Or sheet music. It always amazed me that humans came up with any solution at all to "here's a piece of paper, tell me what your song sounds like" to say nothing of one that actually works to some degree.
I've always wondered how much classical music sounds the way it does because sheet music is the way it is.
An example of this is Chinese guqin tablature. It can be centuries old and includes a lot of detail on where to place fingers and how to strike the strings, which can give you hints about pitch and timbre when combined with knowing the tuning, strings, etc. But the tablature has almost nothing to say about the LENGTH of each note, so rhythm has to be inferred by the performer from what they know about the culture.
Program change + general MIDI instrument set is implementation-dependent but was pretty common in the 90s, and encodes timbre in an extremely limited way.
Now of course nobody outside of fringe artists really use it.
I've always wondered how much classical music sounds the way it does because sheet music is the way it is.