I'm very skeptical that this is an improvement (but kudos for thinking outside the box). Here's something that was intended as constructive criticism, but maybe ended up more as just criticism:
Removing the key signature is not a good idea. When playing in G major, the sharp accidental on the Fs is not put at the beginning of the line just to avoid printing it in the score. Rather, it fits there because when I play in G major, I put my brain in G major mode, in which case it would be distracting to have an accidental on every single F.
Similarly, writing a special symbol for each pitch seems it would get heavily in the way of transposing on the fly. The position already encodes the pitch, and the ABCDEFG names kind of get in the way of understanding the melody, which is more about relative intervals than absolute values.
And what does the little parenthesis on the length line mean? For half- and whole notes it seems to mean it doubles the length (a quarternote with one or two parentheses), but for sixteenth-notes it seems to indicate that it halves it (an eighth-note with a single parenthesis mark).
I also question removing the stem of a note. I have a feeling that is one of the stronger queues for reading rhythm. Spacing is not very important, and indeed especially in dense scores for solo instruments, that need to have few page turns, notes are often just spaced as tightly as possible.
The author also recognized that the beams on eighth- and sixtheenth-notes (e.g. in the left hand) are very important rhythmic cues, and replaced them with that horizontal thing with the arrow on the left. This is a bit hard to read though when there are no stems to link them to the note and the pitch interval is big.
The part about it being easy to write by hand looks good, and made me feel good at first. Then you realize that hand-written traditional notation is quite different from typeset one, just like handwritten text is very different from printed text. Drawing all the little balls and filling in the halfmoon C, up and down thingies seems tedious, when traditionally one writes a simple dot or a little slash instead of the note head.
What you mean by this is that the key signature tells you what the tonic is, and, conversely, what the supertonic, mediant, subdominant, dominant, etc. are.
Whenever I teach key signatures this is the biggest thing I try to impart: key signatures are more than just accidentals, they define the roles each pitch plays.
Agreed. Hummingbird seems like a solution in search of a problem. I could see someone trying to learn to sight read music, get frustrated with how it is "broken" and then invent something like this, which seems far less clear to me than the old way.
sight reading is hard because of the cognitive work involved with translating, say, eight notes at a time into the appropriate finger-patterns, rhythm and pace; or translating fewer notes but at a faster rate. i don't see this making it easier.
i'm not sure why they would bother. anyone who finds sight reading too tough, might not really ever need sheet music, whether they do it by ear, or just listen to music. my friend has a disklavier - incredible. robot plays the piano better than i ever could. it makes me wonder why i still bother to try and play, and then i remind myself that every feeble attempt i make is intrinsically satisfying to me, so i keep trying.
About hummingbird, it's amazing. Really, I found it strange in the first minute. Then I got it
Why? My major peeve with traditional notation is the lines above and below. And I never know what are they talking about after adding some lines above the stave.
About the key signature, 100% agree.
As pretty much all students, I thought the key signature just meant which notes are always sharp or flat ("oh these guys want us to use more black keys - BORING")
It took me some time to get it. It's not about flat or sharp, but as they said it, it's 'G Major mode'. Then you feel everything is clearer. It's like going from understanding words in a phrase to understanding the phrase.
All I can say is this, I play guitar for 15 years, learned piano since I was 7, and I never got the classic notation. I can't read notes. And I tried learning a few times.
I looked at hummingbird, and it took me 30 seconds to memorize the symbols, and now I can read any hummingbird note sheet easily.
I would say this is a big win. Same feel I got when I saw Tau, mathematicians might argue it's incorrect, but for me, I don't care, Tau made math easy for me. Hummingbird makes music easy for me. That's all I care.
About transposing, you got a point, I think there should be apps that do it for you (e.g. convert MIDI files to hummingbird notation, I'm sure we'll see a few of these as Show HN sometime soon)
You can now sightread pages of hummingbird after 30 seconds of cursory inspection?
Hummingbird feels like a crutch to me. Hiding key signatures stunts your understanding of how music works. Forcing time to be marked explicitly as well as by altering spacing places odd constraints on typesetters. Humans use several subtle visual cues¹ to read music quickly and efficiently, and hummingbird just throws them all away.
Looking at the first part of God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen, hummingbird makes it look far more complex than it actually is. A simple series of quarternotes only changing in pitch, but hummingbird is changing two things - visual complexity (filled notes) and location.
I think it's bold and interesting, but ultimately I think it hasn't got legs.
Yes, machine transposing of hummingbird is trivial, but what about transposing while sight-reading? I have to do that regularly, and the removal of the key-signature makes that impossible.
Right, key signatures aren't just shorthand, they're useful information to give the performer up front.
In fact, it's so useful to state the key up front, I might even suggest the opposite; base the notation on relative pitches, as in "movable do" solfege. Then we could replace "all F's and C's are sharp" with just "do is D". Of course, there'd be tradeoffs to this as compared to the traditional notation, but it's fun to think about.
That would be the ideal notation for a diatonic harmonica player like me. I never really have an idea of what letter note I'm playing, unless I think about what key I'm in, and then I have to count. But I always know exactly where on the scale I am.
It's funny, before I read your comment I wrote a longwinded harmonica player's lament elsewhere in the thread, and I was thinking the same thing: A relative notation would be perfect.
On your last question, it took me a minute to get that those various "Above" or "Below" correspond to the notes they represent, A and B. The pitch is revealed both in the symbol and in the position on the staff. I found that pretty useful, certainly easier to read than homogenous black dots where you only have spatial information.
I read through the whole page and didn't get that. It didn't click until I started looking at the second page on the site (which goes more in depth).
My immediate thought once I figured that out was "this depends on English". For speakers of Japanese or Russian or French, can you find easy to remember words that can go with the first symbol, and that start with an "a" sound?
I actually found the terms extremely confusing. At first I thought the above/below referred to sharp/flat, but that didn't turn out. I couldn't even come up with concepts for dot and groove.
I know how to read music, but I'm not very good at it. I'll say that the idea of giving each note it's own shape seems like it could fix the problem of losing my place and having to count lines/spaces to figure out what a note it.
The thing I've never liked about musical notation is that the X axis has nothing to do with time. A staff can have 8 32nd notes and then a dotted half note. Those first notes take up 1/4 the time but 3/4 the space. While it would take more space, I find a consistent relationship much easier (such as piano roles or Guitar Hero note charts).
Your critique is spot on for those trained in music. Is that his target audience?
What about for those being exposed to music and its notation for the first time? What if you had never had a concept of putting your brain in G major mode.
But if complete beginners are his target audience, it begs the question why stop there? Why maintain the use of the staff at all.
No matter what people come up with and who the target audience is, there needs to be a good bridge between the traditional and the new. Staff or not, great for beginners or not, this will only fail because of the total lack of sheet music and other materials with nothing in sight to automate the translation of even a limited subset of music and materials.
(Of course, caveat, I've been playing piano for 20+ years as a hobby. Maybe the ties to the traditional are really not a big deal.)
Certainly the learning process for children can be improved a lot. Really, a lot. But I think it is important to integrate it with the actual notation from the beginning, as otherwise you will hit a wall when you want to play a bigger variety of music that's only available in that format.
I don’t think acquiring a sense of key signature is a dispensable part of the music learning experience, unless you plan to stick to twelve tone music.
It was invented for the Chromatone, a keyboard that eliminates black and white keys and treats all keys the same way, similar to a guitar fretboard. http://muto-method.com/en/index.html
Transposing then becomes easy because every scale has the same shape.
Thanks for that link, that is very interesting indeed. Being able to read the intervals more easily is certainly valuable, especially if you are playing on a chromatic keyboard.
However, I do like the fact that accidentals in traditional notation say something important: This note is out of the scale you are playing in. This is usually audibly very noticeable, so it makes sense to have it very noticeable in the score as well.
The three line system could be enhanced to show the notes that are in and out of the scale slightly differently, e.g. with color, or the size of the note-head. This would still have the benefit of being easily transposable.
The mnemonics are also anglocentric visual puns (e is for empty). I'd suggest a set of symbols with natural ordering that can be distinguished by shape (vs. all circles)
Solid points, although I think you're zeroing in on too many low-level details too early even though your criticisms are valid.
Also, maybe you could make your feedback constructive by providing ideas, alternatives and suggestions instead of just ripping it apart but adding no value or solid suggestions beyond that.
The point here is much bigger and more significant than any of your individual criticisms.
The point is this - these people are rethinking the problem of notation, and redesigning it from the ground up.
I think their approach is totally badass, and I love the fact that someone is tackling this!
> Also, maybe you could make your feedback constructive by providing ideas, alternatives and suggestions instead of just ripping it apart but adding no value or solid suggestions beyond that.
Pointing out flaws IS constructive criticism. This happens all the time and it bugs me:
person A comes up with an idea
person B gives good reasons why it's flawed
person A - the one who wants to innovate - says that fixing those flaws isn't his problem, and that person B should fix them.
WRONG.
The person who generates an idea, the person who wants to do something new, is the one who is responsible for brainstorming, finding problems, finding solutions, and pivoting as needed.
To say "your criticisms should be bundled with solutions" just raises the bar on criticism, and when it costs more to generate criticism, you get less of it.
We should all encourage criticism, and then we should make finding solutions OUR problem.
Thanks, yes I realized my lack of suggestions for improvements after writing my comment. I simply didn't have any (it was also quite late), as I think there are some fundamental choices in that system that are not beneficial. My "low-level details" were meant as arguments against those fundamental choices, rather than nit-picks that could be easily solved.
In the end, I judged that (valid) criticism is better than no criticism, despite the negative feeling of being the guy that just "tears it down".
My first observation was that it was difficult to discern the notes on my screen. Imagine that on paper farther than arms length away in a darkened room. That's plenty enough to disqualify it.
But yes, classical notation could certainly use some refinements.
I had the same reaction. No matter how small the notes are in classical notation, I can tell if they're filled or hollow, and whether an accidental is a sharp or flat. Distinguishing between hollow, partially and directionally filled, and filled notes, with diacritical accidentals seems more difficult.
It's pretty clear the person(s) who created this is/are not (a) very proficient musician(s).
The current notation has been in use for hundreds of years because it works. The notes are large, bold, and easy to recognize and also easy to write. Memorizing GBDFA, EGBDF, ACEG, and FACE is not that difficult.
This new notation has many egregious flaws. Removing the key signature is one of them. Not only does the key signature allow for instant recognition of the pitch and tones used and a general idea of what the piece should sound like, but it also makes writing sheets that much easier for arrangers and composers.
Second, who thought it was a good idea to replace the accidental signs with squiggly marks? A huge step down in usability, I'm afraid. Maybe in sevenths and chords with very close note spacing, but unless you're playing Death Waltz, it is not a problem (usually).
Also, the Consumer Reports-esque notes are also distracting and don't serve any purpose. If I saw what is an "E" on this note, I would play it for 4 beats -- that is, assuming that this is in x/4 time. It's more confusing for longtime music readers than musicians, but it would still throw off many, I'd guess. At any rate, however, if you can't memorize the staff lines and spaces, you aren't a musician. Period.
The uselessness of this notation is compounded by the fact that practically no instructor will be willing to give up a notation that has been in use their entire life, and also for centuries.
Do I see this being successful? Maybe, in small circles (no pun intended). But the harsh truth is that the current notation is easier to write, easier to read, and more efficient.
I'm not going to comment on their musical abilities but I noticed their pain points were common pain points that students have.
Perhaps not surprisingly its similar when you learn a foreign language, for a while you see a word, translate it into your native language, and then understand it. But once you "get it" or reach a certain level of fluency, you read the word and you just know what it means.
When I started playing Trombone I would see a note in the stave and count lines or spaces to figure out what note it was, and then play that note on my instrument. There were actually two translations going on, one from music to note 'name' and then from note 'name' to instrument configuration. At some point however it changed and I stopped seeing a 'B' or an 'A' or a 'C' and instead saw instrument positions (and alternates) so that playing stopped being a translation exercise and simply became execution.
The other interesting thing is that looking at the sheet music I heard music. And that was when everything clicked together because initially I could play things "by ear" by recreating the same sounds in my instrument that my ear was hearing, and now my eyes would see the music, my ears would "hear" it, and my fingers would make it real. Notation stopped being an issue until I tried to play keyboards :-)
Funny I know plenty of proficient musicians who can't read music at all. I don't disagree with what you are saying per sey but saying the creators can't be good musicians because they want to try a new approach to teach music feels awfully elitist.
They are only "proficient" in a very limited sense, then. I'm sure we can argue semantics here, but a musician needs to understand the concepts that govern music. And these concepts can only be understood and visualised by using notation.
The circle of fifth, musical modes and any advanced form of transposition, alongside the basic theory involved in cords, their components and their succession are necessary for a musician. [1]
Technical proficiency does not make you a musician, just like being able to type really well doesn't make you a programmer if you can't...read code.
[1]: This may not apply for percussionists, but even there, playing together with others necessitates the same understanding.
Musicians are not composers. Who cares if they can run scales if they dont know how read/write music. That's like memorizing Numa numa and not speaking the language.
> The current notation has been in use for hundreds of years because it works.
It is not necessarily just because "it works". Learning conventional music notation is optimal only in the same sense as learning a conventional language is optimal - i.e. it lets you communicate. That it is convention is more important than "it works". The human brain is adaptable enough to learn strange things like touch typing on a QWERTY keyboard.
Very much this. Tradition is a terrible way to measure something's merits. And even if it did 'work', that's no reason to not try and improve it (though, I'd agree that just throwing something out there that might fragment things isn't terribly helpful either).
There are some good things about traditional sheet music notation, but that doesn't take away the fact that it's bloated with historical baggage. It's really not terribly efficient at communicating the 'essence' of music, it's just that we've all gotten used to translating piano notation into practical [insert_your_instrument_here] implementation in our heads. It's neither a useful 'source code' for other instruments to interpret, nor is it an efficient 'byte code' to describe the fundamental elements of music.
That's not to say that I have a solution to these problems of course (yet -- been working on my own project for a while that will eventually try to address this), but the issues aren't hard to spot, and they certainly seem like areas that can be optimized. And there will always be the problem of adoption, but I don't think that's even an argument we should bother raising until somebody proposes either a system that's either truly an upgrade, or a system that starts getting so much traction and starts fracturing music notation without any added benefit.
Personally, I sympathize with the aims of this project here, and think some of the ideas are clever, but considering how many things it changes, I don't think it really adds much efficiency when parsing/writing it in return. It actually strikes me as odd why they wouldn't just move to a chromatic grid system if they were getting rid of key signatures, that way they'd just eliminate accidentals all together -- or if not, then just combine them into one, since the key is a big reason for why they even have 2 designations in the first place. Which brings up the point that those symbols are all really quite complicated to be able to parse very quickly; the controversial 'note names' especially, but the accidentals really did not have much of a reason to be changed other than to just look 'fancier' -- which just makes them harder to parse, and to draw (IMO, but I have terrible hand writing).
Oh well, I wish them the best anyway. This isn't a terribly progressive field so I'm just glad to see anything happening.
I couldn't tell; is the key-signature completely elided in favor of putting explicit sharp/flats on all the notes? If so, it's a huge fail, as I play the clarinet, and regularly have to sight-read oboe parts, which means transposing.
This means that accidentals need to be distinct from sharps/flats in the key-signature, and in particular an explicit natural on deviations from the key signature is also helpful.
> The current notation has been in use for hundreds of years because it works.
But it doesn't. And that's why tablature notation is far and away more widely used these days. Old-style musical notation is horribly designed and is gradually dying a natural death.
Music notation is not designed to be easy to learn, it's designed to be efficient for proficient musicians. The key issue is chunking - just as children learn to read individual letters, then words, then whole phrases, the rapid sight-reader has to be able to see chords and phrases rather than individual notes. This requires a strong understanding of musical theory, to be able to anticipate what's coming next and why.
Reforms to musical notation are like the frequent attempts we see to create visual programming environments "So anyone can program!". They're based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what the hard part is. Learning the syntax of a programming language is trivial compared to learning the abstractions of programming; Likewise, learning to identify note names and durations is trivial compared to learning to think intuitively about music theory.
A point you are apparently missing is that musical notation has evolved from its origins in a reflexive manner. Music theory evolved from and with notation; I don't see why this new, progressive, more approachable form of notation would negatively impact learning and maybe even contributing to the evolution of music theory.
Just because something is new and unfamiliar does not mean it has to be scary. Just like fountain/feather pens are no longer all that widely used to write musical notation in a format that made sense for utensils, why does musical notation have to remain stuck in the past and cannot evolve?
Also, as a few other people have noted here, it's actually less expressive than standard notation.
There's no way to show phrasing(especially important for figuring out how to phrase 5/4 or 7/4 time), triplets, and I'm not sure how slur/tie notation works(especially because dotted notes are presented as tied notes... not ideal since they're technically not the same thing).
Maybe it's easier to learn, but it's definitely not simpler. There's a difference [1].
Probably because I'm used to reading the tradional notation, I had a hard time deciphering theirs. There's a reason why, after centuries, the standard notation is still relevant. You basically need 3 elements to play an instrument: height (pitch), length (rhythm) and power (dynamics). And I can't imagine a better way to translate these informations than a traditional score.
But I appreciate any attempt to revisit musical notation, like the one that spawned the guitar tablatures, which is incredibly simple and easy to learn.
I'm concerned by Hummingbird's readability. Though each symbol carries multiple (and sometimes redundant) informations, I feel like there's a lot of noise. Also, drawing these symbols requires some high precision and I fear that handwritten versions will render some confusion, especially the small rest and rhythm symbols. I often scribble some music lines on a piece of paper, and I rarely have issues re-reading myself.
On a side-note, using English-based mnemonic hints ("Empty" for E, "Full" for F...) will hinder its portability across other countries, especially Latin ones where Do-Ré-Mi-Fa is more widely adopted.
Guitar tabs are simple and easy to learn, IF you're playing a song you already know. Most tabs I've seen just tell you which fingers to press down and which strings to hit, often excluding time signature, note duration, note intensity, rests, and other sightreading essentials.
Tabs' major appeal is that there's no learning curve: what you read is almost a physical representation of what you play. And it only requires a text editor to write, and can easily be published and shared on a website.
This is technically true, but is approaching notation from a perspective that everything needs to be specified (I’d call this a “classical” perspective, but even in classical music, this was not traditionally true).
In e.g. Jazz jam sessions, good sight readers can definitely figure out what to play from lead sheets consisting of chord symbols + melody, and in terms of information, those are equivalent to guitar tabs + melody.
Admittedly, there are also books only giving tabs/chord symbols + lyrics (or sometimes not even those), and for this form, I agree that your assessment is valid.
"You basically need 3 elements to play an instrument: height (pitch), length (rhythm) and power (dynamics). And I can't imagine a better way to translate these informations than a traditional score."
(1) Hummingbird translates length in a trivially superior way to standard notation. No contest imho.
(2) I would say it does a somewhat better job on pitch as well. Both have huge shortcomings so I can well imagine far better systems.
Dynamics is a push so I'll say Hummingbird is an improvement in translation. I don't think it's a big enough improvement to climb the mountain of inertial standard notation has in it's favor. I'm typing this on Qwerty keyboard too, yep.
Hummingbird is fatally flawed for anything beyond beginner level stuff. It's not going to deal well with any sort of complicated rhythm. I'd love to see you accurately notate something at all complex, like say this, a snippet from a Beethoven piano sonata:
While it might have some minimal value for beginners, you might as well teach them real notation.
Let me present a metaphore.
You're in charge of the foreign language curricula in, say, Japan. You can offer either Esperanto or English but not both. Esperanto is easier to learn, but English is infinitely more useful.
I'm not convinced length is translated in a superior manner. Any spacing based rhythmic notation quickly gets ridiculous when you combine long and short notes. Space your demi-semi-quavers out far enough to read them (especially if you have to annotate them with hummingbird accidentals) then see how far apart the minims and semibreves are. Traditional notation tends to be set so the rhythm is suggested by the spacing but isn't prescribed.
>Maybe it's easier to learn, but it's definitely not simpler. Probably because I'm used to reading the tradional notation, I had a hard time deciphering theirs.
If you just found out about this from HN, then you didn't have ANY time to get familiar with it.
Plus, your knowledge of traditional notation put you already at a disadvantage. You could only compare it with a control group study, or after you have spend as much time in this, as it took you to be proficient in standard notation (e.g 1-2 months at least).
I've actually just spent my afternoon writing out some music for the first time in about 15 years, so this is quite interesting.
However I must say that I just don't get it. Every example I look at appears significantly more complex than the standard notation, and harder to discern at a smaller size. One place I can see it really struggling is on copies. Music tutors spend a lot of their time copying music sheets, and I suspect this would be quite difficult to read on a low quality reproduction.
Standard notation has survived for hundreds of years. I'll be the first to admit it's not exactly easy to get your head around to begin with, but once you understand the rules it becomes apparent as to why it is the way it is.
The embedded visual cue to the name of the note, plus the proportional sizing, seem really nice to me. The sharping, flatting, and lack of ascenders and descenders I'm not so sure about.
You also lose the "wall of black notes" warning you of deadly fast notes up ahead. ;)
To me, the visual cue of the name of the note is idiotic.
VERY idiotic.
He choose to use the C, D, E... system that is not the norm (the norm, maybe not in US I guess, is Do, Re, Mi...)
And then create graphical representation of words starting with those letters.
Except this works only in english.
How a portuguese speaker for example would associate the dot thing with D or Re? It looks like neither, at most it looks like a dot (that in portuguese is "ponto", thus starts with a P)
Or the above and below? Below in portuguese is "abaixo", thus starting with a A, so you have to teach someone that A actually means B.
To me this new notation might make sense in english (maybe), but in other languages is even more arbitrary and silly (and tedious to hand-write)
The embedded name of the note seems to be the only thing this has going for it, and only in high-quality prints. I feel like the stems help me to distinguish where notes start and end, and the sharps and flats seem a little... small.
Also, properly typeset standard notation is proportional anyway.
I've often thought that if there's space for something to be reformed in musical notation, it's the fact that different wind instruments are notated in different keys[1]. I realize there are historical reasons, but it just seems like such an artificial barrier between musicians in a modern band or orchestra.
It's a standard part of musical training to be able to read a part written in either concert pitch or in your instrument's pitch, or even to be able to transpose on sight into any key. It's not easy but learning to do so pays off when you're on a gig and the singer insists on playing Lush Life in B natural.
This is mildly annoying for composers, but it doesn't really matter for the players. They play the notes they see on the page. I suppose if they have perfect pitch it might be a bit jarring.
I play mainly clarinet (which is written Bb transposed), and the transposition thing is not a problem at all. It's the relative intervals that matter anyways. I don't feel it creates a barrier when communicating with others in the orchestra (we talk about concert pitch anyways), and not having to count five extra staff lines makes up for the small inconvenience.
This makes it much it much easier when switching between different instruments of the same family - a clarinetist (when playing any clarinet part) associates one note on the staff with one fingering. If all instruments were in C, the player would need to associate the same dot with multiple different fingerings, depending on the family member being played.
* The pitch shapes encoded in the notation are fun and probably help learning, but I think they'd be distracting past a certain point. They don't convey any extra information that the staff doesn't, and if they didn't match it's one more thing to trip up on.
* The sharp and flat signs are way too subtle, compared to the traditional accidentals. I'm not going to see those when I'm sight-reading.
* This is also true for the eighth notes and shorter. Those flags are tiny!
* No key signatures?!!
I love that someone's playing with ideas for notation, but this notation is worse for experienced musicians because it makes important information harder to see at a glance. (Yes, sure, I'd get used to new shapes, but the distinguishing marks on the page are smaller?!!)
I can't comment on whether it'd be easier to learn, but this is notation you're going to be using much longer than you're going to be learning it. Optimize for long-term usefulness.
Learning musical notation is not the hard part of playing music; getting your instrument to make the right sounds is. Changing the notation doesn't make that any easier.
Also, if you've only learned this new notation, you'll be unable to read any of the 99.99999% of music that has been published in the conventional notation over the last few hundred years. It would be pretty limiting, somewhat like learning to speak a language that's only spoken on a small island in the Arctic Ocean.
It depends on the instrument. For melody / monophone instruments (woodwinds, brass and to a lesser extent strings) musical notation is easy. For piano, it's easy once you master the bass clef. For guitar, it just never gets easy because the score has to be full of fingering information to make it even remotely clear where on the fretboard your fingers should go.
the only problem with this to me is that this new notation simply seems to add redundancy to the score, repeating information which is already there,but not adding much new.
One advantage traditional notation has over this is that the modifiers are a lot larger and more visible. For sight reading, notation needs to be easily scannable and irregularities (like sharps and flats) need to be highly visible. Connecting the beams on eighth and sixteen notes also serves to group the notes according to beat, and that makes parsing a measure much easier (also easier to skip ahead when you mess up). Neat idea though.
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Removing the key signature is not a good idea. When playing in G major, the sharp accidental on the Fs is not put at the beginning of the line just to avoid printing it in the score. Rather, it fits there because when I play in G major, I put my brain in G major mode, in which case it would be distracting to have an accidental on every single F.
Similarly, writing a special symbol for each pitch seems it would get heavily in the way of transposing on the fly. The position already encodes the pitch, and the ABCDEFG names kind of get in the way of understanding the melody, which is more about relative intervals than absolute values.
And what does the little parenthesis on the length line mean? For half- and whole notes it seems to mean it doubles the length (a quarternote with one or two parentheses), but for sixteenth-notes it seems to indicate that it halves it (an eighth-note with a single parenthesis mark).
I also question removing the stem of a note. I have a feeling that is one of the stronger queues for reading rhythm. Spacing is not very important, and indeed especially in dense scores for solo instruments, that need to have few page turns, notes are often just spaced as tightly as possible.
The author also recognized that the beams on eighth- and sixtheenth-notes (e.g. in the left hand) are very important rhythmic cues, and replaced them with that horizontal thing with the arrow on the left. This is a bit hard to read though when there are no stems to link them to the note and the pitch interval is big.
The part about it being easy to write by hand looks good, and made me feel good at first. Then you realize that hand-written traditional notation is quite different from typeset one, just like handwritten text is very different from printed text. Drawing all the little balls and filling in the halfmoon C, up and down thingies seems tedious, when traditionally one writes a simple dot or a little slash instead of the note head.
Whenever I teach key signatures this is the biggest thing I try to impart: key signatures are more than just accidentals, they define the roles each pitch plays.
sight reading is hard because of the cognitive work involved with translating, say, eight notes at a time into the appropriate finger-patterns, rhythm and pace; or translating fewer notes but at a faster rate. i don't see this making it easier.
i'm not sure why they would bother. anyone who finds sight reading too tough, might not really ever need sheet music, whether they do it by ear, or just listen to music. my friend has a disklavier - incredible. robot plays the piano better than i ever could. it makes me wonder why i still bother to try and play, and then i remind myself that every feeble attempt i make is intrinsically satisfying to me, so i keep trying.
About hummingbird, it's amazing. Really, I found it strange in the first minute. Then I got it
Why? My major peeve with traditional notation is the lines above and below. And I never know what are they talking about after adding some lines above the stave.
About the key signature, 100% agree.
As pretty much all students, I thought the key signature just meant which notes are always sharp or flat ("oh these guys want us to use more black keys - BORING")
It took me some time to get it. It's not about flat or sharp, but as they said it, it's 'G Major mode'. Then you feel everything is clearer. It's like going from understanding words in a phrase to understanding the phrase.
What the particular notes in that key do (their role, as you put it) is a property of that key.
I looked at hummingbird, and it took me 30 seconds to memorize the symbols, and now I can read any hummingbird note sheet easily.
I would say this is a big win. Same feel I got when I saw Tau, mathematicians might argue it's incorrect, but for me, I don't care, Tau made math easy for me. Hummingbird makes music easy for me. That's all I care.
About transposing, you got a point, I think there should be apps that do it for you (e.g. convert MIDI files to hummingbird notation, I'm sure we'll see a few of these as Show HN sometime soon)
Hummingbird feels like a crutch to me. Hiding key signatures stunts your understanding of how music works. Forcing time to be marked explicitly as well as by altering spacing places odd constraints on typesetters. Humans use several subtle visual cues¹ to read music quickly and efficiently, and hummingbird just throws them all away.
I'm not sure this is worth the overhaul.
1: http://lilypond.org/web/about/automated-engraving/software
I think it's bold and interesting, but ultimately I think it hasn't got legs.
In fact, it's so useful to state the key up front, I might even suggest the opposite; base the notation on relative pitches, as in "movable do" solfege. Then we could replace "all F's and C's are sharp" with just "do is D". Of course, there'd be tradeoffs to this as compared to the traditional notation, but it's fun to think about.
It's funny, before I read your comment I wrote a longwinded harmonica player's lament elsewhere in the thread, and I was thinking the same thing: A relative notation would be perfect.
My immediate thought once I figured that out was "this depends on English". For speakers of Japanese or Russian or French, can you find easy to remember words that can go with the first symbol, and that start with an "a" sound?
I actually found the terms extremely confusing. At first I thought the above/below referred to sharp/flat, but that didn't turn out. I couldn't even come up with concepts for dot and groove.
I know how to read music, but I'm not very good at it. I'll say that the idea of giving each note it's own shape seems like it could fix the problem of losing my place and having to count lines/spaces to figure out what a note it.
The thing I've never liked about musical notation is that the X axis has nothing to do with time. A staff can have 8 32nd notes and then a dotted half note. Those first notes take up 1/4 the time but 3/4 the space. While it would take more space, I find a consistent relationship much easier (such as piano roles or Guitar Hero note charts).
Dead Comment
What about for those being exposed to music and its notation for the first time? What if you had never had a concept of putting your brain in G major mode.
But if complete beginners are his target audience, it begs the question why stop there? Why maintain the use of the staff at all.
(Of course, caveat, I've been playing piano for 20+ years as a hobby. Maybe the ties to the traditional are really not a big deal.)
This is a very valid point.
Certainly the learning process for children can be improved a lot. Really, a lot. But I think it is important to integrate it with the actual notation from the beginning, as otherwise you will hit a wall when you want to play a bigger variety of music that's only available in that format.
http://www.hummingbirdnotation.com/songs/Fur%20Elise%20(Fina...
Musical notation needs to be spoken-language-free.
It was invented for the Chromatone, a keyboard that eliminates black and white keys and treats all keys the same way, similar to a guitar fretboard. http://muto-method.com/en/index.html
Transposing then becomes easy because every scale has the same shape.
However, I do like the fact that accidentals in traditional notation say something important: This note is out of the scale you are playing in. This is usually audibly very noticeable, so it makes sense to have it very noticeable in the score as well.
The three line system could be enhanced to show the notes that are in and out of the scale slightly differently, e.g. with color, or the size of the note-head. This would still have the benefit of being easily transposable.
Also, maybe you could make your feedback constructive by providing ideas, alternatives and suggestions instead of just ripping it apart but adding no value or solid suggestions beyond that.
The point here is much bigger and more significant than any of your individual criticisms.
The point is this - these people are rethinking the problem of notation, and redesigning it from the ground up.
I think their approach is totally badass, and I love the fact that someone is tackling this!
Pointing out flaws IS constructive criticism. This happens all the time and it bugs me:
person A comes up with an idea person B gives good reasons why it's flawed person A - the one who wants to innovate - says that fixing those flaws isn't his problem, and that person B should fix them.
WRONG.
The person who generates an idea, the person who wants to do something new, is the one who is responsible for brainstorming, finding problems, finding solutions, and pivoting as needed.
To say "your criticisms should be bundled with solutions" just raises the bar on criticism, and when it costs more to generate criticism, you get less of it.
We should all encourage criticism, and then we should make finding solutions OUR problem.
In the end, I judged that (valid) criticism is better than no criticism, despite the negative feeling of being the guy that just "tears it down".
Dead Comment
But yes, classical notation could certainly use some refinements.
The current notation has been in use for hundreds of years because it works. The notes are large, bold, and easy to recognize and also easy to write. Memorizing GBDFA, EGBDF, ACEG, and FACE is not that difficult.
This new notation has many egregious flaws. Removing the key signature is one of them. Not only does the key signature allow for instant recognition of the pitch and tones used and a general idea of what the piece should sound like, but it also makes writing sheets that much easier for arrangers and composers.
Second, who thought it was a good idea to replace the accidental signs with squiggly marks? A huge step down in usability, I'm afraid. Maybe in sevenths and chords with very close note spacing, but unless you're playing Death Waltz, it is not a problem (usually).
Also, the Consumer Reports-esque notes are also distracting and don't serve any purpose. If I saw what is an "E" on this note, I would play it for 4 beats -- that is, assuming that this is in x/4 time. It's more confusing for longtime music readers than musicians, but it would still throw off many, I'd guess. At any rate, however, if you can't memorize the staff lines and spaces, you aren't a musician. Period.
The uselessness of this notation is compounded by the fact that practically no instructor will be willing to give up a notation that has been in use their entire life, and also for centuries.
Do I see this being successful? Maybe, in small circles (no pun intended). But the harsh truth is that the current notation is easier to write, easier to read, and more efficient.
Case closed.
Perhaps not surprisingly its similar when you learn a foreign language, for a while you see a word, translate it into your native language, and then understand it. But once you "get it" or reach a certain level of fluency, you read the word and you just know what it means.
When I started playing Trombone I would see a note in the stave and count lines or spaces to figure out what note it was, and then play that note on my instrument. There were actually two translations going on, one from music to note 'name' and then from note 'name' to instrument configuration. At some point however it changed and I stopped seeing a 'B' or an 'A' or a 'C' and instead saw instrument positions (and alternates) so that playing stopped being a translation exercise and simply became execution.
The other interesting thing is that looking at the sheet music I heard music. And that was when everything clicked together because initially I could play things "by ear" by recreating the same sounds in my instrument that my ear was hearing, and now my eyes would see the music, my ears would "hear" it, and my fingers would make it real. Notation stopped being an issue until I tried to play keyboards :-)
Dead Comment
The circle of fifth, musical modes and any advanced form of transposition, alongside the basic theory involved in cords, their components and their succession are necessary for a musician. [1]
Technical proficiency does not make you a musician, just like being able to type really well doesn't make you a programmer if you can't...read code.
[1]: This may not apply for percussionists, but even there, playing together with others necessitates the same understanding.
Side note: it's per se
It is not necessarily just because "it works". Learning conventional music notation is optimal only in the same sense as learning a conventional language is optimal - i.e. it lets you communicate. That it is convention is more important than "it works". The human brain is adaptable enough to learn strange things like touch typing on a QWERTY keyboard.
There are some good things about traditional sheet music notation, but that doesn't take away the fact that it's bloated with historical baggage. It's really not terribly efficient at communicating the 'essence' of music, it's just that we've all gotten used to translating piano notation into practical [insert_your_instrument_here] implementation in our heads. It's neither a useful 'source code' for other instruments to interpret, nor is it an efficient 'byte code' to describe the fundamental elements of music.
That's not to say that I have a solution to these problems of course (yet -- been working on my own project for a while that will eventually try to address this), but the issues aren't hard to spot, and they certainly seem like areas that can be optimized. And there will always be the problem of adoption, but I don't think that's even an argument we should bother raising until somebody proposes either a system that's either truly an upgrade, or a system that starts getting so much traction and starts fracturing music notation without any added benefit.
Personally, I sympathize with the aims of this project here, and think some of the ideas are clever, but considering how many things it changes, I don't think it really adds much efficiency when parsing/writing it in return. It actually strikes me as odd why they wouldn't just move to a chromatic grid system if they were getting rid of key signatures, that way they'd just eliminate accidentals all together -- or if not, then just combine them into one, since the key is a big reason for why they even have 2 designations in the first place. Which brings up the point that those symbols are all really quite complicated to be able to parse very quickly; the controversial 'note names' especially, but the accidentals really did not have much of a reason to be changed other than to just look 'fancier' -- which just makes them harder to parse, and to draw (IMO, but I have terrible hand writing).
Oh well, I wish them the best anyway. This isn't a terribly progressive field so I'm just glad to see anything happening.
You overvalue the importance of your analysis.
This means that accidentals need to be distinct from sharps/flats in the key-signature, and in particular an explicit natural on deviations from the key signature is also helpful.
But it doesn't. And that's why tablature notation is far and away more widely used these days. Old-style musical notation is horribly designed and is gradually dying a natural death.
Reforms to musical notation are like the frequent attempts we see to create visual programming environments "So anyone can program!". They're based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what the hard part is. Learning the syntax of a programming language is trivial compared to learning the abstractions of programming; Likewise, learning to identify note names and durations is trivial compared to learning to think intuitively about music theory.
Just because something is new and unfamiliar does not mean it has to be scary. Just like fountain/feather pens are no longer all that widely used to write musical notation in a format that made sense for utensils, why does musical notation have to remain stuck in the past and cannot evolve?
There's no way to show phrasing(especially important for figuring out how to phrase 5/4 or 7/4 time), triplets, and I'm not sure how slur/tie notation works(especially because dotted notes are presented as tied notes... not ideal since they're technically not the same thing).
Probably because I'm used to reading the tradional notation, I had a hard time deciphering theirs. There's a reason why, after centuries, the standard notation is still relevant. You basically need 3 elements to play an instrument: height (pitch), length (rhythm) and power (dynamics). And I can't imagine a better way to translate these informations than a traditional score.
But I appreciate any attempt to revisit musical notation, like the one that spawned the guitar tablatures, which is incredibly simple and easy to learn.
I'm concerned by Hummingbird's readability. Though each symbol carries multiple (and sometimes redundant) informations, I feel like there's a lot of noise. Also, drawing these symbols requires some high precision and I fear that handwritten versions will render some confusion, especially the small rest and rhythm symbols. I often scribble some music lines on a piece of paper, and I rarely have issues re-reading myself.
On a side-note, using English-based mnemonic hints ("Empty" for E, "Full" for F...) will hinder its portability across other countries, especially Latin ones where Do-Ré-Mi-Fa is more widely adopted.
[1] http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2011/11/11/simple-versus-easy/
As you say, most tabs don't include much information besides pitch and order, but can include guitar-specific ones, such as bends or slides.
It's possible though to write good tabs, such as the ones available in Guitar Pro (http://www.guitaring.info/uploads/software/Guitar%20Pro/Guit...).
Tabs' major appeal is that there's no learning curve: what you read is almost a physical representation of what you play. And it only requires a text editor to write, and can easily be published and shared on a website.
In e.g. Jazz jam sessions, good sight readers can definitely figure out what to play from lead sheets consisting of chord symbols + melody, and in terms of information, those are equivalent to guitar tabs + melody.
Admittedly, there are also books only giving tabs/chord symbols + lyrics (or sometimes not even those), and for this form, I agree that your assessment is valid.
It syncs tabs with real audio recordings so that you get the usability of tab plus the rhythm and phrasing cues from the real recording.
Dead Comment
(1) Hummingbird translates length in a trivially superior way to standard notation. No contest imho.
(2) I would say it does a somewhat better job on pitch as well. Both have huge shortcomings so I can well imagine far better systems.
Dynamics is a push so I'll say Hummingbird is an improvement in translation. I don't think it's a big enough improvement to climb the mountain of inertial standard notation has in it's favor. I'm typing this on Qwerty keyboard too, yep.
http://www.conknet.com/~proscore/samples/lgcplxpiano.gif
While it might have some minimal value for beginners, you might as well teach them real notation.
Let me present a metaphore.
You're in charge of the foreign language curricula in, say, Japan. You can offer either Esperanto or English but not both. Esperanto is easier to learn, but English is infinitely more useful.
If you just found out about this from HN, then you didn't have ANY time to get familiar with it.
Plus, your knowledge of traditional notation put you already at a disadvantage. You could only compare it with a control group study, or after you have spend as much time in this, as it took you to be proficient in standard notation (e.g 1-2 months at least).
However I must say that I just don't get it. Every example I look at appears significantly more complex than the standard notation, and harder to discern at a smaller size. One place I can see it really struggling is on copies. Music tutors spend a lot of their time copying music sheets, and I suspect this would be quite difficult to read on a low quality reproduction.
Standard notation has survived for hundreds of years. I'll be the first to admit it's not exactly easy to get your head around to begin with, but once you understand the rules it becomes apparent as to why it is the way it is.
You also lose the "wall of black notes" warning you of deadly fast notes up ahead. ;)
He choose to use the C, D, E... system that is not the norm (the norm, maybe not in US I guess, is Do, Re, Mi...)
And then create graphical representation of words starting with those letters.
Except this works only in english.
How a portuguese speaker for example would associate the dot thing with D or Re? It looks like neither, at most it looks like a dot (that in portuguese is "ponto", thus starts with a P)
Or the above and below? Below in portuguese is "abaixo", thus starting with a A, so you have to teach someone that A actually means B.
To me this new notation might make sense in english (maybe), but in other languages is even more arbitrary and silly (and tedious to hand-write)
Also, properly typeset standard notation is proportional anyway.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transposing_instrument
* The pitch shapes encoded in the notation are fun and probably help learning, but I think they'd be distracting past a certain point. They don't convey any extra information that the staff doesn't, and if they didn't match it's one more thing to trip up on.
* The sharp and flat signs are way too subtle, compared to the traditional accidentals. I'm not going to see those when I'm sight-reading.
* This is also true for the eighth notes and shorter. Those flags are tiny!
* No key signatures?!!
I love that someone's playing with ideas for notation, but this notation is worse for experienced musicians because it makes important information harder to see at a glance. (Yes, sure, I'd get used to new shapes, but the distinguishing marks on the page are smaller?!!)
I can't comment on whether it'd be easier to learn, but this is notation you're going to be using much longer than you're going to be learning it. Optimize for long-term usefulness.
Also, if you've only learned this new notation, you'll be unable to read any of the 99.99999% of music that has been published in the conventional notation over the last few hundred years. It would be pretty limiting, somewhat like learning to speak a language that's only spoken on a small island in the Arctic Ocean.
Musical notation can definitely be improved upon.