Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by exabrial 1511 days ago
> microtonal variations

The vast majority of music probably doesn't need this

1 comments

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