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.
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...
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”?
For me, here are the problems that I see with any new notation system:
1. "Standard" notation (SN) has created a symbiosis between composers and players. If you don't compose in SN, nobody will play your stuff. If you don't read SN, you won't be able to play anybody's stuff, and will probably not even get a chance to develop your reading skills to a performance level. The ultimate stage of learning to read is sight-reading in an ensemble with other players.
2. Learning a new notation gets exponentially harder as you get older. I started learning to read when I was about 10. It's like my spinal column has created a special circuit directly from my eyes to my hands, through my ears. A lot of time when I'm sight-reading, I'm actually thinking about other things.
3. All of the repertoire is in SN, virtually none of it is in computer readable form, and much of it is out of print. I play in a large jazz ensemble. We still maintain our entire music library, entirely on paper. For this reason, SN has much more inertia than one would expect from other "notations" such as programming languages.
For these reasons, the shortcomings of SN and benefits of new notation, are practically irrelevant. Now, "standard" notation is not carved in stone. For instance, jazz bass parts are notated differently than classical clarinet parts. I get a lot of chord symbols and am expected to play an improvised bass line.
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 ;-)
Well, of course. They have invested a lot in the system as it is. But I've noticed even very basic changes that should not cause problems for already strong readers (e.g. a slightly thicker middle line) have zero chance at adoption, whereas changes that are not justified by didacticts (e.g. many composers inventing some quirky new way of expressing something) are.
I share your judgement that this system is poor, and that there are many poor notation systems proposed all the time, though.
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").
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).
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.
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.
The vast majority of music probably doesn't need this
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.
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.
Any eclectic modification of standard western notation therefore needs to justify itself not just against staff notation, but also the simple piano roll.
> 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.
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."
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...
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.
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.
Seems like an unfair comparison.
I'm all for a notation system that distinguishes major/minor thirds more clear. It's a neat idea.
For novices too! Just increasing the physical size of standard notation would be a big help. 13x19 sheet music would be nice.
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.
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.
In some sense it's like saying "finally, I can read Don Quixote in whatever language I want because of Google Translate!"
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.
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.
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.
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.
All the "problems" that this notation "fixes" are essentially non-issues for musicians who already know traditional notation.
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.
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.
I love it.
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.
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
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.
(I wish this notation were adopted since Bach's WTK was published. Alas.)
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.
C4 and C5 are not the same. Singing them well requires different techniques, as would playing them well on some instruments. So it doesn’t really bother me that they’re “different” in relation to staff lines (8va and 8vb notwithstanding).
More importantly, knowing which scale degree you’re on (in relation to the key) is valuable for interpretation; it has implications for where the harmony is going. Likewise knowing how you function within a chord. If you’re on the third in a diatonic triad, much less volume is required for good balance with the other parts on the root and fifth. Even more so for sevenths, seconds, sixths.
You could argue that just listening carefully might allow you to achieve a similar balance by adjusting on the fly, but one advantage of being a skilled music reader is that you can make interpretation decisions before you execute them, even if you’ve never performed the music before.
Edit: clarified difference between scale degree and function within chord.
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.
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.
[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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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).
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.
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!).
I thought it was odd too but I can see how it makes sense, given that they want to unambiguously represent half steps.
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.)
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.
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.
It would be interesting to see how this, or a similar system, could be extended for any X-TET system, not just 12-TET.
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?
It seems like this notation has similar issues in emphasizing the chromatic scale over diatonic scales maybe a little too much?
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.
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.