Posted by aanet 17 hours ago
I think that you can learn music theory (to play an instrument or to compose music e.g. in a "piano roll tool" / MIDI editor) much faster if you skip the classic notation. And I think that it is even better to learn the notation AFTER you understand the music theory.
I even made my own guide to music :D https://www.jampea.com/learn
> Only a limited set of frequencies is used in music. All these frequencies (that exist in music) can be played by a piano.
In addition to microtonality, many instruments (and the human voice) are capable of infinite tuning, and musicians will deviate from the "correct" note (as played by an even-tempered instrument) based on chord structure, voice leading, etc.
> To describe tones that exist in music, we can describe tones that exist on a piano. There are only two rules:
> the first key must play a tone of 27.5 Hz each next key must play a tone 6% higher than the previous key
(This is not to mention that at a 1.06x increase per half step you're going to be sharp by 1 cent / octave which starts to add up).
The parts that are really weird (like the C clef) have mostly been obsoleted, unless you play the viola I guess.
If someone takes time to deeply understand the advantages of the textual approach and then builds an alternative, I'll listen.
But at this point, anyone who is doing this and their criticism of the original approach is shallow and uninsightful, where it's basically just "it's old and it must therefore suck", is unlikely to produce a good answer.
I think that applies to the music notation case too. "Conventional" music notation isn't just a staff and a couple of types of notes. By the time you handle all the use cases that conventional notation handles, or even just a solid subset of it, your brand new notation is probably a lot less elegant than it started out as in someone's head.
Unlike most languages it's inherently two dimensional because music includes both horizontal (time, rhythm) and vertical pitches (chords/colours, harmony) information.
And - especially important - melody is an element that needs both.
You can't represent the same information with text without losing a lot of important content, which is why toys like Sonic Pi are more limited than they seem.
You can kinda sorta represent the same information on a piano roll, but it's not any easier to read than dots - in some ways harder, because you're not going to see the relationship between a bass line and chords as clearly.
Is it a good programming language? It's quite dense, but not denser than some code idioms. The 2D element is unique, and hard to represent in other ways.
The learning curve is steep, but it's probably as good as it can be given the requirements and constraints.
I know neither is about music notation per se (but about fixing the piano), but it is analogous: Music notation has exactly the same problem as the piano -> it defaults to C, which makes everything else relative to C and overly complicated.
For the record, I don't think this means we should switch to a new system, but it is usefull to recognize that it is suboptimal, if only to be able to accept it and continue (because nobody is going to translate everything to some new notation)
Classical composer and software engineer here. One of my goals is to help update score notation. I use something called "harmonic coloring" which is like a reduced MIDI notation: You color a note by its functional role (harmonic value) rather than an arbitrary hue in 0-11.
What this view shares with MIDI: Long rectangles representing the applied durations. How it is different: Occupies a minimal amount vertical space.
The color palette I'm using is intended to support people with colorblindness. The shades/hues of a color encodes the functional harmony. The root key signature (origin) is always the same color; and chords some distance r away on the circle of fifths is the shade/hue at that offset r.
There is a similar concept described in the Tantacruel video towards the end.
You can explore it here on Monic Theory. (mobile view should be fixed within 48 hours)
Similarly, in Carnatic and Hindustani classical traditions, the note names (Sa, Re, Pa etc) do not denote pitches - Sa is always the root, whatever it is, and the rest have a somewhat well defined intervallic relationship to it.
I personally would not use "harmonic value" to describe this, since it occurs in music that (broadly speaking) lacks harmony. The key point, IMO, is that what matters are sets of intervals (ratios, if you prefer) rather than actual pitches (as frequencies).
Hindustani (and Carnatic) music indeed do not denote pitches for a very sound (pun intended) reason: They let singers choose the root note (Sa), and thereupon the melody is built. Most (all?) of Hindustani music is melody-based, not harmonic based (like Western music). And the melodies are themselves created within the Raga framework. Raga is like a mode (but not exactly that), and is hard to explain within the constraints of Western music theory precisely because that concept does not exist in western music per se. Which is why most Indian classical theorists call a raga a "melodic framework", and leave it at that (or expound on it, as the case may be).
A great reference for Indian classical music is [1] and and more recent one [2]
[1] The Ragas of North Indian Music, N.A. Jairazbhoy, https://archive.org/details/dli.ministry.26725
[2] Rāgs Around the Clock, A Handbook for North Indian Classical Music, with Online Recordings in the Khayāl Style, https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0313#r...
In particular, trombones have almost entirely stopped using the tenor clef in jazz.
But it, and the piano black keys with it, are definitely not optimal. It makes playing in C easy, and playing in anything else hard. I've picked up a new instrument since ~2 months, and 1 month in I could already play all scales by by deliberately staying away from music notation, learning the raw distances/steps that make up a scale and how to play them, rather than the 'delta from C', which is how classical training taught me to think. (Same story for chords etc)
I don't think this is true—I was under the impression that, at least on piano, keys other than C major are sometimes chosen specifically to make things easier on the fingers.
... or is it geek, i can never remember the difference ...
Our 12 tone scale with the major scale note names and notes not in the major scale marked with dots looks like this:
C.D.EF.G.A.B
CDE.FGAB....
C.D.EF.G.A.BC.D.EF.G.A.B
X.X.XX.X.X.X
Let's do the same 7 tone transposition for the aliens. Their major scale pattern is XXX.XXXX..., so we get
CDE.FGAB....CDE.FGAB....
XXX.XXXX...
At first that seems very different from our 7 tone transposition. We only need one sharp and they need 23 flats! But wait...mod 12 we have -23 = 1.
It turns out for all transpositions if you count sharps in your key signature as +1 and flats as -1, the key signature for a transposition by N tones will have 7N sharps or flats mod 12 in both our systems.
In general if you have a T note equal temperament scale with an M note subset major scale, transposing the major scale up N tones gives a key signature with NM mod T sharps/flats.
I'll leave it as an exercise to prove that. Hint: you can think of a transposition as a two step operation: (1) a shift that keeps the same letters and just adds sharps or flats to move the notes, and (2) a renaming that changed the name you use to name the first note of the transposed scale. Think about what each of those operations does to the number of sharps and flats needed.
Only in 12TET.
Almost all sheet music that you play uses 5 or 7 unequal subdivisions of the octave, and occasionally the rest. Sure, sometimes you'll have one or two of the rest on a regular basis (blues, harmonic/melodic minor), but still most music won't use all twelve.
I don't really know a thing about music, so I could be wrong here - but that mental model at least made some sense to me when I tried to map all the concepts I've heard about into some sort of a mental system.
At least in western music you pick the seven basic notes on the scale, and that gives you the sharps and flats you place at the beginning of each line. That choice, from the point of view of notation, is even more important than the exact scale. And the choice is constrained to 15 sets of sharps and flats because it implicitly tells the player (veeeery roughly) to expect some patterns that probably will occur.
It doesn't always work great, for example if you want to write the Simpsons theme the set of notes in the scale doesn't fit any of those 15 sets. But it uses an unfamiliar scale in any case, so there's not much to gain and as a player you just deal with it.
See around 32:30 in https://youtu.be/Eq3bUFgEcb4?t=1950
“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.”
This seems like a great resource to me, a classically trained pianist who is now playing different types of music.
Example: https://musictheory.pugetsound.edu/mt21c/DiatonicChordsInMaj...
Same with staff notation: If you want to communicate music to other people, learning the slightly clunky but universally-known written language is generally the way to go.
And I really want to see you communicate wobbling bass or fast random notes. Well you can - in Studel.cc - but is impossible in this notation. Same for complex drum sections (as in dnb, yes), and I can give you fair amount of other examples where medieval notation is useless.
A certain Amazon Web Services comes to mind…
What you’re suggesting is actually hundreds of years old from well before the existence of computers or DAWs but still no one is using it.
It turns out that judging the relative length of lines is difficult at speed compared to reading distinct symbols.
Also that 88 note piano rolls are a very space inefficient way of representing music on a page. Even a chromatic stave would be inefficient.
That really matters for people that want to sight read with other musicians and have as much viewable as possible in a compact area.
Finally, standard notation is very rich and evolved, as you’d expect for something in active use for so long. It has extensions for lots of instruments.
When people say notation can’t show X it’s usually that they just don’t know it can.
The only downside is that you have to learn it.
I have friends who have actual degree in music composition from actual conservatories, so most of them, professionals, who actually compose and produce actual music for movies, for games, for whatever you want - well all of them use DAWs and all of them are on Ableton or Logic or something along the line, and exactly ZERO of this nonsensical notation that takes more effort to master than music itself.
Most of the new music that gets composed is written in gantt charts or tracker rows, believe it or not. Dig around, and you'll find out.
You can use a scrollable chart to display notes on screen and still want printed music for live use.
I'll bet you that if your friends are professionals and using live musicians to play their their compositions then they are distributing music to them in notation form not screenshots of Logic gantt charts.
There's nothing "nonsensical" about notation, it just serves a different purpose to a DAW screen.
If you want to read from paper and play what you read in real time, a Gantt chart is harder to use not easier. Use the right tool for the job.
I'm sympathetic to that view; I spent all evening writing electronic music by programming it into a sequencer and spent a lot of my early career (starting in about 1999) programming using a piano roll.
But "easier for what purpose"? It'd be really tough to read at a gig off a piano-roll.
It took a long time to become comfortable with the fact that standard notation is mostly a suggestion that doesn't contain the years of context I need to get through a big band gig on double bass... but once I realized that my ability to sight read got good enough that I stopped wishing there were some other kind of notation to read.
The instruments, music, and notation all evolved together in a shared tradition that make them well-suited for one another.