[codeulike]

This is great but if we could go back in time and influence the naming conventions so that the 12 semitones were called A-L or just numbered 1 to 12, and if the intervals were named after the actual semitone distance (a 'fifth' is actually seven semitones) the whole thing would be soooo much less jargonny. With all that bumf removed, the patterns of the 'scales' and 'chords' would be foregrounded and thats the actually interesting bit IMHO (the bit defined as 'formulas = {..}' in the article)

[klodolph]

People have had this idea before but I've never seen a version of it that is better than our existing notation systems. Most of our music is diatonic, and we named the notes in our scale A B C D E F G. Seven notes in the scale, seven letters. Seven positions on the staff.

Our harmonies are built on stacked thirds, and the stacked thirds line up perfectly on a staff. Line, line, line; or space, space, space. Three dots stacked neatly on top of each other. Easy peasy. Easy to read all the common intervals at a glance, once you get past an octave it starts getting a bit harder.

If you had chromatic notation, you'd allocate a bunch of extra space and names for things that you spend most of your time not using. An octave would have eleven spaces in the middle, which is practically unreadable.

I think in the long-run chromatic notation is just hostile. Go ahead and use chromatic solfege, that's super useful, but chromatic notation is usually not.

Most often I hear the criticsm from people who are not musicians or do not know how to read music. It's often smart people with an analytical mind, but people who don't have much experience with music. Just speaking from my own experience, it's much harder to read a chord from a piano roll than to read a chord from traditional notation.

[seba_dos1]

In some parts of the world, it's A H C D E F G, with B being what you'd call B flat.

Because of that, it took me way too long to figure out that there was any sense in the note names.

[codeulike]

I appreciate most of your points and I appreciate the conciseness of the stave notation for example. But ...

A B C D E F G. Seven notes in the scale, seven letters. Seven positions on the staff.

Thats fine as long as you're in C Major. As soon as you depart from C Major it all starts going wonky. Why is C Major baked into the notation as if you'd never want to use anything else?

[klodolph]

> Thats fine as long as you're in C Major. As soon as you depart from C Major it all starts going wonky. Why is C Major baked into the notation as if you'd never want to use anything else?

Actually, it works for every major scale and natural minor scale!

What are the notes in E major? E F# G# A B C# D# E.

It's still the same letters, E F G A B C D. Now, you may think that this is CHEATING because I've added sharps. But when you write it out on staff paper, the sharps get shoved off to the side on the far left in the key signature, and you basically forget that they are there. You really still just care about seven notes, so you still have seven letters, and seven spaces on the staff, they're just a different seven notes from the C major scale.

You have to know which key the song is in... but you have to do that anyway.

When I say that you basically forget that they are there... I mean it. This does not even require an especially advanced level of musical skill. People with even a passing interest in music theory should be able to breeze past it.

[codeulike]

So if you pretend that the sharps arent there and that they dont make any difference to anything then its all simple?

[klodolph]

I'm saying that our music is largely diatonic, and it's better to base our notation and terminology on the diatonic rather than the chromatic scale.

The idea that you can number semitones 1-12 has some mathematical elegance to it, but it's a terrible system in practice. It turns out that mathematical elegance doesn't count for much, and domain knowledge is important here.

[kortex]

You have to pick something as your starting point.

The sharps and flats diatonic system is way easier to read because you just mentally parse "key of D" instead of "start on D but also sharp the F and C". It takes time but your brain just starts to grok shapes.

"Piano roll" notation, like in DAWs/midi editors, is actually in certain ways a lot hard to read than staff notation, due to the lower density and lack of reference frame. It _is_ easier to see chord shapes transposed up and down as the same. But I'd argue that's an anti-feature, because of said lack of reference points. The symmetry /sameness makes it a lot easier to start on the wrong note.

[seba_dos1]

> Thats fine as long as you're in C Major.

C major, yes, but also A minor - where it actually starts from A :)

[chjdev]

There probably is a better or more general notation system, but specifically for western music it is actually pretty efficient and logical once you start working with it a bit. Just don't put too much weight on the names and think in intervals. You have a scale made up of 7 notes/intervals with the "fifth" simply being the fifth note in the scale. Same with third, etc. The specific flavor (major/minor) of e.g. the third you're playing usually depends on the mode, but it is still a "third" and serves the same-ish function. Extending the names i think would actually be more confusing. I'd argue it already puts the patterns of scales and chords in the foreground.

[keymasta]

I'm too excited not to comment on here specifically, although I have another comment in this thread already. I made a proposal for this in my book which isn't out yet but basically I'm using only consonants for these.. so that I can link a vowel for a separate encoding.. so in order of notes where their set notation is 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11, B D F G J K L M N P R S.

It's an idea, and possibly somewhat arbitrary, but it's a proposal at least and it will connect to other things well due to uniformity. Then there's my python code which takes a scale.. and writes nonsense with shakespeare verse using words beginning with the letters that spell them. Then words can be used to learn melodies.

But what I was really thinking about more is like depending on the vowel after that letter you will form different chord qualities.. The first most important being the unison, or 'a'.. so to play a major scale with single notes you would say Ba Fa Ja Ka Ma Pa Sa.

But to say the seventh chords that the major scale implies you'd say: BatEk FabEt JabEt KaTEk MatEt PabEt Sabat, which would be a a way of saying: DMa7 Emi7 F♯mi7 GMa7 A7 Bmi7 C♯⌀ - but way less syllables

⌀ is pronounced "half diminished" or "half diminished seventh" which is a mi7(♭5) which would be pronounced "minor seven flat five" for those who don't know.

The insanity of modern music theory is the superimposition of the number 7 (A B C D E F G) onto the number 12 (the number of notes).. everything in the system is skewed by this fundamental wonky shape. But I'll remind everyone that 12/2=6 and 12/3=4 and from these facts more logical systems can be envisioned, as opposed what's 12 notes with 7 names. 12/7=? A number that seems not to have relevance to the comprehension of music patterns.. BESIDE the fact we are forced to think like that with things that conform to 12/7 like sheet music, note names, or piano key locations...

But nature and even a guitar fretboard has less concept of the obsession with the number 7 by design.

[bazeblackwood]

I've been working on a fixed chromatic solfege system (MaNePu) for a while as well. It uses a repeating vowel pattern which I find produces some really interesting effects. In MaNePu, the chromatic scale is ma - ne - pu - qa - re - su - ta - ve - wu - xa - ye - zu. In other words, consonants starting with M til the end of the alphabet, and rotating through the vowel sounds "ah", "ee", and "ooh". What's neat about this is that the pattern repeats every minor third, so that means every diminished scale internally rhymes! Similarly, transposing any melody by a minor third will also result in a melody that rhymes with the former. Likewise, either whole tone scale will result in a reversal of the vowel pattern. There are other fixed chromatic solfege systems that use an alternating vowel pattern, but MaNePu is the only one that uses a minor third rotation (the others I've seen typically alternate by whole tone), and I think it opens up some interesting avenues for music education.

I like your shortened chord quality convention, though MaNePu takes a different tack. Instead, it favors what I call "descriptive chord naming". Instead of being prescriptive about the quality, a chord is simply described by appending the notes contained within it. This is great because it also removes ambiguity in the cases where a chord might include certain notes or exclude certain notes implicitly. So Dmaj7 would be PuTaXaNe ("Xa" is pronounced like a "j"/"sh" sound sort of like in Pinyin). It also typically reduces the number of syllables spoken, like your system.

The superimposition of 7 on 12 as you put it, is indeed a problem, but there's also an issue with intervallic favoritism (of half and whole tones). After all, there are 7 note scales with minor third intervals, and so on—imagine a world where one of those scales was the basis for diatonicism. Representing that on a keyboard, and the subsequent accidentals would be a nightmare.

Notation is the big unsolved problem, I think, but I'm aware of some work being done in the area if you're interested. As far as the public facing projects I'm aware of, Dodeka is likely the most promising.

[keymasta]

Your MaNePu system sounds very cool! It's interesting that you speak of the symmetry vis a vis the number 3. My "way of word" has a similar property. It's based on trigrams from the I-Ching and all of that follows the diminished (3) geometry.

Regarding spelling chords as the iteration over their notes like MaReVe for a major chord, my system can do this as well, by using an -a ending for each letter. In this case a major chord would be BaJaMa. Or even just B' J' M', as in "B'eatles J'amming M'usic" et al. I think this would be used melodically rather than chordally in my system.

Let's say that the first measure of the melody to Ode To Joy is (in MaNePu, Jazz, Word notes):

Ja Ja Ka Ma Ma Ka Ja Fa Ba Ba Fa Ja Ja Fa Fa

3 3 4 5 5 4 3 2 1 1 2 3 3 2 2

Re Re Su Ve Ve Su Re Pu Ma Ma Pu Re Re Pu Pu

It's great to see that. I immediately notice we're both using consonants only for the first character. I can describe to you the trigram lines being referred to in MaNePu as a bottom line if ending in a, middle if e, and top if u. But the glyphs didn't work here so find the trigrams. I notice you didn't demote the letter 'u' out of your system. I personally am much more partial to the letter 'o'. ;)

We can write this passage with the bass accompaniment as well. Bassline just plays 1/Ja/Ma and 5/Ma/Ve. Weird to look at here because Ma=root for you and Ma=fifth for me! Obviously our layperson reader might not also know that Ma is a standard way to notate a major chord in music, as well.. which kind of also has nothing to do with the first two Ma's we were discussing. And we're not going to bring your mom into it either ;) Anyway here it is. Maybe mistakes (?) cause I'm handwriting here, and I just learned your system:

Bat BAt BAk BApEp Map MApAt MApAb MapEp Bap Bap BIp BAt Bat BIp Map

3/1 3 4 5 5/5 4 3 2/5 1 1 2 3 3/1 2 2/5

ReMa Re Su VeMa Ve Su Re PuVe Ma Ma Pu Re ReMa Pu PuVe

As a critique of your system if I was fluent and you read that out to me, I'd be unsure of when the root actually changes.. because when I read ReMa out I think of playing F# then D. As opposed to F#/D (at the same time).

I use an idea more analogous to the jazz chord symbol system where one specifies the root and the harmony as a compound symbol.. Like 1ma7 or b5mi7. There are actually two separate systems at work in chord symbols like this, and my system is the same as that concept. So you can go either way with "word". That is, using notes (horizontal) vs. using harmonies (vertical). I want to point out that when my system uses less letters it's because the last letters are "A" or "p" meaning no notes in this quarter. That's why some are only one syllable instead of my mentioning two. In another way if a chord is over the root we could omit the B at the beginning because it would be assumed. In this second example I included all the B's and M's (1 and 5. D and A in "normal" notes). This way the melody is seperate on top and the root motion is still specified.

My site is rudimentary but all one needs to name every chord by this method is in a small chart. I threw it in a little html file because posting a table in HN is not going to work well. https://edrihan.neocities.org/ngramcharts.html

I should actually have an explanation on the site which I will add at some point.. but basically you pick a letter for each trigram (quarter scale/chord). So there are four. If they are the first/third it's the vowel, and second/fourth is a consonant. That makes up your quality. Then you combine that with a root-letter of mine. Because those are consonants.. and my word starts with a vowel.. your five-letter word is pronounceable.

You mentioned the pinyin which I intuited on as soon as I saw the "x". You'll see pinyin on my link. Fundamentally related to way of word by its connection to the I-Ching, but not in the sense that I am using it as a sound in my system, like you are.

I like reduction of syllables for these systems. I tried to maximise this property insomuch as all 49152 expressible root-harmonies can be expressed in two syllables. I also like the descriptive property. It just so happens I designed it to be pronounceable and so seem prescriptive as well. I guess the prescriptive version here (which is also derivably descriptive) would be to use the trigram/tetragran/hexagram names. So for our major chord example.. it would be respectively,

Lightning Water Water Earth = = atEp (for some reason HN seems to censor trigram glyphs, on my system at least)

Law Increase Response = 𝌭𝌒𝌮

Sprouting Leader = ䷂䷆ = (atEp)

The trigrams and hexagrams map to this system.. but not the tetragrams. In this trigrammatic way our systems are analogous.

The 7/12 problem is one of the biggest problems with music, I feel as an artist. People have explored a small fraction of tonal possibility.

I will check out Dodeka.. Feel free to check out my material, mostly as we approach the future. I've been hoarding my work for a few years now but am unleashing things. So I guess you heard it here first cause atm I basically do not exist on the internet. But ya I wrote thousands of lines of code to get to this point.

For notation systems I like the circle geometry.. the way of word.. or simply instrument diagrams (mostly only possible with strings and keyboard instruments though, where one can visualise multiple notes simultaneously). I also like the idea of colours.

I think one thing that needs to happen in the education is for people to start learning movable-root systems like yours, mine, the jazz system, or the set system, rather than learning in static keys. People then learn 12 times as much data per neuron (-ish). I thought of a keyboard with 6+6 keys instead of the standard 5+7. Then you'd learn shapes on the instrument 6 times faster by reduction.

Ok there's stuff to meditate on.

Actually my chord naming system is "descriptive" as well but admittedly uses a slightly more compressed encoding.

[bazeblackwood]

Thanks for sharing all this, I'll definitely dig deeper into your site! Exciting time for new theories of music.

[keymasta]

My pleasure! Thanks for sharing your ideas as well. I read back my post and realised it's a discombobulated mess. I'm glad you were able to parse something out of that. Writing clear explanations is definitely on my todo list.

[mvanga]

Agreed. The patterns are the most interesting bits. Actually, just the fact that there exist patterns is pretty amazing. It's unfortunately hard to see them through the notation and that made it very unintuitive for me for the longest time.

Unfortunately the momentum that Western music notation has, with a few centuries of tradition behind it, means one has to work within that system.

There was an interesting discussion I came across on Stack Exchange while writing the article: https://music.stackexchange.com/questions/67730/why-have-sha...

[codeulike]

re: the patterns, see discussion here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26860627

and my comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26861415

[coldtea]

>Actually, just the fact that there exist patterns is pretty amazing.

How so? If patterns didn't exist, it would just be random choices.

Any non-random music making (and thus theory) requires patterns.

[protoman3000]

I disagree, because with the way of writing it down we have a homomorphism, e.g. transpositions preserve relations between letters, e.g. (A D E) -> (Ab Db Eb), or (G C D) -> (G# C# D#).

Of course, for every rule there are exceptions, e.g. we have things like (F Bb C) -> (F# B C#)

[a_lieb]

Agreed. I whinge about this all the time. The C-based system is convenient for piano players but it's a mess for guitar players, violinists, and other instruments where there are no

There have been many attempts at a chromatic music notation, but nothing has caught on so far [1].

Things are a little better with solfege -- there is "chromatic fixed do" solfege, where every note has its own name, rather than only having a name for the "white notes," which leaves you to mentally calculate the sharps and flats.

It's a minority thing--maybe 5-10% in Europe? Even regular fixed "do" is rare in English-speaking countries, so I would assume the chromatic fixed "do" is almost unheard of in the US, Britain, etc.

At any rate, there're are at least seeds of hope for a chromatic fixed-do solfege to catch on more. I use it for my own learning.

[1] http://musicnotation.org/

[codeulike]

I find the paino-roll notation on DAWs to be a lot more intuitive. Not much good for perfomers of course, but it helped me understand things better. Each semitone is given the same amount of space.

[jacquesm]

Here's that one weird tip that you were looking for all your life but didn't realize it: pretend the front part of the piano keyboard isn't there, and just look at the part closest to the fingerboard. Presto: chromatic keyboard.

[kortex]

I find piano roll a lot easier to write/produce but a lot harder to sight-read.

I actually find hooktheory's system, where it's diatonic and accidentals are based on the active chord, not the current key, to be the easiest to understand relationships, but also hardest to translate into concrete notes to play.

[klodolph]

I find piano roll very hard to work with. The notes are just too far apart vertically.