I could see how this
| could simplify teaching any instrument that makes one tone at a
| time; all the rules for reading music become "this note -> this
| fingering/position/valves/etc", which would smooth over the first
| couple of years nicely.
|
| One of the tensions of the current system is the learning novice
| vs. the expert. The current system is heavily tilted towards an
| expert. At the time it was written, that was appropriate.
| Building some more novice-friendly features in might be more
| appropriate in a more democratized era. (Though how one gets past
| the switching costs here for _any_ alternate notation I have no
| idea.)
| armagon wrote:
| I think Clairnote is pretty neat. There are more alternate
| musical notation systems at http://musicnotation.org.
|
| The current system we use because it is the one experts know and
| music is written in. I'm sure it could be worse, but I feel like
| it has a ton of backwards-compatible features as add-ons that
| would be so much cleaner with a rewrite. The very simplest change
| that could be made would be to have a grand staff that uses the
| same clef, so people don't need to learn two of them.
|
| I don't think we'll actually see a change until such time as you
| could put on a pair of AR glasses, which could recognize/OCR your
| music, and then, on-the-fly 'transnotate' the song into a sane
| notation. (Perhaps the same could be said for making English more
| phonetic; and, perhaps it will never happen; in the meantime, I
| can't help but feeling that hundreds of hours are needlessly
| spent learning this system that wouldn't be needed with a simpler
| one, many people who'd like to learn it never do, and, oddly,
| plenty of singers sing better because they can't read the written
| notation!).
| dr_j_ wrote:
| I'm a guitarist and I can't understand either.
| tomthe wrote:
| I am of course sceptical whether this notation system will gain a
| bigger following, but I really appreciate their nice website and
| how they clearly communicate their idea. They even have a nice
| interactive online tutorial: https://clairnote.org/learn/
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