[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.