I had hopes for this video, but he didn't really go in-depth on the serious/successful reform projects.
We're all literate here. But very few of us can sight-sing. Attempts to teach musical literacy like reading literacy on a mass scale have failed.
Or have they? Some efforts have done much better than others. I looked into a guy called Lars Roverud, crediting with reforming church singing in Norway in the 19th century. His system was a simple one based on numbers, very similar to the Chinese one briefly touched on in Tantacrul's video. It worked really well.
Then there's the American shape note tradition. I'd say that's an impressive success: regular churchgoers, not just an especially talented choir, actually learn to sight-sing three and four-part harmony. They don't just learn the melodies by heart, they can actually flip to a new song and sing it. They rely on a partially symbolic system, and on harmonization conventions.
There are actually a lot of didactic music success stories, and what virtually all of them have in common is a symbolic system for pitch/harmony.
But what those systems also have in common, is that most of the benefit to literacy is gone a generation after someone says, "how great! now you should advance to real music notation!"
Edit: I have misread the title of the thread and assumed that a different video was linked by OP. My original comment was a link to the same video that OP is linking to, so I have removed it.
PS I had initially assumed that OP was linking to Adam Neely's latest video, "Should sheet music be required for music school?" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51P4-YQACvU
My experience with classical musical notation (as a pianist) is that it gets much easier to read the more you understand the conventions of the music.
After you have a sense of what conventional classical music sounds like, of the kinds of scales and melodies and patterns that it usually uses, then when you look at a new piece, you aren't starting from scratch; you are pattern matching against a document that contains mostly familiar idioms. And that makes it much, much faster and easier than reading something completely unfamiliar or avant-garde.
This is true with some kinds of jazz too: after you've played enough jazz standards, it gets easier to sight-read a jazz piece from a fake book, and have it come out pretty much right the first time. The chords are mostly what you expect, the melody uses familiar scales, and so on. It's not that things have to be 100% in genre, but if they are 80% in genre, then that reduces cognitive load immensely, and it's easy to cope with the 20% that is more surprising.
It's easy to think of a musical genre as being something that provides comfort and familiarity (if not boredom) to the listeners, but it's interesting to think about musical genres as a sort of shortcut that helps the performers as well.
I don't think there is any truly universal musical language and notation. It depends on the specific kind of music you care about. That being said - the other thing that made sheet music easier for me was taking a year of voice lessons. I came away more attuned to melodies than I used to be and better at understanding them on the page.
> it gets easier to sight-read a jazz piece from a fake book
There's a reason they call these "fake books". The purpose is to get close enough that you've effectively re-created the music without hitting all the exact notes. If that's your goal, then you're totally correct: familiarity with the genre will be enough to make it so that you probably played something that basically sounds roughly kinda mostly like basically what the author kinda roughly wanted it to sound like. That's real music! But it is not sight-reading. If you tried this in an Orchestra they'd tell you to GTFO.
If you actually care about playing the music exactly (and many don't, and that's fine!) then you can't be guessing at what note comes next. You have to actually read the music. Conventions have nothing to do with that. If you find it easy to sight-read a complex piece of piano music, you either:
- Are an absolute phenom wunderkind professional piano player, one of the top in the world
- Have actually heard the song played before and are using your ears as much as your eyes (nothing wrong with this!)
- Are guessing and getting it wrong sometimes (not necessarily anything wrong with this either, but you'll learn it wrong and then never master it exactly if that's your goal)
People not “used” to music don’t realize that for any particular segment, there’s really not an infinite number of possible “next notes” - just like when reading English and you see a three letter word starting “ca” it’s only got a few options to finish it up: b,d,m,n,p,r,t,w kinda thing.
That's not reading. That's guessing. Look up the "three cueing system" for reading. It's a workaround for bad readers. You're saying that people can read music, unless the music does something unexpected, and then they'd play the wrong thing. And possibly never know it. So they're not reading music at all. Why bother?
Can you pronounce these fake words? I'll bet your pronunciation is basically the same as everyone else with a similar accent. Yet none of the middle letters are on your list. That's because you can read. Advocating for guessing what the next note is when sight-reading is terrible advice. You will learn the song wrong and never fully un-learn it.
> [X] gets much easier to read the more you understand the conventions of the [form]
This is speciously true for almost everything though. You can learn Rust or C or COBOL to the point where you understand idiomatic code well at first glance. But (1) newbies still get confused by these languages and (2) COBOL remains a terrible choice for new code.
That any language can be "sight read" isn't really at issue. It's whether or not the language we've picked is a good one or not.
I see what you mean. For what it's worth, I wasn't mainly trying to comment on whether classical music notation is a good general language of music. My view, to emphasize, is that classical notation is very useful in certain contexts, absolutely not in others.
Some cases where Western classical musical notation is a really poor fit:
- anything with pitch bending and non-Western or microtonal scales
- non-tonal or percussion instruments
- folk or popular styles of guitar (which anyway has a whole subculture of guitar tab)
On the other hand, if you want to learn classical piano... I don't think it would make much sense not to learn classical musical notation. In this sense, I don't really agree with the COBOL analogy; COBOL is obsolete in a way that sheet music just isn't.
I can't say I really have any opinion on what is the best general case musical notation style for newbies. I guess I leave it to school music teachers to figure that out!
Now I have something to refer to every time I hear someone complain about the standard notation. I am an orchestra musician, and about once a year someone comes up with a system with more shortcomings than benefits. I have started using the socratic method, but I have had conversations that ended with people saying that it isn't a problem to not be able to write triplets. "Then you switch to 6/8".
yes - perhaps other systems can can capture the simpler cases, but standard music notation has been battle tested against many instruments and multi instrument. And iterated on for literally centuries.
It's fine to acknowledge there is a barrier to entry and there may be better DSLs specific to particular use cases but it's also a shame that we have this one language that has captured so much of existing music already
The question is what is music notation even supposed to be.
Is the purpose of music notation to be something you can set in front of a musician and make them play the music the way you want? In that case it performs pretty well, though it varies widely by instrument (both the ability to let them perform, and the actual notation).
But if the purpose is music literacy, letting regular people read a score and be able to hear the music in their head, then it's not working well. Even experienced musicians (like I assume OP is) usually associate notation not with sound, but with finger and lip positions first, the means needed to reproduce it. And only then, sometimes, from finger positions to sounds. I remember the band kids in ear training classes in high school wiggling three fingers, playing an imaginary trumpet, in order to be able to sight sing.
The reason I'm interested in alternative notation is that I dream of being able to read music like I read text. Who wouldn't want that? And despite having learned to sight read on some instruments and to sight sing reasonably, I don't feel like I can do that.
That always did my head in and still does. Ok, so each bar has 6 notes and they're eighth notes. But there are only 6 of them, so why are they specified as an 8th note? They're sixth notes by definition surely? I'm with the crowd that 3/4 should be correctly written as 3/3 even though we were told that was a misnomer in school.
No, they're eighth notes because there are eight of them in a whole note.
In the UK we call them quavers, so we don't have this misconception. The time signatures are the same though - fortunately. They have to be represented somehow, although I'm sure we could do it better than we are it does the job.
3/4 is definitely meant to be 3/4, as it tells you are three beats in the bar, and those beats are represented by crotchets/quarter notes. They're not quarter notes because they're a quarter of the bar, but because you need four of them to make up the duration of a whole note.
You can just as happily have a piece in 3/2, or 3/1, or 3/8, although in most genres all of those would imply different things about exactly how the rhythmic emphasis works.
I do think we could do better around compound times like 6/8 and 9/8 vs simple times like 3/4 and 4/2, but we seem to manage okay. You do need genre knowledge to read music correctly, there's just no getting away from that. Any system which is capable of recording every nuance required would be unreadably dense.
Although we have sound recording now, lucky us, so we can just use that...
It isn't a fraction. The bottom number just refers to the size of a beat, with the added convention that certain time signatures imply a hidden 3x on the size of a beat. 6/8 has two beats of three eighth notes in a measure. It is just an idiom.
If it says 6/8, it means the bar has a duration of 6/8th note. To play that, you play six 8th notes in a bar. Eight 8th notes have the duration of a whole note, so six of them fit in a bar.
Eh. I watched the video and I hear him when he says it’s a hard problem. But music notation is still so far from ideal:
- Why have a bass and treble cleft be different? We could just standardise one. It wouldn’t matter much for professional musicians but would make a massive difference to people learning music.
- It’s unnecessary to have the second number in a key signature. Just standardise on / 4 - at least for beginners. 2/4. 3/4. 4/4. 6/4. Having different key signatures be denoted using different types of notes confused the hell out of beginners for seemingly no benefit.
- So many music names are stupid. It’s not an “oct”ave. An “octave” has 7 or 12 notes depending on the scale. Seeing +8ve / +15ve drives me nuts. It’s +7/+14. Learn to count.
And so on.
Intel assembler is also a battle tested notation that has stood the test of time. But we don’t use it much. I understand that classical music notation is a good system for professional musicians. But that doesn’t mean it’s good for beginners. We don’t teach rust to high schoolers who’ve never programmed before. We start them off with something easier and they can learn rust later if they want.
Even the video says piano roll notation is useful while composing. Why shouldn’t beginners use that?
I get that it’s a hard problem. I know I don’t have all the answers. But surely there is room for improvement here. There’s no way this is the best music notation humanity will ever invent. We should celebrate the explorers, not demonise them. If they come up with something good, we all benefit.
> Why have a bass and treble cleft be different? We could just standardise one.
This has been tried, the sub-bass clef is just the treble clef two octaves down. But then the notes sit too high on the staff, with too many ledger lines. Most musicians find that learning a different clef is doable with a bit of effort. The meaning of relative intervals on the staff is the same, only the actual pitches are different.
> It’s unnecessary to have the second number in a key signature.
3/4 has different style implications than 3/8, same with 6/4 wrt. 6/8 or even 2/4 wrt. 2/2. These distinctions are quite convenient, that's why they're kept around.
An octave or etc. has seven or twelve distinct pitch classes, but if you want to linearly write out a full octave in sheet music in a way that can be heard clearly, you need eight notes--similar for other intervals. It's useful to be aware of both notions--the written-out 'interval' one usually finds and the zero-based 'distance', which is what you reference here.
Staff notation is ideal for writing music in staff notation.
The politics of music are what makes it a hard problem. Staff notation is the notation of music written for clergy and kings. So there are banal incentives to premise arguments about music on the idea that staff notation notates everything that is properly/fully/truly music.
And the politics of music is so pervasive we don't even think about it as politics. So pervasive that describing the music we listen to is often a shorthand for deeply describing ourselves...and perhaps describing the music we do not listen to, even more so.
To put it another way, there are very well-established financially-backed conventions for what constitutes an informed opinion about music, and a corresponding canon of compositions.
An “oct”ave is 8 intervals not 8 notes. The 1 is the root, and the 8 is the same note as the 1 again (2:1).
There’s no specific reason to have 8, or 12, or 7, we just decided that way, same as we decided to count intervals not notes, and to start with 1 not 0.
You could just as well say “let’s divide the frequency range between x and 2x by 10 instead of 12”. Or we do something between x and 3x instead. We just don’t.
For what it’s worth, most guitarists (probably the largest group of amateur musicians in the west) use tab notation to begin with and many never graduate to standard notation.
As others have said, music notation is often not much more than a “paint by numbers” - experienced musicians can “paint” the picture without reading every single number.
There are actually even more clefs than just those two, but those two are by far the most common. A while back I was curious why guitar music is written transposed up an octave and why it is written on the treble clef instead of using both bass and treble clefs like piano music.
One of the thing I found when searching for the answer to that is that piano music is written using two clefs at least partly because the hands are largely independent on piano so it can essentially function as two instruments. Music that for strings might take two instruments to play, such as cello and a violin, can be played on one piano with one handed taking the part for the bass instrument and one taking the part for the treble instrument.
It thus makes some sense to notate the left hand part with the same clef common for bass instruments and the right hand part with the same clef common for treble instruments.
The answer I found for why guitar uses just one clef and why it is transposed is that (1) using the transposed treble clef was cheaper and faster back in the days when printing music was expensive and hard, (2) guitar doesn't have the hand independence piano does.
Here's where guitar in EADGBE tuning would fit without transposition on the piano bass/treble clefs, on just the bass clef, and on just the treble clef:
Actual Actual Actual
Grand Bass Treble
--E- --E- --E-
D D D
--C- --C- --C-
B B B
--A- --A- --A-
G G G
---------F- --F- ---------F-
| E 12 E 12 | E 12
---------D- --D- ---------D-
| C C | C
---------B- --B- ---------B-
| A A | A
---------G- --G- ---------G-
| F F | F
---1st---E- 1st --E- ---1st---E-
D D D
middle --C- middle --C- middle --C-
2nd B 2nd B 2nd B
---------A- ---------A- --A-
| 3rd G | 3rd G 3rd G
---------F- ---------F- --F-
| E | E E
---4th---D- ---4th---D- 4th --D-
| C | C C
---------B- ---------B- --B-
| 5th A | 5th A 5th A
---------G- ---------G- --G-
F F F
6th --E- 6th --E- 6th --E-
The 1st, 2nd, 3rd etc mark the notes on the open strings. I've also marked middle C for reference. The 12 to the left of the second highest E marks the E on the 12th fret of the first string, which is the highest fret before the neck joins the body on a normal classical guitar. The fretboard has frets beyond that, but unless the guitar has a cutaway body they are harder to play so aren't used as much. Classic guitars usually have another 7 frets beyond that which would go up 4 more notes to B. Acoustic guitars often have the neck join the body a little later and have one more total frets so go up to the C above the 12th. Electric guitars typically have the neck join the body way higher and have 12 frets above the 12th fret, going all the way to the E an octave above the 12th fret.
Still, most guitar music is going to mostly stay below that 12th fret. Given that, it fits pretty well on the piano style bass/treble clefs. If music had been cheap and easy to print, and we didn't get hung up on the guitar not having the hand independence of the piano, I think notating guitar without transposition on the bass/treble clefs like piano would have worked out fine.
If that's too hard and expensive, then it becomes clear why it gets transposed. If it was notated just using bass clef you'd need ledger lines for everything on the top two strings, which is often most or all of your melody. When your printed music involves hand typesetting on primitive equipment that is annoying.
Even worse would by untransposed on the treble clef. Now almost everything played on strings 3-6, and much of string 2, would need ledger lines.
Transposing up an octave gives this:
Transposed Transposed
Treble Bass
E E
--D- --D-
C C
--B- --B-
A A
--G- --G-
F F
--E- 12 --E- 12
D D
--C- --C-
B B
--A- --A-
G G
---------F- -F-
| 1st E 1st E
---------D- -D-
| middle C middle C
---2nd---B- 2nd -B-
| A A
---3rd---G- 3rd. -G-
| F F
---------E- -E-
4th D 4th D
--C- --C-
B B
5th --A- ---5th---A-
G | G
--F- ---------F-
6th E | 6th E
-----------
|
-----------
|
-----------
Transposed up an octave on the treble clef needs the same number of ledger lines to cover from the lowest note on the 6th string up to the 12th fret on the 1st string as does untransposed on the bass clef, but it it puts the bulk of more music in or next to the lines of the staff so there will usually be fewer times you actually need to use ledger lines.
Bass and treble clefs are different because they need to cover different ranges. Likewise with alto and tenor clefs, the other two you see most often in modern notation. Or baritone clef, great bass clef, soprano clef, French violin clef... it goes on and on. Actually the mass codification of treble and bass clefs is a problem, because people don't learn to adapt. Once you can read four or five clefs fluently, new ones are pretty easy to deal with. If you only ever learn one or two they all seem difficult.
The "second number in the key signature" is actually in the time signature, and it's pretty important. Although we didn't always have it - some older music just says "3" and you have to figure out 3 whats by looking at the music. Or go earlier than that and you'd have a circle, a broken circle, or one of those with a line through it. And no bar lines. I think most musicians agree the current system is an improvement on these in general. But take modern convention, look at how we write out English traditional music and you'll see that the 3/4 or 3/2 distinction is quite important as the first one is a waltz and the second is a hornpipe. You might not care about that, but anybody trying to dance to that tune will.
If it helps, intervals are named in a 1-based system not a 0-based system. They're called octaves because you go to the eighth note in the sequence, not because you add seven. And yes I know there are actually 12 notes in an octave in Western music, but you're usually operating in a key or mode that has picked out eight of them to be used in that moment, because that's how Western harmony works.
Of course we can improve music notation, and we will - it is still changing. Composers need to write down things that haven't been written down before, so they come up with a way to represent it. If that thing catches on, the notation will become standardised.
Time signatures, which you called out, have changed completely over the centuries. You used to get a circle, a broken circle, or one of those with a line through it. That was it. They'll probably change again when someone has a really good reason to do it.
Even our conventions for what note values to use have changed. There's a reason the semibreve - a whole bar of 4/4 - has a name which means "half a short note". Yet many musicians today don't know what a breve or a long or a longa even look like, because there's been a shift towards using quavers, semiquavers, demisemiquavers and so forth. The whole US system for note naming kind of enforces that, with the idea of a semibreve being a "whole note" as if 4/4 is somehow special (it's not).
So I just started piano (got one for Christmas). Notation is a PITA but the effort to decipher is still orders of magnitude easier than actually playing anything.
I can imagine the effort ratio gets even more skewed by the time you get to the level at which you could invent a better notation, so in the end nobody bothers.
I don’t think you can accurately extrapolate from one week of piano experience. If you keep at it, I suspect how it feels to play in 6 months or 6 years from now will be very different from how it feels to play now.
I’ve been playing piano casually for about 18 months now. I can sight read easy music (though I can’t play smoothly) and I can play a bit of jazz. Physically playing the instrument - hitting the notes I intend to hit - is pretty easy. But reading sheet music (and especially reading the rhythm) is absolutely my bottleneck right now when it comes to performance. I’m sympathetic to the problem - improving sheet music notation seems hard. But learning it really is a hassle.
If you have a piano with MIDI I'd love it if you as a beginner would give pianojacq.com a workout and let me know what you find could be improved. It's super hard to go back to that first impression state and your feedback would be very valuable. Regardless: congrats on getting an instrument and starting out on it!
Musical notation is fine. But you have to go out of your way to encounter it. By comparison, written text is literally everywhere. I walked past a couple of pages of accumulated text just by walking to work and did not see a single musical symbol anywhere.
Musical notation is absolutely terrible, possibly even as terrible as written english, just in different ways.
Not only you cannot infer anything from context while reading for the first time (unlike with english), modal markings that completely change meaning of most symbols are scattere all over — slightly to the left, slightly above, left margin, top of the page etc
Like a lot of things in life, it's fine. Not good. We could do a lot better, but only with considerable human effort, for which there is not a strong incentive.
My only criticism is Tantacrul doesn't mention tracker notation.
While I don't disagree with his conclusion about the advantages of conventional notation -- I kept thinking about Iverson's Notation as a tool of Thought as I watched the video -- I do think that tracker notation might be roughly equivalent to conventional notation as a way of thinking about music.
It just that tracker notation isn't optimized for tonal harmony (aka the music of dead German men) and staff notation is.
Instead tracker notation is optimized for precision and machine reproduction.
Tracker notation directly facilitates complex musical composition by an individual, performance by an individual, and mass dissemination of those compositions.
Essentially, Tantacrul's argument is premised on the necessity of paper and meatware performance. Don't misunderstand me, I think MuseScore is awesome and recently I've found composing in staff notation valuable and efficient. This is just a critique of his essay.
And perhaps a deeper criticism is that his assumption of tonal harmony and paper and meatspace may reflect the kind of bias about the nature of music he criticizes elsewhere. I mean trackers are a "folk art" technology. They are a very plain and intellectually accessible way of notating music.
The verbosity of tracker notation means a person can gain competence in a matter of hours rather than years. Tracker notation removes the social gatekeeping that accompanies traditional western music education (that criticism isn't wrong). I mean staff notation puts tonal harmony at the center of composition. Percussion and microtones get short shrift...nevermind samples and noise and effects (what is the musical notation for a dotted quarter note delay?).
Idk which tracker you talk about, but the ones I know are difficult to read. Sure, you can learn to play a single note melody faster, but I doubt it'll work for complex pieces. At the very least, you'll need to constrain the format, if only to know which hand (or foot) should play which note. Trackers also lack notation for fingering, tempo, dynamics, etc. Piano rolls would be entirely a no-no. That would turn into a giant, unreadable staff.
I don't know what social gatekeeping there is for the current notation system. I know a teenager who learns the basics from Duolingo.
> what is the musical notation for a dotted quarter note delay?
Composers have been very free in adapting notation. They make up a few symbols and strokes, and explain them in the first pages of the score. They've made up notation for aleatoric music, free passages with some direction, knocking on the instrument, etc. If someone wants to prescribe a certain echo effect only on a particular note, that's doable.
"Tracker notation" is basically the same as the "piano roll" he talks about, right?
Anyway, I think "meatware performance" also underlies the criticisms he's responding to of standard notation as applied to music students, most of whom are trying to physically play instruments (those trying to compose on a computer are indeed on a completely different track that doesn't need to care about paper or performance). So he may have picked it up from that context of the whole which-notation question. Hopefully this doesn't count as "having an argument". :)
Yes, but tracker fans are obsessive about their preferred UI in the same way as Emacs or vi devotees. I've been making electronic music off and on for nearly 30 years and I can't stand trackers; it's just an event list so now you have to read everything rather than looking at it.
Also the concept of scale/key is not at all limited to European composers; most music systems have a concept of scale degree, but for computer music it's almost always been shoehorned into the 12-tone equal temperament system. Trackers don't alleviate this.
Just to be clear, Tantacrul is (last I heard) head of design for MuseScore, a program for composing music on a computer. That's probably why I feel it is worth the bother of having an opinion about his essay.
Tracker notation is approximately MIDI data with a human readable interface.
Tracker notation is even more complicated in that duration is built into the sample, and whether the sample has endless looping repetition built in or not - none of which is possible to discern from looking at the tracker notation itself.
Let alone thoss 'notes'are actually a bunch major and minor synth chords in different keys, or orchestra hits in a 2-unlimited mod.
> tonal harmony (aka the music of dead German men)
You mean the basis for 99.9% of all the music anyone alive today in the Americas or Europe has ever heard? And probably 80% to 90%+ of all music in the rest of the world too?
Heads up, that's about an hour and 15 minutes of video, the first 10 minutes of which actually talks about chess as an example of the sort of perspective that will be applied to the music problem.
I like the idea at the end about a standardized data format, which would allow the musical data to be arbitrarily rendered in any notation. Kind of like an "interior language" or an "internal symantic representation", sort of how we use ASTs to represent code.
Readit News
We're all literate here. But very few of us can sight-sing. Attempts to teach musical literacy like reading literacy on a mass scale have failed.
Or have they? Some efforts have done much better than others. I looked into a guy called Lars Roverud, crediting with reforming church singing in Norway in the 19th century. His system was a simple one based on numbers, very similar to the Chinese one briefly touched on in Tantacrul's video. It worked really well.
Then there's the American shape note tradition. I'd say that's an impressive success: regular churchgoers, not just an especially talented choir, actually learn to sight-sing three and four-part harmony. They don't just learn the melodies by heart, they can actually flip to a new song and sing it. They rely on a partially symbolic system, and on harmonization conventions.
There are actually a lot of didactic music success stories, and what virtually all of them have in common is a symbolic system for pitch/harmony.
But what those systems also have in common, is that most of the benefit to literacy is gone a generation after someone says, "how great! now you should advance to real music notation!"
Deleted Comment
PS I had initially assumed that OP was linking to Adam Neely's latest video, "Should sheet music be required for music school?" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51P4-YQACvU
After you have a sense of what conventional classical music sounds like, of the kinds of scales and melodies and patterns that it usually uses, then when you look at a new piece, you aren't starting from scratch; you are pattern matching against a document that contains mostly familiar idioms. And that makes it much, much faster and easier than reading something completely unfamiliar or avant-garde.
This is true with some kinds of jazz too: after you've played enough jazz standards, it gets easier to sight-read a jazz piece from a fake book, and have it come out pretty much right the first time. The chords are mostly what you expect, the melody uses familiar scales, and so on. It's not that things have to be 100% in genre, but if they are 80% in genre, then that reduces cognitive load immensely, and it's easy to cope with the 20% that is more surprising.
It's easy to think of a musical genre as being something that provides comfort and familiarity (if not boredom) to the listeners, but it's interesting to think about musical genres as a sort of shortcut that helps the performers as well.
I don't think there is any truly universal musical language and notation. It depends on the specific kind of music you care about. That being said - the other thing that made sheet music easier for me was taking a year of voice lessons. I came away more attuned to melodies than I used to be and better at understanding them on the page.
There's a reason they call these "fake books". The purpose is to get close enough that you've effectively re-created the music without hitting all the exact notes. If that's your goal, then you're totally correct: familiarity with the genre will be enough to make it so that you probably played something that basically sounds roughly kinda mostly like basically what the author kinda roughly wanted it to sound like. That's real music! But it is not sight-reading. If you tried this in an Orchestra they'd tell you to GTFO.
If you actually care about playing the music exactly (and many don't, and that's fine!) then you can't be guessing at what note comes next. You have to actually read the music. Conventions have nothing to do with that. If you find it easy to sight-read a complex piece of piano music, you either:
- Are an absolute phenom wunderkind professional piano player, one of the top in the world
- Have actually heard the song played before and are using your ears as much as your eyes (nothing wrong with this!)
- Are guessing and getting it wrong sometimes (not necessarily anything wrong with this either, but you'll learn it wrong and then never master it exactly if that's your goal)
Can you pronounce these fake words? I'll bet your pronunciation is basically the same as everyone else with a similar accent. Yet none of the middle letters are on your list. That's because you can read. Advocating for guessing what the next note is when sight-reading is terrible advice. You will learn the song wrong and never fully un-learn it.
Caquin
Caanin
Cazin
Cayin
Cacin
This is speciously true for almost everything though. You can learn Rust or C or COBOL to the point where you understand idiomatic code well at first glance. But (1) newbies still get confused by these languages and (2) COBOL remains a terrible choice for new code.
That any language can be "sight read" isn't really at issue. It's whether or not the language we've picked is a good one or not.
Some cases where Western classical musical notation is a really poor fit:
- anything with pitch bending and non-Western or microtonal scales
- non-tonal or percussion instruments
- folk or popular styles of guitar (which anyway has a whole subculture of guitar tab)
On the other hand, if you want to learn classical piano... I don't think it would make much sense not to learn classical musical notation. In this sense, I don't really agree with the COBOL analogy; COBOL is obsolete in a way that sheet music just isn't.
I can't say I really have any opinion on what is the best general case musical notation style for newbies. I guess I leave it to school music teachers to figure that out!
It's fine to acknowledge there is a barrier to entry and there may be better DSLs specific to particular use cases but it's also a shame that we have this one language that has captured so much of existing music already
Is the purpose of music notation to be something you can set in front of a musician and make them play the music the way you want? In that case it performs pretty well, though it varies widely by instrument (both the ability to let them perform, and the actual notation).
But if the purpose is music literacy, letting regular people read a score and be able to hear the music in their head, then it's not working well. Even experienced musicians (like I assume OP is) usually associate notation not with sound, but with finger and lip positions first, the means needed to reproduce it. And only then, sometimes, from finger positions to sounds. I remember the band kids in ear training classes in high school wiggling three fingers, playing an imaginary trumpet, in order to be able to sight sing.
The reason I'm interested in alternative notation is that I dream of being able to read music like I read text. Who wouldn't want that? And despite having learned to sight read on some instruments and to sight sing reasonably, I don't feel like I can do that.
In the UK we call them quavers, so we don't have this misconception. The time signatures are the same though - fortunately. They have to be represented somehow, although I'm sure we could do it better than we are it does the job.
3/4 is definitely meant to be 3/4, as it tells you are three beats in the bar, and those beats are represented by crotchets/quarter notes. They're not quarter notes because they're a quarter of the bar, but because you need four of them to make up the duration of a whole note.
You can just as happily have a piece in 3/2, or 3/1, or 3/8, although in most genres all of those would imply different things about exactly how the rhythmic emphasis works.
I do think we could do better around compound times like 6/8 and 9/8 vs simple times like 3/4 and 4/2, but we seem to manage okay. You do need genre knowledge to read music correctly, there's just no getting away from that. Any system which is capable of recording every nuance required would be unreadably dense.
Although we have sound recording now, lucky us, so we can just use that...
- Why have a bass and treble cleft be different? We could just standardise one. It wouldn’t matter much for professional musicians but would make a massive difference to people learning music.
- It’s unnecessary to have the second number in a key signature. Just standardise on / 4 - at least for beginners. 2/4. 3/4. 4/4. 6/4. Having different key signatures be denoted using different types of notes confused the hell out of beginners for seemingly no benefit.
- So many music names are stupid. It’s not an “oct”ave. An “octave” has 7 or 12 notes depending on the scale. Seeing +8ve / +15ve drives me nuts. It’s +7/+14. Learn to count.
And so on.
Intel assembler is also a battle tested notation that has stood the test of time. But we don’t use it much. I understand that classical music notation is a good system for professional musicians. But that doesn’t mean it’s good for beginners. We don’t teach rust to high schoolers who’ve never programmed before. We start them off with something easier and they can learn rust later if they want.
Even the video says piano roll notation is useful while composing. Why shouldn’t beginners use that?
I get that it’s a hard problem. I know I don’t have all the answers. But surely there is room for improvement here. There’s no way this is the best music notation humanity will ever invent. We should celebrate the explorers, not demonise them. If they come up with something good, we all benefit.
This has been tried, the sub-bass clef is just the treble clef two octaves down. But then the notes sit too high on the staff, with too many ledger lines. Most musicians find that learning a different clef is doable with a bit of effort. The meaning of relative intervals on the staff is the same, only the actual pitches are different.
> It’s unnecessary to have the second number in a key signature.
3/4 has different style implications than 3/8, same with 6/4 wrt. 6/8 or even 2/4 wrt. 2/2. These distinctions are quite convenient, that's why they're kept around.
An octave or etc. has seven or twelve distinct pitch classes, but if you want to linearly write out a full octave in sheet music in a way that can be heard clearly, you need eight notes--similar for other intervals. It's useful to be aware of both notions--the written-out 'interval' one usually finds and the zero-based 'distance', which is what you reference here.
The politics of music are what makes it a hard problem. Staff notation is the notation of music written for clergy and kings. So there are banal incentives to premise arguments about music on the idea that staff notation notates everything that is properly/fully/truly music.
And the politics of music is so pervasive we don't even think about it as politics. So pervasive that describing the music we listen to is often a shorthand for deeply describing ourselves...and perhaps describing the music we do not listen to, even more so.
To put it another way, there are very well-established financially-backed conventions for what constitutes an informed opinion about music, and a corresponding canon of compositions.
There’s no specific reason to have 8, or 12, or 7, we just decided that way, same as we decided to count intervals not notes, and to start with 1 not 0.
You could just as well say “let’s divide the frequency range between x and 2x by 10 instead of 12”. Or we do something between x and 3x instead. We just don’t.
For what it’s worth, most guitarists (probably the largest group of amateur musicians in the west) use tab notation to begin with and many never graduate to standard notation.
As others have said, music notation is often not much more than a “paint by numbers” - experienced musicians can “paint” the picture without reading every single number.
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There are actually even more clefs than just those two, but those two are by far the most common. A while back I was curious why guitar music is written transposed up an octave and why it is written on the treble clef instead of using both bass and treble clefs like piano music.
One of the thing I found when searching for the answer to that is that piano music is written using two clefs at least partly because the hands are largely independent on piano so it can essentially function as two instruments. Music that for strings might take two instruments to play, such as cello and a violin, can be played on one piano with one handed taking the part for the bass instrument and one taking the part for the treble instrument.
It thus makes some sense to notate the left hand part with the same clef common for bass instruments and the right hand part with the same clef common for treble instruments.
The answer I found for why guitar uses just one clef and why it is transposed is that (1) using the transposed treble clef was cheaper and faster back in the days when printing music was expensive and hard, (2) guitar doesn't have the hand independence piano does.
Here's where guitar in EADGBE tuning would fit without transposition on the piano bass/treble clefs, on just the bass clef, and on just the treble clef:
The 1st, 2nd, 3rd etc mark the notes on the open strings. I've also marked middle C for reference. The 12 to the left of the second highest E marks the E on the 12th fret of the first string, which is the highest fret before the neck joins the body on a normal classical guitar. The fretboard has frets beyond that, but unless the guitar has a cutaway body they are harder to play so aren't used as much. Classic guitars usually have another 7 frets beyond that which would go up 4 more notes to B. Acoustic guitars often have the neck join the body a little later and have one more total frets so go up to the C above the 12th. Electric guitars typically have the neck join the body way higher and have 12 frets above the 12th fret, going all the way to the E an octave above the 12th fret.Still, most guitar music is going to mostly stay below that 12th fret. Given that, it fits pretty well on the piano style bass/treble clefs. If music had been cheap and easy to print, and we didn't get hung up on the guitar not having the hand independence of the piano, I think notating guitar without transposition on the bass/treble clefs like piano would have worked out fine.
If that's too hard and expensive, then it becomes clear why it gets transposed. If it was notated just using bass clef you'd need ledger lines for everything on the top two strings, which is often most or all of your melody. When your printed music involves hand typesetting on primitive equipment that is annoying.
Even worse would by untransposed on the treble clef. Now almost everything played on strings 3-6, and much of string 2, would need ledger lines.
Transposing up an octave gives this:
Transposed up an octave on the treble clef needs the same number of ledger lines to cover from the lowest note on the 6th string up to the 12th fret on the 1st string as does untransposed on the bass clef, but it it puts the bulk of more music in or next to the lines of the staff so there will usually be fewer times you actually need to use ledger lines.The "second number in the key signature" is actually in the time signature, and it's pretty important. Although we didn't always have it - some older music just says "3" and you have to figure out 3 whats by looking at the music. Or go earlier than that and you'd have a circle, a broken circle, or one of those with a line through it. And no bar lines. I think most musicians agree the current system is an improvement on these in general. But take modern convention, look at how we write out English traditional music and you'll see that the 3/4 or 3/2 distinction is quite important as the first one is a waltz and the second is a hornpipe. You might not care about that, but anybody trying to dance to that tune will.
If it helps, intervals are named in a 1-based system not a 0-based system. They're called octaves because you go to the eighth note in the sequence, not because you add seven. And yes I know there are actually 12 notes in an octave in Western music, but you're usually operating in a key or mode that has picked out eight of them to be used in that moment, because that's how Western harmony works.
Of course we can improve music notation, and we will - it is still changing. Composers need to write down things that haven't been written down before, so they come up with a way to represent it. If that thing catches on, the notation will become standardised.
Time signatures, which you called out, have changed completely over the centuries. You used to get a circle, a broken circle, or one of those with a line through it. That was it. They'll probably change again when someone has a really good reason to do it.
Even our conventions for what note values to use have changed. There's a reason the semibreve - a whole bar of 4/4 - has a name which means "half a short note". Yet many musicians today don't know what a breve or a long or a longa even look like, because there's been a shift towards using quavers, semiquavers, demisemiquavers and so forth. The whole US system for note naming kind of enforces that, with the idea of a semibreve being a "whole note" as if 4/4 is somehow special (it's not).
I can imagine the effort ratio gets even more skewed by the time you get to the level at which you could invent a better notation, so in the end nobody bothers.
I’ve been playing piano casually for about 18 months now. I can sight read easy music (though I can’t play smoothly) and I can play a bit of jazz. Physically playing the instrument - hitting the notes I intend to hit - is pretty easy. But reading sheet music (and especially reading the rhythm) is absolutely my bottleneck right now when it comes to performance. I’m sympathetic to the problem - improving sheet music notation seems hard. But learning it really is a hassle.
Not only you cannot infer anything from context while reading for the first time (unlike with english), modal markings that completely change meaning of most symbols are scattere all over — slightly to the left, slightly above, left margin, top of the page etc
While I don't disagree with his conclusion about the advantages of conventional notation -- I kept thinking about Iverson's Notation as a tool of Thought as I watched the video -- I do think that tracker notation might be roughly equivalent to conventional notation as a way of thinking about music.
It just that tracker notation isn't optimized for tonal harmony (aka the music of dead German men) and staff notation is.
Instead tracker notation is optimized for precision and machine reproduction.
Tracker notation directly facilitates complex musical composition by an individual, performance by an individual, and mass dissemination of those compositions.
Essentially, Tantacrul's argument is premised on the necessity of paper and meatware performance. Don't misunderstand me, I think MuseScore is awesome and recently I've found composing in staff notation valuable and efficient. This is just a critique of his essay.
And perhaps a deeper criticism is that his assumption of tonal harmony and paper and meatspace may reflect the kind of bias about the nature of music he criticizes elsewhere. I mean trackers are a "folk art" technology. They are a very plain and intellectually accessible way of notating music.
The verbosity of tracker notation means a person can gain competence in a matter of hours rather than years. Tracker notation removes the social gatekeeping that accompanies traditional western music education (that criticism isn't wrong). I mean staff notation puts tonal harmony at the center of composition. Percussion and microtones get short shrift...nevermind samples and noise and effects (what is the musical notation for a dotted quarter note delay?).
None of this means I didn't enjoy the video.
And none of it means I want to have an argument.
Notation as a tool of thought: https://www.jsoftware.com/papers/tot.htm
I don't know what social gatekeeping there is for the current notation system. I know a teenager who learns the basics from Duolingo.
> what is the musical notation for a dotted quarter note delay?
Composers have been very free in adapting notation. They make up a few symbols and strokes, and explain them in the first pages of the score. They've made up notation for aleatoric music, free passages with some direction, knocking on the instrument, etc. If someone wants to prescribe a certain echo effect only on a particular note, that's doable.
[1]: or just as strawmen are made from words not straw.
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Anyway, I think "meatware performance" also underlies the criticisms he's responding to of standard notation as applied to music students, most of whom are trying to physically play instruments (those trying to compose on a computer are indeed on a completely different track that doesn't need to care about paper or performance). So he may have picked it up from that context of the whole which-notation question. Hopefully this doesn't count as "having an argument". :)
Tracker notation indicates pitch via mark (text), instrument is horizontal, and time is vertical.
Also the concept of scale/key is not at all limited to European composers; most music systems have a concept of scale degree, but for computer music it's almost always been shoehorned into the 12-tone equal temperament system. Trackers don't alleviate this.
Tracker notation is approximately MIDI data with a human readable interface.
Let alone thoss 'notes'are actually a bunch major and minor synth chords in different keys, or orchestra hits in a 2-unlimited mod.
You mean the basis for 99.9% of all the music anyone alive today in the Americas or Europe has ever heard? And probably 80% to 90%+ of all music in the rest of the world too?