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.
I felt exactly this way learning to read music. The score just didn't present enough information fast enough for me because I hand't learned to build the context in my head and spot the relations. I fumbled about with alternatie notations, extra notations etc. I finally settled on colors. I wrote a small program to color the dominant, subdominant etc. and then printed it on my color printer. This helped me immensely and I didn't take the dead end road of learning alternate notations that would shut me out of all written music everywhere.
Some windmills should be tilted at, some should just be left alone.
I wonder if a suitable analogy would be like underlining all capital letters in a selection of prose - useful for the neophyte, chaff for the slightly experienced onwards.
robot plays the piano better than i ever could
Apart from the personal enjoyment angle, robots also can't detect the mood of the audience (yet) and play to suit.
The one place I could see pitch symbols being slightly beneficial is when notes are either way above or way below the staff. But even then, after some deliberate practice these can be recognized pretty quickly as well.
Regarding relative position. On a piano the relative position of notes on the staff almost directly correlates to position on the keyboard. On a stringed instrument this is VERY far from the case. As i proceed up the scale on a simple instrument like the bass i will proceed right on the neck on one string, then drop down a string, shift left, proceed right on that string, drop down a string, shift left, proceed right on that string. So you've got back and forth, and up and down motions to keep going in one direction tonally. On a guitar the strings aren't all tuned evenly so the back and forth on the neck changes depending on which strings you're switching between. On the Ukulele the top string is higher than the string below it so you end up jumping UP strings rather than down, AND the strings aren't tuned at even intervals. So you've just got a big jumble of movements.
Don't even get me started on the totally unintuitive nature of woodwind fingerings or how they are almost totally disconnected from what's going on on the staff.
In short, the relative positioning of notes on the staff is good from a tonal perspective but crap from a finger perspective on most every instrument except piano.
That's not really a problem once you build the muscle memory, though.
It's the same thing as touch typing. With enough practice, you know that finger placement X will produce note y, the same way you know where the keys on the keyboard are.
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.
It's all about recognizing when to build tension and when to resolve tension.
Yes, the roles that the notes play is defined by the key, but if you don't mentally make the switch, you'll often perform things poorly because you don't anticipate where things are going correctly.
Or at least that's how it works for me, at any rate. Take anything I say with a grain of salt. I can't sight-read much at all.
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
If this had that much of an impact on you, and if this has the potential to encourage others to learn notation, I'd like to see a full study of how hummingbird compares to the regular notation.
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.
I've worked with intermediate-level musicians who are skilled at regular sight-reading, but who struggle to learn to transpose on the fly. A relative-pitch notation might be like requiring everyone to "transpose" all the time, forcing them to learn this skill before they can proceed.
On the other hand, maybe you'd teach it differently. Instead of learning transposition as carrying around an offset to add to each pitch, you'd learn it as carrying around a scale to which the relative pitches would be mapped. I wonder whether this would be easier or harder to learn.
When you get beyond that, "mapping relative pitches to a scale" is, IMO, the correct approach. The "offset to each pitch" thing obscures what's really going on, as if they were all weird derivatives of the key of C. I can see how it might be harder, among other reasons because you have to understand how a scale works more clearly, but I suspect it would be worth it.
Of course, it's hard to really know without getting people to switch for a couple generations.
We already use relative notation for most instruments. Trumpets, Clarinets and Tenor Saxophones typically read notation where Bb is equivalent to C on the page. What you'll note we Don't do, is change our relative pitch between songs.
No. Relative pitch is Very Hard, because as a musician, my hands don't play relatively. When I see an Eb on a notation sheet, my body knows how to play the note without me thinking about it, and it has to, because sometimes you can have notes flying at you with a rate of 32 a bar. This does not leave time to translate between the relative abstraction on paper and the absolute pitch of my instrument. It's not just harder.
It's much, much harder to train your brain and body to be able to map the same object on the page to twelve different body positions, depending on some variable that changes at random between songs.
Also remember, that different pitches have different textures, otherwise we'd never play in a keys other than C.
This is why I mainly worry that a relative-pitch notation may present a steeper learning curve. Advanced players typically need to be able to think at least somewhat in both relative pitches and absolute pitches at the same time anyway. Absolute pitches because that's what many instruments demand, and relative pitches, because that's where a lot of the meaning is, which informs other aspects of the performance. But it typically takes more practice to learn to think in both ways at once.
> Also remember, that different pitches have different textures, otherwise we'd never play in a keys other than C.
I did propose that pieces could indicate their intended key.
Scales are a function that acts upon the set of pitches used in music. A C major scale has the pitches C, D, E, F, G, A, and B. A G major scale (function) has the pitches G, A, B, C, D, E, and F#.
"Mapping relative pitches to a scale" is nonsensical. A scale (function) is an absolute set of pitches, immutable.
There are two forms of solfège (do, re, mi, ...): fixed and moveable. In moveable the first pitch of the scale is always do. In fixed the pitch called C is always do. Watch "The Sounds of Music" to learn the solfège for a major scale, it's the do-re-mi song. There are other syllables used for the three minor scale forms. To my knowledge (admittedly not complete) Italy, France, and perhaps England used a fixed-do system, whereas the rest of the world uses a moveable-so system.
Actually, most trumpets, harmonicas, and many classes of flute are restricted to diatonic scales. You'll have a hard time finding a chromatic trumpet outside of a museum.
There's more to music than western chromaticism or indeed harmonic theory.
The chromatic trumpet is an invention that allowed us to escape the trumpets natural harmonic series (Those being the notes a trumpet can play in a single valve position) before valves were invented by drilling holes along its tubes.
Wikipedia is not the best place to learn music theory, and knowing music theory is as useful as knowing a list of rules for programming best practice.
Also, I was playing and recording music since before wikipedia even came into existence, so dial back those assumptions.
This is kind of a confusing statement to me. Most instruments called "trumpets" where I come from are valved instruments which are fully capable of producing chromatics. (Maybe this is technically incorrect and we should be properly calling them "cornets" or something, I don't know.)
My point is, you certainly don't have to go to a museum to find one, and I expect, in a museum (of history anyway), any trumpet you'd find would be more likely to to be valveless and non-chromatic.
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).
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.)
I know there are a lot of judgement calls in typesetting music, but that's true of text too, and we have some pretty good algorithms for doing so these days.
All that said, I have a lot of reservations about this particular notation, but I think there's certainly room for improvement even inside the current system. Letting the back catalog of work hold notation back isn't healthy.
It is enough if machines can translate the existing sheet music to the new system.
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.
Tempi and volume are usually given in Italian, aren't they?
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.
I much prefer someone to criticize my work, rather than sitting quiet just because they can't think of improvements. After all, I'm probably much more likely to come up with a solution than they are, and the reason I didn't is just because I didn't think of that 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".
But yes, classical notation could certainly use some refinements.
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.