[prvc]

>If I want to transport music notation between software programs, I have MIDI for that, which does a good job of capturing all elements of a performance (keys, timing, velocity, pedals, aftertouch, etc.) These types of notation formats almost always fail to achieve MIDIs precision across all the aspects of a performance.

Music notation works at a higher level of abstraction than that, and is intended to be intelligible by humans first and foremost.

[jcelerier]

> Music notation works at a higher level of abstraction than that, and is intended to be intelligible by humans first and foremost.

there's an entire generation of people who mainly compose through ableton live's piano roll though

[thebricksta]

I misunderstood the point of this comment before, thinking you were arguing that MIDI fails because it is not, itself, a clear human-legible format like text-notation languages being discussed are.

I understand now that you likely meant that MIDI does not capture the score itself, so it does not work as a notation file format, whereas these text-notation languages do describe the score.

[thebricksta]

Alright, it was wrong of me to call MIDI a notation format, since it's not.

MIDI is a protocol meant to be able to capture the performance of music, and much of the performance isn't human-intelligible data, so MIDI doesn't work as notation.

However, the case I was making is that MIDI can capture all the data present in a score already and transport between applications. No, you would never read MIDI itself from a file and try to play it on a piano, but I also doubt you could easily read Alda straight from a text file without rendering it either.

[voakbasda]

MIDI can capture the meaningful information about a performance of a work. It cannot work back from that and present the original sheet music. The performance is, by definition, only one possible interpretive expression of the written music. As such, MIDI cannot possibly transport all of the information of a piece of music that I score using classical notation without losing some of the specific information.

[thebricksta]

Yes that's a good point, something I was thinking about too after that post:

MIDI cannot work its way back to the original score itself, but it can capture a perfect performance of the score and allow that performance to be notated in another scoring program. That doesn't quite get you back to the original score however.

So now I suppose I can see some value in trying to develop more score representation formats with more compatibility - it'd be cool to be able to write a proper score then drag-and-drop it like MIDI into a DAW. Yes, that's usually possible through MIDI export, but it'd be neat if that was a first-class feature and we all passed around scores on the web instead of MIDI files.

EDIT: On further thinking, passing scores around wouldn't really be sufficient either, as oftentimes you do want a copy of an exact performance with humanized timings. I suppose you really would need to embrace both formats, or create some sort of hybrid that can capture elements of either/both freely.

[mnhn]

This is a really nice and subtle point. A score, expressive as they can be, is still a text to be performed. No one performance is the text, and the text is not a performance. There is a whole person performing the work whose identity, personality, history, sensibility and present state of mind all feed into any specific performance.

[yomly]

To draw an analogy - we are more than happy passing around the works of Shakespeare in its textual form. But as we know, a good performance can bring so much more than is encoded in the text at face value.

Music is really just a non-verbal language. If you become fluent in the language, you can appreciate music in its textual form just like you can appreciate Shakespeare for its literary value.

To my mind, this is why notational representations still persist, even in the age of media recordings. That higher level of abstraction still carries plenty of value and its compactness (over performance) is convenient to creators and academics who wish to reference them with fast read access.