[iainmerrick]

I hate to be too much of a downer as there are some nice ideas here, but I can see at least three problems with this:

1) First and foremost, of course, the massive entrenched investment in traditional notation. It's like trying to replace the QWERTY keyboard.

2) More risk of transcription errors in written music. The difference between "sitting just above the line" and "sitting on the line" is quite subtle.

3) This is strictly tied to the 12-note equal temperament scale, with enharmonic sharps and flats. Traditional notation works fairly well with many alternate tunings, e.g. 19-note equal temperament (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/19_equal_temperament) Edit to add: looking more closely, it does include a notation to distinguish between e.g. G# and Ab, but as it's optional for most music it comes across as an afterthought that most people won't learn; and as in the previous point, it looks ripe for transcription errors. # and b are a little weird but at least they look very different!

I really like that this tries to be a more general-purpose system without being biased towards western classical diatonic music, but it looks significantly worse for that style of music (point 2) while not necessarily being significantly better for other styles (point 3).

Easy transposition across octaves is nice, but not exactly a killer feature. That's already one of the easiest things you can do on most instruments.

[Jeff_Brown]

> the massive entrenched investment

At first I thought it would be like switching from Facebook to Mastodon. But if there is automatic translation software, it wouldn't actually be as hard -- you can just wear your own Clairnote lenses when you want, without bothering the other musicians.

> The difference between "sitting just above the line" and "sitting on the line" is quite subtle.

Agreed. It seems worth using different heads for the two kinds of notes.

[reikonomusha]

At least in Western classical music, there's a lot of emphasis put on Urtexts (scores that contain exactly the information the composer wrote and no more), composer intent, distinguished voices (stem up v down), diatonic scales (enharmonic choices matter), etc. This would make it nontrivial to simply switch notations.

In some sense it's like saying "finally, I can read Don Quixote in whatever language I want because of Google Translate!"

[jhasse]

IMHO that's a very bad example because there's a big loss of information with Google Translate (you wouldn't get the Urtext when translating back), but there isn't with Clairnote.

[Jeff_Brown]

Yeah, if the original score is digitally encoded such that everything really is a first-class citizen (and not, say, a GIF of some scribbles) -- a very big if -- but if so, it's not obvious that any information has to be lost in translation to Clarinote, nor that Clairnote would impose any additional information. If you want to know the scale you could encode the key signature, which Clairnote seems to make possible, just unnecessary.

[iainmerrick]

From the earlier reply:

distinguished voices (stem up v down)

That's a very important one that might not survive across re-transcription. Although in this case, Clairnote is similar enough that it might generally be possible to retain all the stem directions.

[iainmerrick]

That's a good point; if/when all the scores are fully electronic, they could easily be transcribed automatically.

Anyone know how close we are to that? I feel like I'm seeing many more professional classical musicians using iPads rather than paper scores, but I don't know if they're just looking at scanned scores, or something like MIDI that can be freely transliterated.

[TremendousJudge]

We are very, very far away from that. To get a feel of what scorewriter software is like nowadays, Tantacrul's videos[0] on the subject of UI are very good at showing what the state of the art is. On one of his videos he shows that the best score engraving can only be achieved by using a closed source, now-unsupported command line program from the 80s called Score[1]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKx1wnXClcI [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCORE_(software)

[scrozier]

That's an excellent point that I hadn't thought of. If one could just pick one's favorite notation, that would make the "competition" between traditional notation and others more fair. And more and more music is being notated digitally, so this isn't completely a pipe dream.