> Where it suffers is in notating timbre

There are a great many annotations to individual notes: lines, accents, staccato dots, slurs and brackets, dynamic markings etc. etc. that indicate timbre, and you've always got the fallback of just writing out what you want, and it's even acceptable to not even use Italian these days!

I've always been fascinated by the possibility of a chromatic western notation though, which would require way less learning but would therefore not centre around the C major scale.

Imagine it as a piano with all alternating black and white notes, no gaps.

Now there are 6 white and 6 black notes per octave.

You would only have to learn two positions to have learned all scales and all chords (like sliding moving a bar chord on a guitar).

I don't know that it would be better. It might be soulless but it also reduces the redundancy of learning harmony and theory and suddenly jumping up a key is as simple as physically moving up a key.

Look into chromatic keyboards like the Jankó keyboard or the Isomorphic keyboard.

You'd also need different keyboards and notation if you start considering music not built around the octave.

Thanks for that I hadn't seen the Jankó keyboard, although the purely physical fix doesn't deal with my bigger frustration that the accidentals and quirks of scale centric notation requires a huge investment in theory learning to learn Western music in more than one key... Having taught theory from scratch a couple of times as well as learned it, it's been a lifelong frustration that the same thing written a different way can be massively more complex even though the semi-tonal pattern is identical. I'd go as far as to say that the language and notation around scales actually obfuscates the patterns and then when you really understand the circle of 5ths you realise it's just a veneer and your mind can just translate it.

Really interesting reference. Will definitely read more into Jankó.

Interesting almost every pro musician I know uses the chord numbers to convey this information orally more than they use the note names. And when I did degree in jazz it was always focused on the numbers.

Musicians clearly understand the patterns, but it's beginners that I'm concerned with. After decades of study / practice most systems are workable.