[kaoD]

The thing all of these new notations miss is the fact that western music is constructed stacking thirds on top of each other.

A major chord is a root, a 3rd on top of it, and another minor 3rd (or R+3+5 relative to its root). Add another 3rd (R+3+5+7) for a major 7th chord. Add another minor 3rd (R+3+5+7+9) for a major 7th(9) chord. Etc.

This is easy to see at a glance, both in pentagram (where thirds are line-to-line or space-to-space) and solfege/letter form (where a C chord is C-E-G, or Eb for minor, but always E). This is the reasoning behind enharmonic notes like G# and Ab (same frequency, different name), so E major is E-G#-B, and F minor is F-Ab-C. Chord inversions are then super easy to identify: G-C-E is C major in first inversion.

The notation looks great for mathematical operations, but it's not a replacement for solfege as a quick reading/writing notation. It misses a lot of implicit intent.

[swatcoder]

This is like saying functional programming languages miss the fact that application software is written with objects.

Alternate approaches to notation aren't meant to supplant traditional notation. It'll be centuries before today's notation goes anywhere. It's very well established and does indeed do a good job of representing traditional western music.

New notations just make other styles of music more legible, which makes it easier to compose them, and easier to perform them.

There's no competition involved, nor anything being doomed to failure.

[kaoD]

Sorry, I submitted my comment too early by mistake (fat finger on mobile phone) and I heavily edited it before I noticed your reply (your last paragraph won't make sense).

You got a nice point there. I guess I conflated western music with triadic chords, when in this case it just means 12TET.

[acjohnson55]

Yep, this is the brilliance of the staff and the associated notation system.

All chords and scales are spelled the same, just with different accidentals. For instance, all variants of triads starting on all variants of D are spelled D-F-A. The one with no accidentals happens to be D-minor. D-major is D-F#-A. D#-minor is D#-F#-A#. D#-major is D#-F##-A#. And so on. By holding this pattern, chords always look the same on the staff no matter what key you're in, which makes reading and writing tonal music easy, once you get the hang of it. The key signature captures everything that varies between keys. Although, on instruments that represent pitches differently in how you physically play them, the difference between keys is very noticeable.

The problem with dozenal notation is that intervals have to be identified by subtraction instead of their shape on the staff, which is a lot of mental effort. That said, the staff requires its own mental effort depending on what you're doing. For example, translating from staff notation to guitar fingering is a difficult exercise in real time, which motivates the need for tablature.

For some styles of music and some instruments, I can see dozenal being nice. But for the most part, it would be more useful to use standard pitch notation (e.g. C#5), because it makes intervalic/tonal relationships more obvious, at the cost of an occasional additional glyph per note.

[acjohnson55]

The one other thing I'd add about standard pitch notation is that you do have to memorize what flavor of chord each of the seven triads without accidentals is in order to infer what modification an accidental will make. But this is just seven facts to memorize, instead of unusual addition and subtraction tables.

[john61]

> G# and Ab (same frequency, different name)

This is only true for equal temperament.