[acjohnson55]

This is interesting!

As weird as the standard notation system is, it works pretty well for tonal music. If you know how to play your instrument within a given key, music takes the same basic shape on the staff, even if it's transposed. It also keeps most pieces pretty compact, even if they have a wide range.

However, standard notation is also notoriously difficult to learn, to the point that many virtuoso players never actually learn it (especially guitar players).

Clairnote appears to respect most of the most useful properties of standard notation, except maybe efficiency with vertical space. Maybe some day I'll give it a try.

[nine_k]

To me, this notation fixes a number of annoying bugs of the traditional notation. They clearly show each fix. Each fix clearly makes sense.

(I wish this notation were adopted since Bach's WTK was published. Alas.)

[aidenn0]

The fixes are all about directness, consistency, and intuitiveness. Legibility is never mentioned Tonal music is arguably more suited to the original than this is, where small differences in distance from the lines can make for a different note.

For example, I claim that the tonic scale will be more legible in traditional notation than in clarinote; portions of the tonic scale make up a significant fraction of music that many people read. TFA never claims that chords and/or arpeggios will be easier to read under the new notation, and I don't have a strong opinion on that one after my brief time with it.

[acjohnson55]

Good point that stepwise tonal motion is much more apparent in standard notation. Maybe there would be a way to augment the notation for that, perhaps at the cost of losing some of the commonalities they kept. For instance, if you're willing to play with the duration notation, maybe you can use filled-in notes for notes within the key and hollow notes for accidentals. Or something.

Or maybe they could have done the staff lines differently.