What happens if you rotate that first image 90° counter-clockwise? 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.
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.
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.
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).
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).
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.
I'm a bassist, of the "don't quit your day job" variety. Owing to the accident of having a certain musical background, I'm a fluent sight-reader, and the groups that I play in require this skill. I frequently encounter a mixture of standard notation (SN) and chord symbols, plus the occasional Nashville number chart.
From what I can tell, people have explored different notation systems for a couple of reasons. The first is that SN is an entry barrier for beginners. The second is to express musical ideas that don't fit within the bounds of SN.
But in my view, the reason why SN remains in use, is that there's a symbiosis between composers who can write it, and musicians who can sight-read, i.e., perform it directly from the sheet. Tabulature, or other pictographic notations don't work because the composers don't intimately know all of the instruments that they're writing for (including the variety of tuning and fingering systems for each instrument), and nobody knows how to sight-read those notations.
Another issue with any method involving computer graphics, is that there are still a surprising number of composers who use pencil and paper, because notation software is so cumbersome.
In one band that I'm in, the composer brings new material to each rehearsal. It's all written out by hand.
I agree. The value of SN is that it's abstract. It assumes a certain structure (the one that western music uses) and describes melody in terms of that structure. It doesn't concern itself with the actual sounds involved (eg. frequencies and durations) or the mechanics of producing them (eg. tablature).
SN is difficult for beginners because music is difficult for beginners. Notations that focus on the mechanics of the instrument are easier to start with, because they don't require any theoretical background in music. That's fine, but they won't be able to replace SN.
I'm very interested in this sort of cognitive technology, but I have yet to see a proposal for improving on SN in its own terms. Is there some notation out there that is simpler than SN, but just as expressive? Something that could be approachable for beginners, but still useful for experts?
> In one band that I'm in, the composer brings new material to each rehearsal. It's all written out by hand.
It is way faster to write out by hand than using software. You use software at the end, when your ideas/tests settle and you want a nice copy. Before that, it is really not worth it.
Yes, musical notation is hard. But no, this is not an improvement.
While a lot of the problems of it comes from its limitations at the origin (think medieval musicians writing music) it is a very flexible and interesting format
What are the problems I see with it:
- Apart from the center notes, it's hard to know which note is which. I know that the second line from the bottom is a G, beats me what's that thing 3 lines above the regular lines
- It's hard to capture what's happening. Chords on top help
- Having to identify notes in G clef, F clef (and C clef sometimes)
- It's an absolute mess when you have lots of simultaneous notes
I know there are a lot of historical, instrumental or music-theoretical reasons things are like that, but there's room for improvement
I just wouldn't think of twinkle twinkle little star when designing it, I would think of something more complex (and Let It Be, props to him, is not very complex but also not very simple)
(And that's not touching the issues with the piano, that's another load of items)
It's clearly stated that the solution is meant to be like guitar tabs for piano. It's a limited, instrument-centered approach and not intended as a complete or universal solution.
This sort of "piano-roll" notation has the nice feature that the elements are easy in theory to parse: time goes along one axis, pitch goes along the other, and you just do what it tells you. As far as notation for Western music goes, it does have some disadvantages.
All twelve pitch classes are spaced equally, so the scalar structure of tonal music is harder to make out. I can tell just by glancing at a page of sheet music whether it is tonal or atonal, and I can't do that here. All the notes kind of look the same (though I'm sure this is true for someone who isn't fluent at Western notation trying to read sheet music!). One way we tried to ameliorate this in Rock Band was to color different groups of notes differently, so you had a lot of features to grab onto (e.g., the boundary between E and F is the boundary between blue and green).
Durations are completely visual, which is nice from a intuitive point of view but means that it's harder to parse the underlying pulse and rhythmic structure of the music. A grid might help here. (I was constantly insisting that the grid in Rock Band be made to be as helpful as possible.)
Anyway, it's a nice visualization of keyboard music, and I don't doubt that this is easier to understand for people who don't read music already. I wish he had chosen a less hyperbolic title, though.
It's not really new as it's used in most MIDI software to represent chords over time [0], or in many music videogames [1]. I think this style might work for very simple music sheets, but would become way too confusing and imprecise for complex ones.
Does the author actually play piano? I didn't see him explicitly say it. I play violin, and reading sheet music was never a limiting factor. It was not a challenge to learn, and you don't learn all the symbols in the beginning. As you get more proficient and read harder music, only then do you learn new symbols.
Maybe sheet music can be improved upon, but the real question is should it? Sheet music is easy enough to learn, and once you learn it, all music opens up to you.
I'm a violist, and I used to teach violin and piano. With stringed instruments, as you say, just making a sound and holding the instrument right are so difficult for beginners, reading music pales in comparison. Piano is unique-ish as an instrument that you can sit down at and start making a sound essentially right away. I found that for my beginner piano students, learning to read was probably the biggest challenge starting out. However, not learning to read is even worse, as then you won't be able to learn music going forward.
And, all that being said, learning to read music is really not very difficult. There seem to be a lot of complaints from the HN crowd about music notation, but learning to read music is wayyy easier than learning a new programming language. Seriously, just get over it and learn the system that everybody else uses, and you will be able to play any piece in just about any repertoire on the planet.
I play both piano and trumpet and I think two hands make reading music at least a little bit more difficult. I've never struggled with reading trumpet music, but lots of piano sheet music still gives a hard time at tempo.
I have the feeling that it's badly conveyed by """musical pedagogy""". All the theory and notation isn't the essence of music but that's the main communication channel they make student interact with and through.
I wouldn't say it's not challenging, but it's out of place, thus tedious. As other people said, it's an abstraction for people doing the art, IMVHO it's not important unless you are doing the art.
Computer scientists of all people should understand why standard notation is used. It's a high-level symbolic language that allows for music to be ported across instruments and for the communication between musicians. Low-level markups such as tablature are akin to assembly and machine code. They cut out the work of the compiler at the expense of portability and higher level reasoning (such as key signatures). In this analogy, the musician is a dynamic compiler of musical notation into the physical actuations required by the instrument. Tablatures remove most of the work of compilation by depicting a more direct relationship to the physical playing of the instrument, and for this reason they are less cognitively demanding. But if one wants to be a musician, rather than a player of an instrument, I recommend sticking to a symbolic language such as standard notation. It's hard to imagine a composer writing a symphony in dozens of unique machine codes.
I really love this. When I was young, I was really excited to learn to play the piano. The biggest problem I had was being able to read the sheet music. It was incredibly difficult for me to read and understand the notes for both hands at the same time. A big part of this was that when individual notes were off the normal staff (e.g., C is below the staff), you either had to have an innate sense of how far from the staff it was and what note that corresponded to, or you had to stop playing and count to see which note it was. This seems to solve all of those problems.
tl;dr don't cripple yourself with substandard notation when it takes 2 weeks to learn it.
You shouldn't be counting.
Any decent pedagogical training is going to introduce the lower and higher notes one at a time. And 'decent' can include self learning. Have some patience and don't try to jump into advanced things right off. You will just learn bad habits.
Say you know by sight all the notes g below middle c. The next exercise should introduce the f below middle c. When you see it it will be the one and only note you haven't trained on, and before you know it it will be trained into your muscle memory. Soon you will just see all the notes and know what it is. No counting required.
We are talking a couple of weeks here. A note a day, say, will get you pretty far - scores almost always change clefs before going 14 semitones above/below the staff.
Some people will do anything to avoid learning in a disciplined manner, and then spend years never advancing or fighting their bad technique. Take a bit of time, and the world of music is opened up to you.
Analogy - imagine somebody asks you to teach them how to pitch (baseball). You ask to see their current throw and it is some weird, lurchy, shot put type of throw. You show them a standard over shoulder release. They say no, they want to keep their current style, and maybe, just maybe, over many months, first remove some part of the weird lurch. In six months, then maybe they'll raise their hand a few inches. After that is working over several months, then maybe they'll start moving their hand behind their shoulder just a bit. Why, in just 10 years they'll be able to throw a ball!
It's crazy. If you want to pitch a baseball, just learn the movement that is required. If you want to play piano, learn how to hold your hands, and learn to read the music on sight. If you want to play guitar, learn the correct way to hold the strings with the left hand, and learn the proper plucking/fingering of the strings with the right hand. Etc. It's a few weeks of boredom, followed by a life time of being able to play.
actually I find it very zen, and love to go back to the beginning exercises, seeking absolute, unthinking perfection, letting each note ring for several seconds. Learned that from reading about Horowitz, and it works. But it is a bit much to expect 'zen' from a beginner that just wants to play some Billy Joel tune. To them I say Billy Joel did this to get the skill to play his songs, and you are probably not more a natural genius than he is, so you probably can't skip over what he had to do.
The traditional notation system has lasted so long for a reason. It's super difficult to figure out how long notes are meant to last with this notation system. It also takes up a lot more space than normal music notation. Moreover, it looks really difficult to write because of how note durations are represented.
"[The] target user is probably learning easy, contemporary songs, and already knows what they sound like before they learn them."
Leaving out exact note durations is intentional, and probably the main reason why it's so easy to read. The shaded tails from notes just have to evoke what's already in your head.
Just wanted to leave this here, for people who get off on alternate music notation...
An amazing collection of functional/beautiful/arty alt music notation can be found in "Notations 21", edited by Theresa Sauer. One score per page, all wildly different in their approach to encoding music. Just wow.
A bit of a click-bait title, don't you think? Maybe "How I'd redesign piano sheet music for beginners."
This is basically just tablature for piano. Great for simple pieces, unweidly for anything more. Can you imagine notating Fur Elise with this? That's a fairly cmomon beginner/intermediate piece. Or etudes? Or any excercise that develops techincal proficiency?
Maybe it has a place, but like tab or lead sheets it is not a replacement for sheet music.
I play guitar and find having both sheet music and tablature together useful. Sheet Music has an incomparable amount of timing information and other nuances, and tablature has the fingering positions you can sight read effortlessly once you've got the piece down.
I am on board with the goals of the article, and I've actually been working on an iOS app to pick away at this problem[1] (albeit in a different way — mine is more fluid and is intended to be used interactively, not to be printed). Sheet music is a great format to represent classical music, but the fact that it doesn't allow you to easily notate one of the most common elements of modern music — syncopation — points to the fact that it's out of date for today's needs by about a century. Modern music does not fit into a rigid meter. It goes off-beat; features arbitrary note lengths and overlapping meters; pitch bends without a second thought; ties performance and production together with the notation. If you want to write down popular music on staff paper, you'll be using a lot of awkward dotted notes and rests.
In my app, I figured I'd try to distill written music down to its basic elements — pitch and time — and allow users to draw on notes arbitrarily, with the equal temperament pitch grid as a guide and pitch/time snapping available as an option. (As an aside: the pitch axis is basically a logarithmic graph of tone frequnency — cents from A440. Because of this, I can swap out the equal temperament scale with basically any arbitrary scale. I've implemented *.scl file import and have been playing around with odd non-equal tunings from huygens-fokker.org's archive[2], though I don't know if this will end up in the final user-facing product.)
This idea isn't entirely new (is anything?); for an earlier version, check out Klavarskribo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klavarskribo. It didn't really take hold, because it's much more inefficient than normal notation.
I spent a long time Googling before finding this, only to see that it had already been posted. When I was in college I went on a tour of the Netherlands with my school's choir. We sang in a number of Protestant and Reformed churches and I remembered one of the music students pointed out a hymnal, still used by a congregation in Friesland, that used this particular notation system.
Someone else suggested that this was a notation with which they were familiar, from an old hymnal of the (U.S.) denomination affiliated with the college I attended. I had assumed it to be quite an old system as the hymnal appeared quite antiquated. Still, it doesn't surprise me that it (only?) dates to the 1930s, nor that there would still be churches using it. Many old Reformed churches have short institutional memories but nonetheless cling to assumed traditions. That, and the Frisians are, stereotypically, an old, stubborn people.
My grandfather was an expert piano player who used klavarscribo. All klavarscribo players I know have a very distinctive style/intonation, maybe because they were all either taught by my grandfather or from his generation or something. I'm not sure about any inefficiencies, my family said you needed to know classical script to get into music academies, and the academics wouldn't switch so they were locked out, but obviously my family is rather biased..
The first issue that I see with this notation is that you loose information compared to standard notation. For example, a half note contains the information of how long it will last along with the note itself. This information is given to you when your eye hits the note at which point you can stop looking at it. In this notation, you either have to continue seeing the note for the length or memorize the lengths of different notes which would require you to "zoom out" much farther.
IMO, an experienced sight reader would have more difficulty sight reading more complicated music using this notation.
Sheet music evolved when it would be difficult to produce a different representation for each instrument. Now this can be automated it makes a lot of sense to produce specialised formats, such as tab for guitar or this for keyboard. As a novice keyboard player I'd certainly prefer to use this than sheet music. Having said that there are advantages in sheet music that a professional musician would find lacking here. There's no rhythmic grouping (the beams provide this cue) and I'm sure there are many others that I'm unaware of.
Here are some shortcomings I thought of immediately.
- Traditional notation is instrument-agnostic.
- It may be easily printable, but a staff is easily writable. With just a pen and a ruler, I can produce a neat staff in ~10 seconds. The ruler is optional if I don't
care about prettiness. With this, you more or less have to print it: getting the spacing right by hand would be quite difficult.
- I have mixed feelings about the the traditional representation of key. Missing a sharp or flat in an unfamiliar key is probably my most common error when
reading sheet music. OTOH, The traditional notation tells me which sharps and flats to use. With this system, I have to already know the structure of C# major if I want to noodle around (always). This would seem to be more hostile to beginners.
- The precision issue has already been brought up many times, but I would add that all the lost information is an archival disaster. It might seem superfluous since
we have recordings, but given the rate of change in technology, access to data in old formats is by no means a certainty. Since this notation basically requires you to have heard the song in order to play it, it would become incomprehensible pretty quickly.
It seems to me that most of the complexity of musical notation reflects the "essential" complexity of actually playing the music. For example, consider key: even at the level of simple rock songs, a basic grasp of "key" is absolutely essential, and if you're playing a piano, this means you have to know which sharps and flats to use. If this seems pedantic, consider that the main difficulty of learning to play a piece is dexterity. It's going to take a bit of effort just to make your fingers hit the damn keys. Since this effort has to take place anyway, the little bit of extra effort to learn notation doesn't seem like much to ask. Besides, the amount of notation required to play pop songs is relatively small - that rendition of "Let it Be" contains about 10 symbols, most of which are related.
This isn't to say that traditional notation is perfect, or even good. It is rather baroque, and I'm open to a "redesign," as long as it really solves the problem. This redesign isn't useless, but its scope of usefulness seems so limited that I'm not really sure it's worth it.
This isn't redesigning piano sheet music, this is just creating a piano tablature. That's great and all, but this has existed for a long time, it's similar to how Synthesia[1] represents piano notes. The fact that the timing can't be easily read from it means that like guitar tabs, it can't be a replacement for traditional sheet music. There's a good reason sheet music has been around for so long, it makes sense and is versatile, it doesn't pertain to any particular instrument, and I don't think it's going away any time soon.
I've been playing the piano since I was a kid and found it very difficult to learn to read sheet music. There was a period for maybe 3 months where I was fluent in reading after 3-4 years of study but then took some time off and lost the ability.
I think very visually and find watching someone play a song on youtube infinitely easier than trying to learn with the equivalent sheet music. I really feel like this comes down to a left brain/right brain thing but I'm not sure how true that generalization is.
Are more visual approaches like youtube tutorials or this redesigned sheet music the way of the future? I wonder if it might it be detrimental to take this approach from the start?
By pure chance I had just sat down at a piano, trying to figure out my old music sheets that I had managed to play, with lots of stress and never well in any sense of the word, 10 years ago. (My piano lessons got me to "Fröhlicher Landmann", before my teacher and I gave up.) Now I struggled with the most basic lessons and contemplated about the inefficiencies of the notation.
I gave up, somewhat frustrated, and then saw this post. Here is my experience:
- The top to bottom timescale is easy to get use to and makes sense, given that you need a wide space just to fit all the keys. I placed my iPad on the piano in horizontal mode and could well imagine an app that scrolls the sheet for me, for time progression. Edit: Sorry, I was so excited about the article, I did not even see that it goes on after the notes, where the author talks about this.
- With the standard sheet music, because decoding was so inefficient, I would first figure out the keys and then try to memorize the finger pattern as quickly as possible, so that I don't have to decode the notes again. With the new notation I got lazy and kept my eyes on the sheet for the whole time, which actually slowed me down. I had to remind myself to memorize more. Just something to get used to, I guess.
- The notation does not give an exact rhythm, which I actually loved. If you've ever heard the song, you quickly figure out what the rhythm is supposed to be. The minimal rhythm notation is great, because it's not in the way of the notes.
I had a lot of fun learning the start of this song, and I would love to see more. I always wanted to learn some Beatles songs, and the sheet music that my mother bought so many years ago was always too complex to be fun. With this notation, songs like that are a lot more approachable. I don't think it makes sense for classical music, where the timing is not as obvious, but for pop and folk songs, or playing along to Studentenlieder ("im schwarzen Walfisch zu Askalon", anyone?), it seems like a great choice.
One minor sugestion to the original author: It would be great if the grey lines that correspond to the black keys would be bolder and darker. I had trouble seeing them, but I don't have the best eyesight...
I love the idea of trying to come up with a better way of notating music to make it more accessible. That's a great idea.
However, I'm skeptical that this is it. First, looking at the 2 notations of "Let it Be," we can see that the new notation does not convey the same data, or even a simplified version of it. It's a different version of it. I find that odd.
Second, I don't think learning music notation is very difficult. I learned to read treble and bass clef when I was 5 years old. It was much harder trying to make my fingers press the right keys at the right time than memorizing which circle on which line matched with which key or note.
Looking at this, I'm reminded of Laban notation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laban_Movement_Analysis) and Benesh Notation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benesh_Movement_Notation) for notating dance. Both are very complicated and essentially never used by the people who actually do the dancing. Furthermore, I'm told that Benesh, for example, allows a notator to add written (human-language) notes below the staff to convey additional information. In other words, they know it doesn't convey everything it's supposed to.
So what do dancers do? They learn from video. They watch the masters who went before them directly performing the movement. Frankly, I think it would be great to see something similar for music. Having a video of someone playing a keyboard from above, possibly with a graphical overlay showing the notes pressed would be way better (in my opinion). (Which isn't to say it's without issues - far more bandwidth, video codecs, playback hardware, etc.)
I have always wondered how dance/ballet is recorded, and I'm not surprised it comes down to video. But music is more limited data I think, an opinion supported by the fact that sheet music exists and sheet dance is still questionable.
There's a passage in a piano piece I'm having trouble with and I tried watching videos of pros on youtube to figure out how to play it. It was frustrating and almost useless. The video goes by too fast. Granted, I was looking for technical details, not notes, but I think notes would be almost as hard.
E.g. Can you tell what notes are being played in the video below?
[+] [-] bbx|10 years ago|reply
What about the new features?
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|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] abecedarius|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] krick|10 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] fao_|10 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] baby|10 years ago|reply
Personally I'm very fond of that kind of music sheets: 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.
[+] [-] analog31|10 years ago|reply
From what I can tell, people have explored different notation systems for a couple of reasons. The first is that SN is an entry barrier for beginners. The second is to express musical ideas that don't fit within the bounds of SN.
But in my view, the reason why SN remains in use, is that there's a symbiosis between composers who can write it, and musicians who can sight-read, i.e., perform it directly from the sheet. Tabulature, or other pictographic notations don't work because the composers don't intimately know all of the instruments that they're writing for (including the variety of tuning and fingering systems for each instrument), and nobody knows how to sight-read those notations.
Another issue with any method involving computer graphics, is that there are still a surprising number of composers who use pencil and paper, because notation software is so cumbersome.
In one band that I'm in, the composer brings new material to each rehearsal. It's all written out by hand.
[+] [-] cwp|10 years ago|reply
SN is difficult for beginners because music is difficult for beginners. Notations that focus on the mechanics of the instrument are easier to start with, because they don't require any theoretical background in music. That's fine, but they won't be able to replace SN.
I'm very interested in this sort of cognitive technology, but I have yet to see a proposal for improving on SN in its own terms. Is there some notation out there that is simpler than SN, but just as expressive? Something that could be approachable for beginners, but still useful for experts?
[+] [-] Loic|10 years ago|reply
It is way faster to write out by hand than using software. You use software at the end, when your ideas/tests settle and you want a nice copy. Before that, it is really not worth it.
[+] [-] raverbashing|10 years ago|reply
While a lot of the problems of it comes from its limitations at the origin (think medieval musicians writing music) it is a very flexible and interesting format
What are the problems I see with it:
- Apart from the center notes, it's hard to know which note is which. I know that the second line from the bottom is a G, beats me what's that thing 3 lines above the regular lines
- It's hard to capture what's happening. Chords on top help
- Having to identify notes in G clef, F clef (and C clef sometimes)
- It's an absolute mess when you have lots of simultaneous notes
I know there are a lot of historical, instrumental or music-theoretical reasons things are like that, but there's room for improvement
I just wouldn't think of twinkle twinkle little star when designing it, I would think of something more complex (and Let It Be, props to him, is not very complex but also not very simple)
(And that's not touching the issues with the piano, that's another load of items)
[+] [-] andrewliebchen|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dfan|10 years ago|reply
This sort of "piano-roll" notation has the nice feature that the elements are easy in theory to parse: time goes along one axis, pitch goes along the other, and you just do what it tells you. As far as notation for Western music goes, it does have some disadvantages.
All twelve pitch classes are spaced equally, so the scalar structure of tonal music is harder to make out. I can tell just by glancing at a page of sheet music whether it is tonal or atonal, and I can't do that here. All the notes kind of look the same (though I'm sure this is true for someone who isn't fluent at Western notation trying to read sheet music!). One way we tried to ameliorate this in Rock Band was to color different groups of notes differently, so you had a lot of features to grab onto (e.g., the boundary between E and F is the boundary between blue and green).
Durations are completely visual, which is nice from a intuitive point of view but means that it's harder to parse the underlying pulse and rhythmic structure of the music. A grid might help here. (I was constantly insisting that the grid in Rock Band be made to be as helpful as possible.)
Anyway, it's a nice visualization of keyboard music, and I don't doubt that this is easier to understand for people who don't read music already. I wish he had chosen a less hyperbolic title, though.
[+] [-] laurent123456|10 years ago|reply
[0] http://www.musicmasterworks.com/MMScShot.gif
[1] http://i.ytimg.com/vi/rNg50UGkXfw/maxresdefault.jpg
[+] [-] themodelplumber|10 years ago|reply
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hmwXThnqi0
[2]: http://www.musanim.com/mam/mamhist.htm
[+] [-] jahewson|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nileshtrivedi|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] legohead|10 years ago|reply
Maybe sheet music can be improved upon, but the real question is should it? Sheet music is easy enough to learn, and once you learn it, all music opens up to you.
[+] [-] rquantz|10 years ago|reply
And, all that being said, learning to read music is really not very difficult. There seem to be a lot of complaints from the HN crowd about music notation, but learning to read music is wayyy easier than learning a new programming language. Seriously, just get over it and learn the system that everybody else uses, and you will be able to play any piece in just about any repertoire on the planet.
[+] [-] avita1|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] agumonkey|10 years ago|reply
I wouldn't say it's not challenging, but it's out of place, thus tedious. As other people said, it's an abstraction for people doing the art, IMVHO it's not important unless you are doing the art.
[+] [-] PepeGomez|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] doctorstupid|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattbasta|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tacos|10 years ago|reply
And it's NEVER too late to learn.
[+] [-] baby|10 years ago|reply
it already simplifies reading A LOT.
[+] [-] RogerL|10 years ago|reply
You shouldn't be counting.
Any decent pedagogical training is going to introduce the lower and higher notes one at a time. And 'decent' can include self learning. Have some patience and don't try to jump into advanced things right off. You will just learn bad habits.
Say you know by sight all the notes g below middle c. The next exercise should introduce the f below middle c. When you see it it will be the one and only note you haven't trained on, and before you know it it will be trained into your muscle memory. Soon you will just see all the notes and know what it is. No counting required.
We are talking a couple of weeks here. A note a day, say, will get you pretty far - scores almost always change clefs before going 14 semitones above/below the staff.
Some people will do anything to avoid learning in a disciplined manner, and then spend years never advancing or fighting their bad technique. Take a bit of time, and the world of music is opened up to you.
Analogy - imagine somebody asks you to teach them how to pitch (baseball). You ask to see their current throw and it is some weird, lurchy, shot put type of throw. You show them a standard over shoulder release. They say no, they want to keep their current style, and maybe, just maybe, over many months, first remove some part of the weird lurch. In six months, then maybe they'll raise their hand a few inches. After that is working over several months, then maybe they'll start moving their hand behind their shoulder just a bit. Why, in just 10 years they'll be able to throw a ball!
It's crazy. If you want to pitch a baseball, just learn the movement that is required. If you want to play piano, learn how to hold your hands, and learn to read the music on sight. If you want to play guitar, learn the correct way to hold the strings with the left hand, and learn the proper plucking/fingering of the strings with the right hand. Etc. It's a few weeks of boredom, followed by a life time of being able to play.
actually I find it very zen, and love to go back to the beginning exercises, seeking absolute, unthinking perfection, letting each note ring for several seconds. Learned that from reading about Horowitz, and it works. But it is a bit much to expect 'zen' from a beginner that just wants to play some Billy Joel tune. To them I say Billy Joel did this to get the skill to play his songs, and you are probably not more a natural genius than he is, so you probably can't skip over what he had to do.
[+] [-] theseoafs|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] goodside|10 years ago|reply
Leaving out exact note durations is intentional, and probably the main reason why it's so easy to read. The shaded tails from notes just have to evoke what's already in your head.
[+] [-] hyperbovine|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] emptybits|10 years ago|reply
An amazing collection of functional/beautiful/arty alt music notation can be found in "Notations 21", edited by Theresa Sauer. One score per page, all wildly different in their approach to encoding music. Just wow.
This video has some images from the book:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8F2Dv27CSuI
[+] [-] jdbernard|10 years ago|reply
This is basically just tablature for piano. Great for simple pieces, unweidly for anything more. Can you imagine notating Fur Elise with this? That's a fairly cmomon beginner/intermediate piece. Or etudes? Or any excercise that develops techincal proficiency?
Maybe it has a place, but like tab or lead sheets it is not a replacement for sheet music.
[+] [-] leventhan|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] archagon|10 years ago|reply
In my app, I figured I'd try to distill written music down to its basic elements — pitch and time — and allow users to draw on notes arbitrarily, with the equal temperament pitch grid as a guide and pitch/time snapping available as an option. (As an aside: the pitch axis is basically a logarithmic graph of tone frequnency — cents from A440. Because of this, I can swap out the equal temperament scale with basically any arbitrary scale. I've implemented *.scl file import and have been playing around with odd non-equal tunings from huygens-fokker.org's archive[2], though I don't know if this will end up in the final user-facing product.)
[1]: Early demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ra8OvnoxKQw
[2]: http://www.huygens-fokker.org/docs/scales.zip
[+] [-] theOnliest|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] plorg|10 years ago|reply
Someone else suggested that this was a notation with which they were familiar, from an old hymnal of the (U.S.) denomination affiliated with the college I attended. I had assumed it to be quite an old system as the hymnal appeared quite antiquated. Still, it doesn't surprise me that it (only?) dates to the 1930s, nor that there would still be churches using it. Many old Reformed churches have short institutional memories but nonetheless cling to assumed traditions. That, and the Frisians are, stereotypically, an old, stubborn people.
[+] [-] tinco|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] technimad|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] konceptz|10 years ago|reply
IMO, an experienced sight reader would have more difficulty sight reading more complicated music using this notation.
[+] [-] gambiter|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ollysb|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] platz|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jveld|10 years ago|reply
- Traditional notation is instrument-agnostic.
- It may be easily printable, but a staff is easily writable. With just a pen and a ruler, I can produce a neat staff in ~10 seconds. The ruler is optional if I don't care about prettiness. With this, you more or less have to print it: getting the spacing right by hand would be quite difficult.
- I have mixed feelings about the the traditional representation of key. Missing a sharp or flat in an unfamiliar key is probably my most common error when reading sheet music. OTOH, The traditional notation tells me which sharps and flats to use. With this system, I have to already know the structure of C# major if I want to noodle around (always). This would seem to be more hostile to beginners.
- The precision issue has already been brought up many times, but I would add that all the lost information is an archival disaster. It might seem superfluous since we have recordings, but given the rate of change in technology, access to data in old formats is by no means a certainty. Since this notation basically requires you to have heard the song in order to play it, it would become incomprehensible pretty quickly.
It seems to me that most of the complexity of musical notation reflects the "essential" complexity of actually playing the music. For example, consider key: even at the level of simple rock songs, a basic grasp of "key" is absolutely essential, and if you're playing a piano, this means you have to know which sharps and flats to use. If this seems pedantic, consider that the main difficulty of learning to play a piece is dexterity. It's going to take a bit of effort just to make your fingers hit the damn keys. Since this effort has to take place anyway, the little bit of extra effort to learn notation doesn't seem like much to ask. Besides, the amount of notation required to play pop songs is relatively small - that rendition of "Let it Be" contains about 10 symbols, most of which are related.
This isn't to say that traditional notation is perfect, or even good. It is rather baroque, and I'm open to a "redesign," as long as it really solves the problem. This redesign isn't useless, but its scope of usefulness seems so limited that I'm not really sure it's worth it.
[+] [-] sean-duffy|10 years ago|reply
[1] http://www.synthesiagame.com
[+] [-] mentos|10 years ago|reply
I think very visually and find watching someone play a song on youtube infinitely easier than trying to learn with the equivalent sheet music. I really feel like this comes down to a left brain/right brain thing but I'm not sure how true that generalization is.
Are more visual approaches like youtube tutorials or this redesigned sheet music the way of the future? I wonder if it might it be detrimental to take this approach from the start?
[+] [-] maho|10 years ago|reply
I gave up, somewhat frustrated, and then saw this post. Here is my experience:
- The top to bottom timescale is easy to get use to and makes sense, given that you need a wide space just to fit all the keys. I placed my iPad on the piano in horizontal mode and could well imagine an app that scrolls the sheet for me, for time progression. Edit: Sorry, I was so excited about the article, I did not even see that it goes on after the notes, where the author talks about this.
- With the standard sheet music, because decoding was so inefficient, I would first figure out the keys and then try to memorize the finger pattern as quickly as possible, so that I don't have to decode the notes again. With the new notation I got lazy and kept my eyes on the sheet for the whole time, which actually slowed me down. I had to remind myself to memorize more. Just something to get used to, I guess.
- The notation does not give an exact rhythm, which I actually loved. If you've ever heard the song, you quickly figure out what the rhythm is supposed to be. The minimal rhythm notation is great, because it's not in the way of the notes.
I had a lot of fun learning the start of this song, and I would love to see more. I always wanted to learn some Beatles songs, and the sheet music that my mother bought so many years ago was always too complex to be fun. With this notation, songs like that are a lot more approachable. I don't think it makes sense for classical music, where the timing is not as obvious, but for pop and folk songs, or playing along to Studentenlieder ("im schwarzen Walfisch zu Askalon", anyone?), it seems like a great choice.
One minor sugestion to the original author: It would be great if the grey lines that correspond to the black keys would be bolder and darker. I had trouble seeing them, but I don't have the best eyesight...
[+] [-] vitd|10 years ago|reply
However, I'm skeptical that this is it. First, looking at the 2 notations of "Let it Be," we can see that the new notation does not convey the same data, or even a simplified version of it. It's a different version of it. I find that odd.
Second, I don't think learning music notation is very difficult. I learned to read treble and bass clef when I was 5 years old. It was much harder trying to make my fingers press the right keys at the right time than memorizing which circle on which line matched with which key or note.
Looking at this, I'm reminded of Laban notation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laban_Movement_Analysis) and Benesh Notation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benesh_Movement_Notation) for notating dance. Both are very complicated and essentially never used by the people who actually do the dancing. Furthermore, I'm told that Benesh, for example, allows a notator to add written (human-language) notes below the staff to convey additional information. In other words, they know it doesn't convey everything it's supposed to.
So what do dancers do? They learn from video. They watch the masters who went before them directly performing the movement. Frankly, I think it would be great to see something similar for music. Having a video of someone playing a keyboard from above, possibly with a graphical overlay showing the notes pressed would be way better (in my opinion). (Which isn't to say it's without issues - far more bandwidth, video codecs, playback hardware, etc.)
[+] [-] ta92929|10 years ago|reply
There's a passage in a piano piece I'm having trouble with and I tried watching videos of pros on youtube to figure out how to play it. It was frustrating and almost useless. The video goes by too fast. Granted, I was looking for technical details, not notes, but I think notes would be almost as hard.
E.g. Can you tell what notes are being played in the video below?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8IHzqVKugE&t=35
Here's another fun one to try:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpXqdBKSSFo&t=4m51s