[InitialLastName]

At a glance, this is a neat concept, but doesn't seem to come at the problem from the perspective of the most common users of music notation (experienced musicians); rather, it appears to have been written by somebody who was frustrated by trying to learn to read music. For experienced musicians, the priorities are a) legibility for sight-reading and transcription (which this system, with indistinguishable sitting/hanging notes and pervasive ledger lines fails) and b) musical context for expressive decisions, such as information about key, mode, modulation and harmonic content as hinted at by the key signatures and accidentals (which this system downplays as unnecessary).

[chrismorgan]

I’ve gained that impression from every single alternative notation system that’s come up here (a new one comes up every year or two). They have a habit of solving problems that just aren’t problems for experienced readers, while causing problems for experienced readers. (They may also solve some real problems, but when they do, they always involve compromises. Inconsistent octave positioning on the staff is a problem, even if it becomes comparatively minor for fairly experienced readers, but the solution offered for that particular issue here looks lousy to me, the compromises made being considerably worse than the original problem.)

In this instance, I look at the subtle vertical placements alone and first guessed rendering imprecision, because I’ve seen that bad and worse from some digital scores, to say nothing of older scores especially with inconsistent ledger line spacing, especially when they’ve been scanned or reprinted or are otherwise aged. I also see something that my dad would struggle to distinguish visually except under fairly strong lighting. This notation looks terribly unsuitable if you don’t have (a) a high-precision, high-resolution display, (b) good lighting, and (c) good eyesight. And it certainly won’t scale down as well, nor is it in any way suitable for hand notation.

[_moof]

> They have a habit of solving problems that just aren’t problems for experienced readers, while causing problems for experienced readers.

If I had a dollar for every "new way of doing XYZ" made by someone inexperienced who just doesn't want to learn the way we're all doing XYZ just fine...

[munificent]

It so hard for an outsider to tell the difference between:

1. It is this way for logical but obscure reasons that will become clearer later when you have deeper understanding.

2. It is this way only because of path dependence and historical baggage and it's arbitrarily annoying for a new person to learn but we don't switch because we all learned it the old hard way.

It's valuable for inexperienced people to question designs that appear bad from the outside because there are a lot of examples of 2 and experienced users of a system aren't incentivized to fix them because they've already climbed up the learning curve and don't personally benefit. But that baggage is a worthless drain for every new user.

The tax for having new users point out and sometimes fix #2 is having to deal with them sometimes erroneously "fixing" cases that are #1.

[vintermann]

Well, it's even harder for insiders. What makes you think the would-be be reformers are outsiders anyway?

Further down this thread, someone brought up their sight reading tutor program. That's a very classic "solution" to the problem.

Also very classic is that when the well meaning "insider" who approves of classical notation finds out that his tutor program didn't really help matters, he'll come up with a reform proposal of his own...

We know that reformed notation systems can increase musical literacy, because they have. Examples are the Scandinavian siffer notation, the Chinese system (which is almost identical to the Scandinavian one, even though developed independently) and the American shape note systems.

But we also know that once they do, there is inevitably a push from educators to "graduate to real notation", and the gains are typically lost within a generation...

[munificent]

Insiders can reform things too, but they tend to do so less often from a combination of:

1. Since they have already learned the old way, they are less personally incentivized to improve the path. It's in their past anyway, so it's a sunk cost. Also, they may have some (conscious or not) incentive to keep things the way they are in order to leverage their existing expertise in the current system.

2. Once you've internalized a system, it's much harder to even see it's flaws. Like navigating your living room, you just walk around the furniture completely on auto-pilot without even thinking, "Maybe I should move this chair out of the way." If you've ever done any UX research, it leaves a striking impression about how users often know and do things without consciously knowing they are doing them. Outsiders and new users to a system still see it for what it is.

The peak time to improve a system is when you understand it just well enough to see its flaws and how to fix them but not so well that you've forgotten the pain points. Any given user is in that liminal state for only a small amount of time, so it's precious and it's good to make the most of it.

[scrozier]

You bring up interesting examples. The only one I know anything about is shape note singing. I guess your point is that shape note singing can be taught much more easily to beginners, and get them to a point of being able to enjoy making music (usually with others) more quickly?

If so, point taken!

And I guess that those shape note singers who feel the pull to perform/compose more complex music can then simply learn traditional notation. Self-selection, with a satisfying "intro" notation for those who are happy at that level.

Following that path, I'm still not sure that the original article here provides anything useful. It's simply an alternative to traditional notation. It doesn't seem easier to learn to me. I could be wrong, but I doubt that I'm an order of magnitude wrong. In fact, if this new notation were proposed as an alternative to shape note singers, it would seem to undo the very reason for shape note singing in the first place: easy entry point to music making.

[gabereiser]

I think you forgot

3. It is hard because of me?

Music isn't for everyone and reading sheet music is not for all musicians. I know plenty of guitarists who only can read tabs. I know a few serious musicians that can't read sheet music (they have to take it home to study).

Anyone that has had proper music instruction though was taught how to read sheet music in their clef. Pianists learn both.

We must also understand our own limitations and accept that there are some things in this world that we, in our current state, can't understand without either further experience or further instruction or unlearning a prejudice we have.

[scrozier]

As a very experienced "tech guy" and a very experienced musician, I notice this happens a lot on HN. Maybe because there's a very math-y, notation-rich aspect to music that appeals to technology types. I am absolutely all for everybody getting to music whichever way works for them, but there has been a lot of effort spent by technologists trying to "fix" music or make it better, when a little humble learning would have paid big rewards.

I wonder in what fields I do this same thing....

[wolverine876]

Isn't that the reactionary response to all innovation, such as in tech? 'That's not the way we do it.'

[mkr-hn]

There's a gradient between "there's a reason we do things this way and you should understand it before you try to change it" and "don't roll your own notation."

[evilotto]

https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Chesterton%27s_Fence

[_moof]

It rhymes with it, sure. The key difference is that the phenomenon I'm talking about comes from people who haven't taken the time to understand the problem, or they come up with "solutions" that have already been tried and found not to work. The reactionary, conversely, is simply afraid: of change, that they won't be able to learn the new thing, of not being important because they aren't the one who came up with it, of losing status gained from being an expert in the old thing, etc.

[vintermann]

There are solutions that have been tried and found to work very well. The American shape note system made 3 and 4 part harmony singing something the whole congregation could take part in, rather than just an elite choir. Lars Roverud's digit notation system (and the system to teach it) did a similar thing for singing in Scandinavia. They fell out of favour not because they didn't work, but because professional musicians and teachers saw it as a crutch instead of a system in its own right, and kept pushing for graduating to "real" notation.

[scrozier]

Shape note notation doesn't, and doesn't try to, replace traditional notation, which is what Clairnote is trying to do.

[wolverine876]

> The key difference is that the phenomenon I'm talking about comes from people who haven't taken the time to understand the problem, or they come up with "solutions" that have already been tried and found not to work.

IME, that is a common 'reactionary' response. Often the problem has changed.

[mkr-hn]

Notation has changed, adapted, expanded, contracted, and even spun off for different and new aspects of the problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_notation#Variations_on...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_notation#Other_systems...

There are some grognards out there who hate even this, and they're way too influential in traditional music education, but notation hasn't been static and unchanging all these centuries. A lot of that resistance is from people who believe their idealized notion of their culture is superior and resist any exposure to new ideas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kr3quGh7pJA

[jonnycomputer]

Brew vs macports in a nutshell.

[Elidrake24]

What's great is I'm not even sure which one you're disparaging; they both "just work" and stay out of my way.

[jnovek]

How does one learn to actually read music, then?

I have been learning to play the keyboard for about a year and I find the layout of the keys to make a lot of sense for figuring out things like scales and chords. When I was in high school I never really learned to sight-read a staff, it was always a struggle for me and probably what turned me off to playing an instrument for so long.

If simplified notations are essentially a crutch for newbies, how does one “git gud”?

[bambax]

I'm working on a webapp to help learn sight reading; the v1 is almost ready; I will do a show hn soon (hopefully next week).

People often associate sight reading with keyboard playing, but they're different things. Reading the staff, as it is traditionally taught in conservatories, means associating the position of a note on the staff with the name of the note (in a given clef). And that's it.

This means, for instance, that the octave is a different problem (I was going to say that it doesn't matter, which isn't exactly true, but close). A C3 is a C4 is a C5 is a C. Same with accidentals. A sharp G is a flat G is a G.

There are many problems associated with learning to read staff on sight. The main and obvious one is that it's tedious and offers no immediate reward. But another is that we are trying to learn too many things at once.

My app is trying to make learning to read notes engaging, competitive and (maybe?) addictive. I don't know if it'll have any success, but during the weeks I've been working on it, it was very effective at improving my own performance.

[InitialLastName]

For all of its strengths as an instrument, piano has some drawbacks for learning to read traditional staff, as there isn't an (obvious-to-the-uninitiated) differentiation between notes or across octaves (you just sit in front of a wide line of keys). I think I learned to read first on a recorder, where you can develop a more intuitive link between fingerings and notes (especially as the first note you learn is the B dead in the center of the treble staff).

I'd suggest a few paths to learning the note positioning:

- If you're already comfortable with note locations on the keyboard, don't be afraid of the line/space mnemonics. If they get you to where you're making ID's faster in the parts of the staff where your hands normally live, it can make life much easier, and you can easily extend from there. There are really only ~26 note/staff associations to learn that will cover the majority of the music you'll see day to day (with octave shifts) and knowing a few will make the rest come more easily.

- Similarly (and I think this is the way piano is taught to beginners, but it's been a long time) you can make a lot of progress by starting your thumbs on middle C, which is dead between the staves and operating from there to play simple music. As you play and read more music, you'll find yourself starting to recognize the locations of more notes across the staff, until they all come to you intuitively.

[scrozier]

The distinction between reading music and sight reading aside (others have addressed it), learning to read music is honestly just rote practice. In the grand scheme of things, it's really not that hard. To play simple songs (all within one octave, say) from music on a staff on an instrument, you really only have to learn twelve associations of positions on the staff to a key on the keyboard or a fingering or an embouchure and a fingering, etc. It's far easier than learning a language or a programming language or the rules of hockey. From there, it's just extending those associations higher and lower, and learning other aspects of music notation, like note durations. It's just standard repetitive learning. No magic or particular talent is involved.

[analog31]

Start with realistic expectations. It will take longer for you, than for someone who's 9 years old. Find sources of large amounts of written material that is nonetheless fairly simplistic, but at the same time not children's songs. There's a lot of sheet music at IMSLP.

An example is the Mikrokosmos collection by Bartok, written as a method book for kids, but is nonetheless serious music.

Don't focus exclusively on reading. When you've worn out a piece from the standpoint of reading, continue practicing it to build technique and musicianship. All of those things develop together. Good luck!

[reikonomusha]

Learning to sight-read is different than just reading. Sight-reading takes an enormous amount of daily dedication and practice for years to get to even an intermediate level.

[JasonFruit]

I don't recall it being that difficult to achieve. Probably the difference is in early teaching and expectations: if you learn to read music as an aid to remembering pieces that are perfected over a long time, sight-reading would be slow to develop, but if you learn it as a way to be able to play new music frequently, it will come more quickly. Probably like the difference between learning a foreign language by studying grammar and working translation exercises as opposed to on-the-fly immersion — you develop different strengths.

[jnovek]

This is a great perspective that I hadn’t considered before.

My previous experience, years ago in high school, was absolutely the former. I think it makes tons of sense to try playing a wide variety of pieces at my skill level.

[ghostpepper]

I am just beginning to learn piano and when I told my teacher that I was memorizing the pieces I was supposed to be reading, he told me to simply play each piece once, mistakes and all, and continue on to the next - specifically to practice playing a piece on first sight.

[scrozier]

I think the distinction is one of degree, not of kind. "Sight reading" is just reading music and applying it to an instrument or voice, in real time. It's a natural outgrowth of learning to read music. I'm a very good sight reader, and it didn't take me anything like years of daily practice. (Which was a good thing, because I have no practice discipline.)

[john61]

> How does one learn to actually read music, then?

The same way millions of musicions before you. By reading music, training, time and patience.

[jnovek]

Please don’t take this personally, but this isn’t very helpful advice.

I’ve learned how to do many things in my life, and I’ve come to appreciate that it’s very easy to practice the wrong thing and never make any progress.

Another way to phrase my question might be, “What and how should I practice to develop my music reading skills?”

[yesenadam]

Pianist here, regularly won sight-reading competitions in my youth etc. GP's answer seemed a good answer to me. Your first sentence seemed rude, disrespectful.

What kind of music do you want to be able to read? Presumably the music you like and want to play. So read that. You will always be reading new stuff you don't know, not the same thing over and over, so I'm not sure how never making any progress is a possibility. Sight reading/playing difficult music is not easy, sounds like you want a quick way of learning the skill, which doesn't exist.

    A fellow went to a Zen master and said, “If I work very hard, how soon can I be enlightened?”
    The Zen master looked him up and down and said, “Ten years.”
    The fellow said, “No, listen, I mean if I really work at it, how long—”
    The Zen master cut him off. “I’m sorry. I misjudged. Twenty years.”
    ”Wait!” Said the young man, “You don’t understand! I’m—”
    “Thirty years,” said the Zen master.

[jnovek]

> Your first sentence seemed rude, disrespectful.

Really? I genuinely trying to communicate that I was criticizing their opinion and not them personally. Did it come off as sarcastic? In any case, I apologize.

You are being awfully presumptuous. I am doing this because I enjoy it. I don’t have a destination or a timeline. I am not asking for a “quick fix”.

I’m asking how to focus studies in music because I struggled for many years with music when I was in school. I did practice quite a bit and always lagged behind.

Your response reminds me why I don’t ask people on the internet for help.

[MandieD]

I can only give advice for “one note at a time” instruments like the flute or trumpet: practice sight reading children’s songs you know (and therefore can tell if you’ve made a huge mistake) - sight reading, not memorizing! As you get more proficient at reading those, slowly choose harder things - melody lines from a familiar church hymnal are ideal for this. If you make mistakes, finish the phrase, then repeat it, but here, you should be going for quantity, not quality.

Treat this as a separate part of your practice.

I would imagine it’s similar for piano or guitar.

[vintermann]

It really isn't. You highlight something important: musicians don't usually learn to convert notation to music in their heads. Instead, they learn to associate notation with how to make the sound, e.g. finger positions.

I remember in ear training class in high school all the brass kids playing imaginary valves with their fingers when trying to sight-sing.

It's harder for singers, and quadratically harder for instruments where you have more positions and play more notes at once.

[egypturnash]

I am by no means even a decent amateur guitarist but "practice with songs you know" definitely lines up with what I was being asked to do when I was taking guitar lessons as a kid.

[duped]

Honest answer is to find a tutor and take private lessons. Books and videos can't show you how to correct bad technique and habits, and it's hard to follow the right pedagogy without someone to guide you.

[alar44]

Literally practice. Don't look at your hands. It takes years and years, there is no quick way to learn piano.

[analog31]

I'm an amateur double bassist, and a fluent sight-reader. To be fair, I gravitate towards situations where reading is an asset, since it gives me a leg up on the "competition" including pro's who haven't maintained their reading chops. Plus I benefit from the networking opportunities afforded by those situations.

For me, here are the problems that I see with any new notation system:

1. "Standard" notation (SN) has created a symbiosis between composers and players. If you don't compose in SN, nobody will play your stuff. If you don't read SN, you won't be able to play anybody's stuff, and will probably not even get a chance to develop your reading skills to a performance level. The ultimate stage of learning to read is sight-reading in an ensemble with other players.

2. Learning a new notation gets exponentially harder as you get older. I started learning to read when I was about 10. It's like my spinal column has created a special circuit directly from my eyes to my hands, through my ears. A lot of time when I'm sight-reading, I'm actually thinking about other things.

3. All of the repertoire is in SN, virtually none of it is in computer readable form, and much of it is out of print. I play in a large jazz ensemble. We still maintain our entire music library, entirely on paper. For this reason, SN has much more inertia than one would expect from other "notations" such as programming languages.

For these reasons, the shortcomings of SN and benefits of new notation, are practically irrelevant. Now, "standard" notation is not carved in stone. For instance, jazz bass parts are notated differently than classical clarinet parts. I get a lot of chord symbols and am expected to play an improvised bass line.

[phkahler]

I'm not sure it's possible to say it's worse. You suffer from having learned the traditional notation, so some of this is going to look weird regardless. I'm not good at reading music and agree with some of the issues it has, but looking at this does seem like a different set of issues to me as well. I think the only fair comparison could be done by someone with a lot of experience using both.

I think it's fair to say the staff has to be spread out more for this notation since is doesn't compress 12 notes into 7 places like traditional notation.

OTOH be glad you're not reading guitar tablature ;-)

[chrismorgan]

Certainly I’m biased, but on the vertical alignment thing I think I can be objective: relying on sub-millimetre positioning is a bad idea.

[vintermann]

It certainly is, but there are similar obvious bad ideas in regular notation.

If you've typeset music manually, or written out nice parts by hand, you know that you need to take stem direction into account when spacing note heads. Notes with opposite stem direction will seem closer, or further apart, than they actually are. Optical illusions aren't a great feature of a notation system.

Five lines is also a bad optical choice, because it's actually very difficult to count 5 or higher parallel lines at a glance. I remember my piano teacher, who was a very strong sight reader, played a Bach fugue for me. However, the score had been annotated with a line showing the figure part ("dux", "comes" etc.) and as it happened that line was spaced exactly like a staff line. He'd played three measures before going, "wait, that doesn't sound right" and realizing he'd been playing on a six-line staff!

[vintermann]

> They have a habit of solving problems that just aren’t problems for experienced readers, while causing problems for experienced readers.

Well, of course. They have invested a lot in the system as it is. But I've noticed even very basic changes that should not cause problems for already strong readers (e.g. a slightly thicker middle line) have zero chance at adoption, whereas changes that are not justified by didacticts (e.g. many composers inventing some quirky new way of expressing something) are.

I share your judgement that this system is poor, and that there are many poor notation systems proposed all the time, though.

[Jeff_Brown]

That does appear to be its origin. And if you take 12 equal divisions of the octave as a given, Clairnote seems more natural. OTOH once you're thinking in terms of a 7-tone subset, maybe traditional notation is more natural. (It certainly is to me, but I haven't given Clairnote a try.)

Traditional notation uses the scale degree as the fundamental unit, whereas this uses the 12-edo chromatic tone as the fundamental unit. While it's not a big deal to most musicians, there are a lot of microtonal variations of traditional notation (my favorite is HEWM[1]). A 12-edo notation like CLairnote could be similarly modified, but it seems awkward, because (most) microtonal systems don't start from 12 equal divisions of the octave.

I don't think the sitting/hanging notes are indistinguishable. But they do need to be distinguished, which means it's more work than looking at a traditional between-two-lines note. I find it difficult.

Clairnote does make key signatures available. Surely any real composer would include them, or something equally or more informative (e.g. the text "G dorian").

[1] http://www.tonalsoft.com/enc/h/hewm.aspx

[iainmerrick]

I'm very surprised they don't make the sitting/hanging notes semicircular, so they're much more visually distinct (like stalactites and stalagmites).

Instead they seem to have tried two different systems for the sitting/hanging notes, both of which look very hard to read to me: https://clairnote.org/clairnote-dn-clairnote-sn/ (although as you say, if you already know traditional notation it's hard to look at this with an unbiased eye).

[InitialLastName]

> I don't think the sitting/hanging notes are indistinguishable.

They aren't indistinguishable when rendered by a computer. When rendered by hand (where space notes have a tendency to float from the line to avoid being interpreted as line notes), the F and G especially would be indistinguishable.

[dwringer]

I always thought one of the main benefits of a 7-tone subset is that it fits inside working memory. It's also what anyone who grew up with commercial pop music or western classical music has a natural ear for. Not to mention that even just looking at it harmonically, all 12 tones are most certainly not equal from a given root.

AFAIU, historically 12-TET is really a compromise, sacrificing some harmonicity to simplify and enable having symmetrical 7-note tonality in any traditional mode starting from any point in any scale. Some modern styles definitely subvert this idea, embracing the full range of chromaticity - but without abandoning 12-TET, they are still playing with the audience's harmonic preconceptions that are based in conventional tonality.

[Jeff_Brown]

> AFAIU, historically 12-TET is really a compromise, sacrificing some harmonicity to simplify and enable having symmetrical 7-note tonality in any traditional mode starting from any point in any scale

It is. And it's a surprisingly lucky compromise. By some metrics 19-EDO, 22-EDO and 31-EDO dominate 12-EDO for traditional (5-limit) music theory. (And of course every multiple of 12 does.) But if you want strictly better thirds and fifths, the smallest EDO that qualifies is 41.

For anyone interested in big microtonal scales, there's a great website[1] that will render a touchscreen-friendly virtual keyboard with whatever scale and layout (provided it's hexagonal) you want. Don't worry about all the menus to start, just pick something from the first menu, "Tuning\Layout Quick Links".

[1] http://terpstrakeyboard.com/web-app/keys.htm

[exabrial]

> microtonal variations

The vast majority of music probably doesn't need this

[nameless912]

The vast majority of _Western_ music doesn't need it, but microtonal music is extremely important in a number of Asian, Middle Eastern, African, and even Eastern European systems.

[exabrial]

Ok... so? Use a different notation, duh. See my point about letting edge cases drive the bus off a cliff.

[Jeff_Brown]

Continuing to use the status quo notation would hardly constitute driving the bus off a cliff. And the cases of microtonality are not that edge. Beyond allowing interoprability among musicians from different cultures, western notation has been critical to most (and there's a lot of it) western microtonal music.

[exabrial]

Who the hell cares? Use a different notation for the .00000000001% of the time you ever have to interop with a non 12-tone equal temperament scale.

[blagie]

The vast majority of users of music notation are amateurs, and being more friendly to amateurs would mean even more users.

The vast majority of decision-makers are experienced users with a vested interest in the status quo.

The issue is very similar to why corporate systems have such horrible user interfaces. The people making the decisions in IT aren't the normal users of the system. IT cares about features, integrations, and high-level analytics. Employees care to be able to sanely input their time sheets, file an expense report, or buy a stapler.

I'd like a system simple enough to use by all the kids in my local elementary school music class, much more than I care about what happens in the local orchestra.

[apendleton]

> The vast majority of users of music notation are amateurs

I'm not sure the claims you and OP are making here are actually in tension. They said:

> the most common users of music notation (experienced musicians)

which is ambiguous, and might mean something like "of all the people that ever do any music-reading at all, the majority are experienced musicians," which would indeed be the opposite of your claim. But it might also be "of all the people that are reading music at any given moment, the majority are experienced musicians," which would be a proxy for "most hours spent reading music are spent by experienced musicians"; this could be true simultaneously with your claim (it stands to reason that experienced or professional musicians spend comparatively more time reading music than do novices or amateurs).

I don't think it's a foregone conclusion that the thing you want to optimize for is maximizing the average quality of experience for all users regardless of how much they use the thing, vs. maximizing the quality of the average hour of use.

[Aidevah]

Many people seem to not realise that there is already an alternative to staff notation; it is called the piano roll. It has all the advantages that alternative notations propose (proportional intervals and note lengths), is already in widespread use, is available in all professional music software, and is by far simpler and easier to learn. For many professional musicians the piano roll may be the only type of notation they deal with on a regular basis.

Any eclectic modification of standard western notation therefore needs to justify itself not just against staff notation, but also the simple piano roll.

[vintermann]

Piano roll is certainly better than traditional notation for writing down music that will be played by a computer anyway. It's not great for live play.

[armagon]

Is there a nice way (ie. not screenshots) to print piano roll notation?

[tgv]

The problem, IMO, is that once you have acquired a notation system is that you can’t/won’t make the jump the another one. So if you train beginners with eg. clairnote, they will have a hard time making the jump to a higher difficulty level. It’s not unlike a walled garden.

[dehrmann]

It's a bit like the Dvorak keyboard problem. It's slightly better, but too much of a hassle to bother with. You need something between 2x and 10x better to displace an entrenched incumbent.

[blagie]

I think a better music notation system would easily be at least 2x better for beginners. A rationalized system could mean 100% of kids learn to read and write music, and anyone could understand how to play an instrument like a piano from music (even if not able to do it at full speed).

My point was that it could be 10x better, and it wouldn't lead to a switch. The decision-makers aren't the same as the people whom it would benefit.

Coincidentally, there are a lot of scientific fields where jargon could be dramatically simplified, to where anyone could learn them too. Same entrenched walled garden problem. That's especially true of fields like medicine, chemistry, and biology where things were named before we understood them.

[danachow]

> A rationalized system could mean 100% of kids learn to read and write music, and anyone could understand how to play an instrument like a piano from music (even if not able to do it at full speed).

I played in school bands and marching band - very very few of my classmates took up music seriously beyond high school, but music reading just was a complete non-issue for everyone involved. I don’t see how the current system is limiting anyone.

> My point was that it could be 10x better, and it wouldn't lead to a switch. The decision-makers aren't the same as the people whom it would benefit.

Who are these “decision makers” you keep speaking of. There is no global cabal of music notation protectionists. I don’t think the forces that lead to internal corporate IT decision making really have anything to do with a music notation system.

There are already simplified notation systems like tabs and piano rolls and annotated staves. Your argument seems to assume there is a notation system that really is 2 to 10 times better (which obviously is mostly subjective) - but you haven’t even given an existence proof of this, so it is all hypothetical.

> Coincidentally, there are a lot of scientific fields where jargon could be dramatically simplified, to where anyone could learn them too. Same entrenched walled garden problem.

Example?

[stephen_g]

I don't think any of that actually adds up though. I had about 10 years of music reading experience when I started learning the piano, and it was still hard. Took me years to get to a decent level. Because playing an instrument (or learning an instrument in a different class to ones you already know) is actually just very difficult in itself.

I don't think music notation ever held me back for a second - I remember when learning, you'd learn the music notation for something new first in a few minutes, and then spend days of practice doing exercises learning how to play it well on your instrument.

Similarly with science, medicine, etc. - you can know all the terms, but the real difficult part is trying to understand the massive complexity of what they're describing!

[MandieD]

Over a third of the students at my middle school were in band, and lots of them had academic problems. By eighth grade, they were all ok enough at reading music to get through multi-page pieces together.

Only a few of us could have told you what a major third or the circle of fifths was, but frankly, even that meager level of theory was useless for the immediate task of playing the same note at the same time as all the other second clarinets.

[vintermann]

Band players don't really learn to read music as such, they learn to read finger/hand positions. This is much easier. Sheet music is really a lot like instrument-independent tabulature, but it's a bad for singing or any instrument with lots of positions or where you play many notes at once (e.g. piano)

[reikonomusha]

To be clear though, a lot of kids do understand the current notation system fine. Most kids aren't saying "hey! this chord is a minor third in frequency space but occupies the same vertical distance on the page as a major third! so confusing!" They instead approach it very much "monkey see, monkey do".

That's not to say many folks don't have trouble with notation, but if I had to place a bet, almost any notational system that abstracts away from letter names or (in the case of piano) keyboard positions will pose difficulties.

[photojosh]

I was a kid who learned enough music to be barely good enough to do music at church... Now a few decades later I'm learning the drums using Rock Band [0] (and similar, I have almost a complete collection); the video game using a "toy" drumkit on a 10 year old console. Back in the day I read that a motivation behind the drums implementation of the game was that if you can play the song in the game, you can play in real life. [1] It's perfect for doing in small doses and providing good motivation,and so I've reached the point now that I'm good enough now that I am buying a proper e-drumkit. Yes, guaranteed I will pick up some terrible habits, but I've always failed to learn things when the barriers to achieving each goal aren't as simple as possible, and I'll take some proper lessons later on.

Now... how's this relevant to OP? Well, the 'music notation' it uses is best explained via analogy to a road, imagine you are standing on a bridge looking up a highway. There are 4 lanes, each lane representing a drum, and coming towards you at a constant pace are symbols (gems) representing the hits (and bars across the whole road for the kick). There are horizontal markings for the bars as well. Song plays, hit the notes correctly and you'll hear them in the song. Get them wrong and you'll hear a clanging and the drums drop out of the song. Then you get feedback at the end of the song.

Just search YouTube for "rock band drums" or "guitar hero drums", and you'll quickly get the gist.

Now this "notation" can be via the application of some simple steps turned into the real thing. These don't necessarily have to be in order either, perhaps some different sequence is better to make the jump.

1. Rotate the 'highway' sideways, remove the perspective distortion, and it looks like a regular music staff

2. Scroll it at first... but then swap to stationary with a moving playhead

3. Remove the playhead so the player has to keep their place.

4. Make the changes to turn it into proper notation [3], but keep the colouring.

5. Get rid of the colour altogether and you're left with regular notation.

Now referring back to [1] again, this is the same idea covered there. A project idea I've had floating around is to actually implement the above steps in a game/app on a device that can take MIDI input and use the same charts format that the amazing CloneHero [4] developed.

And for regular tonal notation rather than percussive? While I haven't looked into it much... Rock Band 3 has the "ProKeys" mode which is meant to do the same thing with a 2-octave keyboard, and perhaps the same concept could be applied [5].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_Band

[1] This wasn't the original article... but this one is even better, and deals with the notation discussion. I swear I only found it when I was adding references in at the end of writing this comment! https://www.destructoid.com/how-rock-band-can-teach-you-to-p...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percussion_notation

[4] https://clonehero.net

[5] https://www.gameinformer.com/blogs/editors/b/gijeffm_blog/ar...

[zozbot234]

I might agree with the general claim, but diatonic notation is a lot friendlier to amateurs. Traditionally, kids in early education learn solfège (Do, Re, Mi...) which is very much based on diatonicism.

[danachow]

This analogy doesn’t fit at all.

> I'd like a system simple enough to use by all the kids in my local elementary school music class, much more than I care about what happens in the local orchestra.

Amateur doesn’t mean lack of experience or skill - what you seem to be meaning is “casual”. There are already a number of simplified notation systems for casual use. And this alternative notation is definitely not positioning itself for casual use based on its examples - and it sits in a sort of uncanny valley.

[scrozier]

As an experienced (semi-professional) musician, I think this is probably a false dichotomy. For one thing, "users of music notation" implies that these users know how to use it. Very many "amateur" musicians read traditional notation just fine. It's not that hard.

There is really no such thing as a "decision-maker" for music notation systems. That ship sailed a long time ago. There is no orchestra conductor anywhere pondering whether or not they should abandon a millennium or two of traditional notation for something "better."

You would be doing your elementary music students an enormous disservice by teaching them some "alternative" music notation system. And for what reason? As I've said elsewhere, learning to "read music" is far easier than many things we ask elementary students to learn.

Apologies for excessive "quotation marks."

[aidenn0]

Right, some highly chromatic music would be better represented in this notation, but it seems a poor fit for traditional western music.

Also, a single, brief, look at a piano keyboard will expose why whole-steps and half-steps always being equidistant on the sheet music might not be a desirable goal. There are similar affordances on woodwinds as well. Maybe a string-instrument player could comment on usefulness for string music?

[edit]

I'd also be interested in seeing examples of transposing in Clairnote; all of the examples in TFA were in the key of C and I don't have an intuition for how easy/hard this would be. As an amateur clarinetist I was often handed oboe music...

[LegionMammal978]

> Maybe a string-instrument player could comment on usefulness for string music?

Speaking from my experience playing violin (as an ameteur), players generally practice their scales until the finger positions become muscle memory. This way, the key provides the entire note position -> finger position mapping, and accidentals simply become half-step modifications. Since the scales would need to be learned anyway to play tonal music, I don't see how this notation would simplify anything.

[_moof]

Can concur as a bass player. Tell me to play (for example) a B and without even thinking, my hand will move to the second fret on the A string. Put a flat sign on it and I just move one fret down.

I also know the "shapes" of intervals though, and they are constant. A half-step is always one fret, a whole step is always two. A minor third is a minor third is a minor third: one finger on fret N of string M, the other finger on fret N-2 of string M+1; the names of the notes are irrelevant.

[MandieD]

I pulled my flute out of its case after over five years, and within minutes was playing all my scales, and able to play the melody lines out of a hymnal. My tone was awful, and my lips got tired long before my hands.

To this day, I still associate flute fingerings with music I read for singing.

Or piano, which gets messy…

[jhasse]

As a guitar player I find this very useful as half-steps are equidistant on my instrument.

[throwaway675309]

Even if the system was superior, at this point in history it's irrelevant because you simply won't be able to gain traction or hit critical mass for large scale adoption for all existing musicians.

The only thing this will do is teach you a completely different system and as soon as you move out of your own isolated learning and into working with other musicians and gigging or other public functions you will just get frustrated.

At the very least you would wanna system that would be somewhat transferable to the existing sheet notation and tablature systems.

[balabaster]

Well I can't speak for everyone else obviously, but I find traditional notation much easier to read than Clairnote's alternative. Even with the description, I find it harder to glance at the Clairnote notation and see what it means.

[tomComb]

But isn’t that because the Clairenote alternative is new to you?

Seems like an unfair comparison.

[taylodl]

Exactly! It's like designing a language making Hello World! programs trivial to create but makes the actual programs we write a little more difficult to create and doesn't solve the actual problems experienced by day-to-day developers. Not useful.

[ajkjk]

Yeah, agreed. I'm totally on board with fixing the fact that you have to learn ledger lines / note placements separately for each clef. Besides that, none of this seems necessary, and the legitimately of sitting/hanging notes is a big problem.

I'm all for a notation system that distinguishes major/minor thirds more clear. It's a neat idea.

[mkr-hn]

You see the same with people suggesting MIDI is a replacement for notation. I program MIDI in a MIDI roll and still appreciate notation. MIDI is to notation as a play is to a script. Notation is more like a script. It's there to guide the performance. Notation has persisted and evolved for centuries for a reason!

[WhitneyLand]

>for experienced musicians priorities are legibility….

For novices too! Just increasing the physical size of standard notation would be a big help. 13x19 sheet music would be nice.