I always found sheet music way too hard to read - and I literally spent a year at a company building a sheet music rendering engine. I wanted an app that would display music like the tutorials on YouTube, but not be focused on upselling lessons etc. like most current apps, and also would let me import my own files
This works on MIDI files. If it’s a valid midi it probably plays.
Since releasing, I did add a subscription for classical music - on a theory that most normal users don’t know what a midi file is. It changed about a month ago from an up front price to in app purchases and/or a subscription - which has absolutely tanked revenue so far - but maybe it will pick up
Would love to hear your thoughts and if you have any suggestions!
Experienced players read music in a way that overcomes some of the limitations that form the assumptions that are behind these alternative notation systems. Instead of looking at a measure as a collection of individual notes that must be perceived, interpreted and executed in sequence, they take it in as a chunk. (I imagine reading code must be similar.) This is why the density of traditional notation isn’t intimidating - after a while it can be read as a whole.
Whether a system like this could be a pedagogical bridge to formal notation remains to be seen. I’ve encountered such bridging systems before. I’m an admitted skeptic because my orientation to this is that if you want to learn a thing, just start learning the thing. The struggle, within limits, is known to enhance learning.
Ever since I started learning something about music theory (just in the past couple years... I'm far from an expert), I've realized that both sheet music and the piano layout are both very clever in unexpected ways that, as you point out, make the music notation both expressive and more compact than a straight timeline of linear note values, because they lean on the fact that sections of music tend to skip very predictable parts of the range of notes. They tend to use them in particular patterns that make it useful to reduce your focus to a subset of the available range at any given moment.
There's this absolutely wild video by Adam nealy about how polyrhythms are actually cords. (It's very approachable if you know just a smidgeon of music theory). Highly recommend Adam's channel if you're interested in music/music theory. https://youtu.be/JiNKlhspdKg?si=J7eaB1xH4Eo27cC9
Granted it does have its edge cases. IIRC it's not great at representing complex rhythm.
But what sheet notation does great man does it do well at it. Like recently have been looking at quite a few different multi voice piano pieces and the fact that using convention you can differentiate between the lower and middles voices is pretty amazing.
Eg in Clair de lune the runs that are played by both hands will share the same beam to denote it's a single voice
There is one particular instance in which getting away from traditional notation can help. I have absolute pitch, and I've played transposing (woodwind) instruments before. The mental link between specific finger positions and specific tones / notes on the score, is one that causes me untold issues with transposing instruments. If I could just focus on the finger positions without the distraction of the score, that would help me. I don't think this is a common problem though.
1) just work on actually transposing whatever you're reading by a fixed interval. If you get fluent in doing this, you'll get past your "page says f but it sounds d" discomfort.
2) practice reading C clefs (+ octave transposition). You play a C on a clarinet in B-flat, it sounds a B-flat. So, imagine instead of a treble clef, it were a tenor clef (but 8va higher) instead. That third-space treble-clef C is now a tenor-clef B (you have to add the accidentals).
In either case, it is probably matter of just getting used to it, and that means spending time with it, so no truly "easy" answer for you.
Isn't this exactly what most guitar players do? Tablature is used instead of traditional staves.
Yes! I quit tenor and alto sax in favor of C melody. And I learned euphonium before trumpet so I just can’t see a Bb but call it C. Not at speed anyway.
I’m not professional, but I have been playing for awhile and can sight-read fairly easily. What you said here is 100% true, and I liken it to learning to read a language. Watch how kids learn to read, they have to look at each syllable and letter and sound out each word. Eventually, after enough practice, you don’t read individual letters, you read words. Then, you begin to observe the nuance of the grammatical structure.
I feel like reading music notation has followed a similar trend for myself. I no longer read individual notes, I see chords and progressions. Just like stories tend to follow a plot line, and you can predict how the story may end, music follows a plot line, and you can predict the movement. This is also why certain styles of music is so interesting! We expect the plot to move in a direction and then are surprised by the twist. This video by 8 bit music theory gives a good overview of how that can be done[0].
I especially love when I’m playing through a new piece and every part of the song just makes sense. Yiruma’s music in particular feels very natural for me, and it’s an absolute joy to play through the song and have it all flow together so well.
Anyways, I think a lot of people just don’t give it enough time and give up a bit too early. It’s magical when you pass that point of reading individual notes and enter into the territory of really reading pieces. I still have so far to go, but music will always be a relaxing and fulfilling hobby.
[0]: https://youtu.be/gzK1CTxxRH0?si=H3aUQo83lVl-2BQK
It wasn't until well into adulthood that anyone told me sight reading like that (i.e., sit in front of unfamiliar music and just play it) is actually a rare and exceptional skill. Since then, I've been assuming it must not follow the "learn to read letters" path at all, but now you have me wondering if the reality is between these two ideas, and my dual misconceptions have more to do with never having actually "learned" to read in any ordinary sense.
One day when I was 3, my mom finished reading me a story, and I said it was my turn to read the next one. I read the next one, and the one after that, and the one after that. It all sort of clunked into place at once.
It also made me an unusual reader, which I also didn't know at the time. While I can read words one at a time, like when I have occasion to read aloud, by default, I read chunks of the paragraph/page at once. I don't subvocalize the words. I just know what they say. My brain apparently just handles letters and words funny.
Your comment is so helpful for me because it's helping me realize I may just need to learn to read music the way most people learn to read words, and it's not useful to think of it in terms of how I did!
I know people who cannot play a tune without sheet music. I know some of the most talented musicians on this earth who cannot read sheet music. There is no right and wrong to this. It's what works for you.
I do think some form of formal music theory training is an absolute cheat code when it comes to playing multiple instruments, or just jamming and playing by ear though
I learned to play classical piano as a child and teenager and got reasonably good at it. But as my interests expanded to music that is normally not written down, I had less need to read music notation. Fifty years later, I still play the piano every day, but the only reading I do is occasionally looking at the chords and melody lines for jazz standards.
The music theory I learned when young has been very helpful over the years, and it would have been more difficult for me to absorb it then without using standard music notation. But I no longer think about music in terms of notes on a stave; I have gradually developed my own mental representation of it.
I still listen to classical music, and I do wish that I had acquired and maintained better sight-reading skills so that playing it would be a pleasure for me now rather than a chore.
Personally I believe there's no substitute to doing serious amounts of repetition of stuff that you're trying to learn to get it fluent, and using your ears (and on the piano to a lesser extent eyes) to get it. Personally I'm happiest when I'm able to step away from the sheet music, but I also read to an intermediate level.
It turned out what got me much more fluent with sheet music reading was copying out some scores that were a little bit of a stretch for me, at the time, due to having multiple performances of same music at short notice.
For most music I play (I'm on sax in a couple of street bands) I much prefer to have internalised the music and be able to operate from memory based on knowing the key and some intuition of the harmonic structure. In fact if I know a tune too well the sheet music starts to throw me if I try reading and playing.
Intuition is important. The fact that I already had good intuition on the sax, but that it was a struggle on the piano is what made me stop piano lessons because getting better at piano was eating in to my getting better at the sax time too much.
I like Ableton's Push system and associated sequencing software. I think it is superior.
Its an LED grid and matrix, but primarily within that grid it highlights all the C notes for every octave
for someone that doesn't have the discipline to already sense them, there is no need to ever gain or hone that sense anymore
its hard to describe, as the combination of hardware and software is quite comprehensive, but in comparison it really does seem like this just wasn't revisited for the last 700 years. the matrix is for playing and reading. whereas these would be separate things in analog devices and things that simulate them. hm, lines blur with the term analog. I mean in comparison to traditional physical instruments.
The Ableton Push sequencer is also designed with using it in a scale-only mode in mind. It gets a fair bit uglier if you enable chromatic mode.
I don't know whether or not this is it - judging purely from the screenshots I think it's too pared back and austere, e.g. making it harder (for me at least) to see expected duration of a note from length alone, but I love that people are trying.
I found that once I learned coding I started to internalise and conceptualise things about music I didn't before. The structure of music became so much more concrete and I also realised that not only are musical chunks (eg scale or arpeggio) an abstraction on paper but so too is the brain-muscle instruction to execute it. In some of the intermediate Beethoven and Chopin where it starts to get spicier you don't have time to think note by note...
I always wished that sheet music was rotated 90 degrees. The more I hear from musicians the more I think maybe that's not good... but there is something to be said about, "with experience you'll just get it, it become natural" especially with a system that's been around for hundreds of years...
This. After you have learned things feel free to come up with something others might want to spend their time on learning.
I'm almost more interested in an example of gradually evolved notation being tossed completely when a simpler modern replacement actually is better. Maybe Hangul?
If you need to sight read (and as rock/pop/jazz people point out, you don't have to for many genres), then you need to sight read.
There are so many other virtues to sheet music. Look at the cover image. I can see a few notes. I can see vastly more notes in sheet music. I can easily evaluate if the piece is playable, I can scan and look for broader patterns. I can see that a bass note is being held for 8 measures (and I may choose to repeat it at some point). I can look ahead quite a bit. I can understand the repeat structures - don't gasp, but you don't have to take repeats, or you can repeat more times than written, especially with 20th+ century music, where you are often expected to do things like choose your own ordering of measures or blocks of measures. There are fingerings. I can see if the composer is writing out finger pedaling explicitly (Couperin normally does, Bach normally doesn't). I can see the pedal markings, general contours of dynamics. I can see the trills, etc., which are often just suggestions rather than hard requirements. I can see the meter, meter changes, keys, key changes, accidentals. I can see a big scary chord coming up and spend a bit more time looking at it while I play a few measures behind. I can see that Bach is repeating a phrase a 5th down, or inverting it, or reversing it. I can see the difference between passages meant to be played in time, and fioritura type writing.
I haven't used these piano roll systems so there are undoubtedly some things that are nice about it for an experienced player that I don't know about, so that paragraph is one sided. But that one side is very important - I'd loathe to go without them, and can't imagine I'd ever trade them for whatever advantage the piano roll might bring. After all, a player can take a sheet of paper Chopin wrote, produce that music at a more or less performance level. So it gives you about everything you need. I could imagine a current composer might find something more expressive about the piano roll (maybe expressing note durations not evenly subdivided by 2 or 3).
I suspect there is something neurological happening that stops some people from sight reading well, just like some people struggle with text. I've read accounts of people trying for years, with seemingly good practice techniques, still struggling.
So things like this, synthasia, etc., seem to have a niche. But in general, I suggest, think about someone proposing an app that instead of displaying printed text output it sonically. Great boon for certain situations or people! Undoubtedly someone is using one to read this very post. But a terrible replacement for reading in general.
If a six year old was relying on screen readers because reading is too hard to learn, after testing for dyslexia and vision problems, you'd urge them to make the effort; the advantages of reading text vastly outweighs the 1st grade difficulties of learning to read (yes, that time span will differ by language and writing system, not the point). Literacy is empowering, and arguing that the auto mechanic down the street can't read yet makes a good living is probably not a convincing argument to not teach a child to read.
I learned to sight read at age 4-5 with a plastic brain (I recall my mother having to teach me the letters a-g, and how to write them, for example), so I may underestimate the difficulties of learning later in life. But if you are in a situation where some kind of notation is helpful (again, not all are), learn standard notation!
edit: I thought of a counter-example. Say you play in a band. You can record your output to midi, and then share it with others. You can quantize midi and turn it into sheet music, but chances are you playing is not rhythmically exact. Sight reading that sort of thing is painful (notes carry 1/16th note into the next measure, that sort of thing), and I imagine a piano roll would often be easier.
The main point is that the design of the piano has held beginners back for centuries, and likewise has hindered the development of music notation.
Unfortunately the design of the piano keyboard requires that fingering change when you change key. The guitar doesn't do this, neither does the button accordion.
Whatever, a number of keyboards have been developed where the fingering does not change as you change key.
Start here https://www.le-nouveau-clavier.fr/english/
and https://musicnotation.org/wiki/instruments/isomorphic-instru...
Particularly the https://musicnotation.org/wiki/instruments/wicki-hayden-note...
But please start searching and reading on the following topics:
Isomorphic Instruments, the Xenharmonic Keyboard, the Janko Keyboard, Linnstrument, Lumatone, Dodeka, Chromatone, Balanced keyboard.
And for just a glimpse of an alternative music presentation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQ7LkWCzKxI
That is an absolutely horrible idea. It might seem intuitive at first ("Just alternate keys!") but its impracticality becomes immediately apparent and is directly acknowledged in the site you linked:
>> There’s just one drawback: the monotony of such an arrangement. How can we find our way on such a keyboard? Recently, the French musicologist Laurent Fichet remarked: “This system would certainly be much more rational than the keyboard of today, but one may wonder how players would locate the different notes with such a systematic and uniform layout.”
The French version of the article then goes on to suggest many variations of ways to avoid being lost on a keyboard without any obvious pattern (the English version only lists one, briefly). Some include coloured keys.
It is beyond obvious that the simple, intuitive solution proposed at the start produces a cavalcade of complications none of which has a simple solution.
Not to mention: despite what the linked site suggests, learning how to position your fingers on the keyboard is the least of your problems when you learn the piano, just as learning to touch-type is the least of your problems when you learn how to code.
I vote no.
Gitar and violin players also manage.
That's a huge drawback and it's really underappreciated by everybody advocating for the "better" concept.
Besides, there is the unrelated drawback that especially for a beginner, it's really easy to learn simple tunes with just the white keys on a piano. Throw in a black one now and then and you can get quite far and have fun as a kid. This would be much more intimidating with a symmetrical layout.
Also, good luck printing it on paper without the animations :)
There are many comments to the effect that this is a crutch that will inhibit future learning. I agree with that assessment.
I also agree that such a tradeoff is probably fine for many people, depending on their goals.
I studied music composition in college and then worked in adult world language curriculum. Perhaps a useful analogy is the use of Romanization to teach world languages to native English speakers (romaji, pinyin, etc.)
For languages like Chinese (Mandarin, Cantonese, etc.) where there is (virtually) no phonetic information in the writing system, it’s just too dang hard for a lot of people to make the leap to pronouncing characters as they are reas by natives. Pinyin or its equivalents are an “inauthentic” but valuable tool, but eventually you have to discard it to progress.
With straightforward phonetic languages like Korean, it’s actually counterproductive to try to bridge people to familiar symbols, because there’s very few resources for the learner until they start mapping sounds to Hangul.
That’d be my argument—-if you find you can’t easily make the leap to reading music and just want to get playing, sure, use this. But know that there’s a whole world of communication out there that you’ll be missing until you abandon this simplified representation and cross the full chasm.
Getting philosophical, I believe there could be a more efficient/learnable notation system, but I’m bearish on one inventor or committee inventing it in a lonely tower, because of how e.g. the French and Spanish academies try so hard to prescribe clarity for their countries’ official languages and then people just go and do the organic language evolution thing to meet their local communication needs anyway.
But there are rare counterexamples like Shong Lue Yang, a spiritual leader who created an effective writing system for Hmong.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shong_Lue_Yang
However over time it becomes easier and easier - and then you wonder is sheet music somehow optimal or is it 'good enough' and has withstood the test of time (also accounting for the fact that there is an enormous corpus of existing sheet music).
The question regarding this app (which looks awesome) is, is this format for reading music better than sheet music at the expert level (for professional musicians). And if not, how can we get that 10x improvement to make the switch from sheet music to something better.
I am, once again, asking people to understand that piano roll notation is no substitute for traditional notation when it comes to performance, among many other things.
Anyway, I've noticed some music youtubers can read and write midi notation just as fluidly as sheet music. Which can result in some fun shenanigans[^1]
[^1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sy_0mMcj0Q8
I suspect traditional sheet music is like the the qwerty keyboard.
At this point it’s momentum is so large that it’s impossible to stop.
I think there’s no denying that the particulars of the current system of musical notation is more or less an accident of history. But it’s also a local minimum—if you want to improve on it, you’re probably going to have to come up with radical changes.
Can we get this guy to play the Super Mario World ending theme with the notation from TFA?
Either you start with an impossibly long bar that covers the screen, where you can't see how the phrase flows into the next notes, or you later get to a dozen identical ultra-short bars mashed on top of each other.
And that's just one problem.
This is my biggest issue. I played piano for years and still struggle with this. (though I never excelled, and started young)
Any suggestions on a simple way to overcome this issue?
Some genres, like rock and folk music, involve little or no written material. There are certainly players who have never read music from a sheet. I attend a week-long folk music camp every summer, and there's no sheet music. I perform jazz "standards" in small ensemble settings entirely by ear.
But I also belong to a 19-piece jazz ensemble, that plays from sheet music. It's really not practical to expect the players to figure out their parts by ear and perform them from memory. Requiring that would greatly reduce the scope of our repertoire, and the band's ability to attract players. Sheet music literally expands the artistic palette of the composer, to the delight of both the performers and the audience.
Sheet music allows students to study and work through a large amount of literature, quickly. My kids are both studying music in college, and the amount of material they're exposed to every week is mind blowing, in lessons, class, rehearsals, and even getting together to play for fun.
Having been a part time working musician for a few decades, I've also noticed that sheet music is a band management tool. My band would be incapable of performing if we couldn't call in one or two substitutes per performance, some of whom are sight-reading on the bandstand. Same deal for a classical orchestra. In a smaller band that I play in, the bandleader is composing most of the material, and we scribble edits and rehearsal notes in our parts as we collaborate on refining each piece.
Up through the 1960s or 70s, the instrumental parts for most popular music was recorded by professional musicians who were working from written material, even if they made sometimes dramatic changes to the songs. This was just the most efficient way to manage a studio date. The touring musicians could always learn the songs by ear later on. There are stories of bands, where the first few dates of each tour still sounded rough as the band was coming up to speed on material that had already been professionally recorded.
You develop a reflexive connection between your ears and your hands, so the signals flow through your spinal cord and reptilian brain, while you're thinking consciously about the higher levels of musical structure and what's going on around you.
If the whole concept of this confuses me, and it does, it may confuse people who are eager to learn and get playing (without doing endless scales) and don't read sheet music.
I have no idea what tabs means in this context, though I am vaguely familiar, I think, with it as a guitar term (which you or a commenter came from).
Looking at the graphics on the site (I don't use Apple) gives me no clue how the notes for each hand are displayed "according to how they look on a keyboard."
What am I missing? Will someone who uses Apple, can't read sheet music, has never played any instrument and wants to learn how to play piano be able to figure it out within app tutorials?
It’s been my experience that most people who are fond of sheet music learned it at a very young age.
Or perhaps I’m just stupid? I’ve tried several times to learn sheet music in my 20’s and it is brutally difficult. Guitar tabs? Easy. Chord charts? No problem. Sheet music? Go fuck yourself!
What is it with the musicians in the comments here having _zero_ awareness? Sheet music is probably great! Sure, fine. But to claim that OP’s idea or even YouTube tutorials are outright not a good idea is laughable and tone deaf.
Not everyone’s folks bought them a Steinway and piano lessons at age 5-13 (the age when humans can magically pick up on absurdly difficult concepts with relatively little effort).
I started learning to play music as an adult with zero training as a child, and in my observation, adults (such as myself) don't actually have a problem learning sheet music, so long as they're comfortable practicing reading for several years daily, just like a child would. I'm several years in with daily practice, and I can work my way through sight-reading early-intermediate classical repertoire, albeit slowly.
Adults, at least those with the privilege of learning music, are usually already quite literate and perhaps even quite formally educated. Moreover, said adults also have a strong conception of music—their ears are good and attuned to their preferred styles of music. To many such adults then, it feels agonizing to start learning to read, and dedicate oneself to the pursuit at a child-level for many years. No doubt plasticity is a factor, but I genuinely think it's grossly overstated.
What do you mean by "learn it"? Just being able to decode what notes are supposed to be played and how long they should last from sheet music, given no time limit? Or doing it in near real-time?
My parents never bought us a piano. My grandmother passed her decidely-not-Steinway down to us, and also paid for lessons with a school music teacher. I joined the band in 5th grade and played a school-issue trumpet until my parents could afford a used one. After my 10th grade the band teacher lost almost all his trombone players to graduation, so he taught me over the summer before I started my junior year and gave me an old trombone with lots of dings, which I used through my freshman year in college, after which I dropped band because it was a 1 hr credit and took about 25–30 hours a week (practice with band, practice on own, perform at games), and I wasn't a music major.
The problem that sheet music solves is providing a static notation that can be read non-linearly for a dynamic piece of art that must be played linearly.
There's also no way to represent dynamics, as far as I can tell? The MIDI file won't give you that information.
Similarly unless you support MIDI 2 clip files (to my knowledge, no one does yet) you're also missing the key signature information, which is kind of important (otherwise the notes have no meaning - you need to infer their function from context, which is ambiguous)
Yes - there's no key signatures. It's something I may add in the future
Don't forget - most people who use this app don't learn a lot of this stuff. They just want to play
The thing is that if you want to play you need to learn some fundamentals first. A keyboard isn't a just slab of buttons to push at particular times.
If you’re serious about learning a piece, so you can perform it, you’ll want to transcribe it yourself, buy some better tabs, or buy sheet music. Or do some combination of those things. It’s not a problems with tabs themselves, but the general low quality tabs you see in ASCII art from random websites.
(For what it’s worth, I think it’s really easy to find sheet music for popular music. Sometimes too easy… I search for some pop song and get a couple dozen different arrangements for different instruments at different levels. The catch is that you have to pay a couple bucks.)
Then came adtech, and when those goons rolled in, they just couldn't believe the opportunity that these idiots were wasting by doing all this work for free and just giving it awa... er- STEALING SALES from LEGITIMATE ARTISTS.
It usually started with campaigns of rude emails that threatened and insulted the site owner. "How could you do something as horrible as stealing the food out of the mouths of the artists you claim to love by competing with their official sheet music? You're lucky I found you first you first since you're such a small-fry, because if they knew what you were up to, they'd be disgusted by you, and their lawyers would sue you so hard, your grandkids would still be in litigation. Oh and by the way, your tabs are shit, your site is shit, and you're a shit person, so why don't you do everyone a favor and shut down?"
Then, once the site owner had a very predictable panic attack and crisis of faith, typically chronicled publicly on their home page, they'd be made an offer of a few hundred dollars. "Look, the only way out of this is to sell. We're connected, partnered with artists. Unlike you, you lowlife, you thief, we make money so we can PAY the artists. It's the only way to do this fairly. If you really think about it, you'll understand and do the Right Thing."
Then, if the site owner sold, the site would be stripped, frozen, and crammed with ads until it was a desiccated husk of itself, or else forwarded to its new home. Either way, there would be no more new tabs, no photos from tours, event updates, band recommendations, or community interaction, all waning value siphoned into some traffic-whoring cramscammer's [2] pocket.
And if they didn't sell, either the interaction left enough of a negative impression they they lost their passion, or they were legally harassed until they shut down, but only after they were scraped and hoovered up into trashy meta-sites like ultimate-guitar.
This is the slum web we live in today, but with more aggressive authoritarian identity management.
[1] For reference: https://www.classtab.org/tabbing.htm#history
[2] I wonder if anyone can name the top two private forums for this prior 2005? Bonus points if you can name a person we all know today who was part of them!
That 'at the time' now seems to have extended to around 400 years (in Western classical tradition for instance, from pre-baroque). The evolution of another type of keyboard demonstrates that convenience is not necessarily the watchword.
https://www.thoughtco.com/history-of-the-computer-keyboard-1...
I completely agree with your point though, sheet music is an element from Western "Music Theory", and has nothing to do with being able to make music. It definitely does help if you want to have musicians trained in that Western cultural practice to play your music, but not everyone cares about that.
Edit: my point about Mr Greenwood is that he is a huge part of the sound of Radiohead, as well as the other members.