Re:Experimental music notation resources (2015)
by psychometry on Sunday May 27, 2018 @11:00AM
(#17167104)
It would be nice if people on HN didn't try to turn everything into a coding analogy.
Re:Experimental music notation resources (2015)
by wolfram74 on Sunday May 27, 2018 @04:09PM
(#17168883)
But it's fairly fitting since musical notation is /supposed/ to be instructions for making a machine behave in a certain way. It's an early example of write-once-run-everywhere since the sheet music is relatively unchanged from instrument to instrument.
Re:Experimental music notation resources (2015)
by TheOtherHobbes on Monday May 28, 2018 @06:49PM
(#17175297)
Sheet music contains instructions for making human musicians behave a certain way. There is no sense in which it's a complete description of a musical performance. Timing variations and dynamics are all controlled by the player.
If the score is figured bass, the player will improvise/create a complete accompaniment from a sketch of the bass line and some hints about the harmony.
And it's not necessarily unchanged. The layout of a piano score and a transposed brass line are only distantly related. The notation will be common, more or less, with the limitation that a horn line is monophonic while a piano can play chords.
But the key won't be the same, which means the pitches won't be the same. And many of the expressive markings will be different too.
In the coding world, we have "Hello World" and Fizzbuzz. It would be nice if alternative music notation systems had something similar: A simple, familiar melody (candidates that come to mind are "Happy Birthday to You," and "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star") that, by rendering it in the new notation system, demonstrated the fundamental features of that system, and could be easily understood by someone knowledgeable in the traditional system.