How I’d redesign piano sheet music
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How I’d redesign piano sheet music
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Re: How I’d redesign piano sheet music
#2Sheet music evolved when it would be difficult to produce a different representation for each instrument. Now this can be automated it makes a lot of sense to produce specialised formats, such as tab for guitar or this for keyboard. As a novice keyboard player I'd certainly prefer to use this than sheet music. Having said that there are advantages in sheet music that a professional musician would find lacking here. There's no rhythmic grouping (the beams provide this cue) and I'm sure there are many others that I'm unaware of.
Re: How I’d redesign piano sheet music
#3It looks like a keyboard doesn't it
Not really.
Re: How I’d redesign piano sheet music
#4I really love this. When I was young, I was really excited to learn to play the piano. The biggest problem I had was being able to read the sheet music. It was incredibly difficult for me to read and understand the notes for both hands at the same time. A big part of this was that when individual notes were off the normal staff (e.g., C is below the staff), you either had to have an innate sense of how far from the staff it was and what note that corresponded to, or you had to stop playing and count to see which note it was. This seems to solve all of those problems.
Re: How I’d redesign piano sheet music
#5It's not really new as it's used in most MIDI software to represent chords over time [0], or in many music videogames [1]. I think this style might work for very simple music sheets, but would become way too confusing and imprecise for complex ones.
Re: How I’d redesign piano sheet music
#6The traditional notation system has lasted so long for a reason. It's super difficult to figure out how long notes are meant to last with this notation system. It also takes up a lot more space than normal music notation. Moreover, it looks really difficult to write because of how note durations are represented.
Re: How I’d redesign piano sheet music
#7Sheet music evolved when it would be difficult to produce a different representation for each instrument. Now this can be automated it makes a lot of sense to produce specialised formats, such as tab for guitar or this for keyboard. As a novice keyboard player I'd certainly prefer to use this than sheet music. Having said that there are advantages in sheet music that a professional musician would find lacking here. T…
Yeah, this only makes sense if you already know the song. trying to infer the correct timing spatially would be difficult.
Re: How I’d redesign piano sheet music
#8It looks like a keyboard doesn't it Not really.
Yeah, I couldn't see it until the graphic of it next to the piano.
Re: How I’d redesign piano sheet music
#9I think this a cool idea. I think piano needs its own version of the guitar tab to be more approachable. For someone who knows the basics, just seeing the chords goes a long way. But this gives better detail.
One thing it glosses over is how the format responds to greater range. It acknowledges the fact that only 3 of piano's ~7 octaves are shown, but it doesn't address how much difficult it would be to read if there were notes in both the C2 octave and C6 octave at the same time. It gets much more difficult to line up the timing in that case because your eyes would be scanning frantically every note.
In traditional sheet music, notes played at the same time are never more than an inch or two apart. Will this format support sheet music's equivalent of 8va to keep notes properly within visual range?
Re: How I’d redesign piano sheet music
#10It's not really new as it's used in most MIDI software to represent chords over time [0], or in many music videogames [1]. I think this style might work for very simple music sheets, but would become way too confusing and imprecise for complex ones. [0] http://www.musicmasterworks.com/MMScShot.gif [1] http://i.ytimg.com/vi/rNg50UGkXfw/maxresdefault.jpg
There seem to be lots of different visualization methods [1] and the creator of musanim has posted an interesting history of their use with MIDI [2].