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How I’d redesign piano sheet music

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Re: How I’d redesign piano sheet music

#31

Post by rspeer »

amsilprotag wrote: post #28
bbx wrote: post #21

What happens if you rotate that first image 90° counter-clockwise? http://i.imgur.com/i2V57On.png You get a traditional sheet music with simpler graphics. What about the new features? - Easily printable: traditional scores already are - Screen and scroll-friendly: you can stack traditional score pages vertically - Chord names: already exist on traditional scores - Lyrics: same thing - Foot pedal arrows: same thing Th…

I challenge "easily printable." This way of writing sheet music is vastly more space inefficient. Each beat requires an entire row of space, whereas a beat in sheet music might require 3 square inches at most. Having many pages of sheet music, like in coding, makes it much harder to understand the song as a whole and navigate repeats. I do like the fact that — unlike with sheet music - the 12 semi-tones are spaced ev…

As long as you're playing tonal music, chord types and intervals will be strongly associated with the 7 note names, not just the 12 semitones. A perfect fourth will always be the same size on the staff, for example.

If it's "spelled" differently -- if an interval of that size is actually written as C-E#, for example -- then that's a sign that something weird is going on and you're not supposed to think of this interval as a fourth.

The fact that we write music using the 7-note diatonic scale is kind of like compression: it optimizes notation for the notes and intervals you're most likely to play. It's just not suited for atonal music, much like compression is not suited for random-looking data.

Re: How I’d redesign piano sheet music

#32

Post by dfan »

This has some things in common with what we did in designing the notation for keyboards in Rock Band 3 (see https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/G/01/videogam... for an example), where we had the same sort of concerns in mind.

This sort of "piano-roll" notation has the nice feature that the elements are easy in theory to parse: time goes along one axis, pitch goes along the other, and you just do what it tells you. As far as notation for Western music goes, it does have some disadvantages.

All twelve pitch classes are spaced equally, so the scalar structure of tonal music is harder to make out. I can tell just by glancing at a page of sheet music whether it is tonal or atonal, and I can't do that here. All the notes kind of look the same (though I'm sure this is true for someone who isn't fluent at Western notation trying to read sheet music!). One way we tried to ameliorate this in Rock Band was to color different groups of notes differently, so you had a lot of features to grab onto (e.g., the boundary between E and F is the boundary between blue and green).

Durations are completely visual, which is nice from a intuitive point of view but means that it's harder to parse the underlying pulse and rhythmic structure of the music. A grid might help here. (I was constantly insisting that the grid in Rock Band be made to be as helpful as possible.)

Anyway, it's a nice visualization of keyboard music, and I don't doubt that this is easier to understand for people who don't read music already. I wish he had chosen a less hyperbolic title, though.

Re: How I’d redesign piano sheet music

#33

Post by emptybits »

Just wanted to leave this here, for people who get off on alternate music notation...

An amazing collection of functional/beautiful/arty alt music notation can be found in "Notations 21", edited by Theresa Sauer. One score per page, all wildly different in their approach to encoding music. Just wow.

This video has some images from the book:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8F2Dv27CSuI

Re: How I’d redesign piano sheet music

#34

Post by d2p »

I really like this. I used to play piano, and I just hated reading sheet music. This seems to much more simple.

I don't think it'd work well in paper/book form, but on a scrolling screen I think it'd be a great learning aid.

Re: How I’d redesign piano sheet music

#35

Post by tacos »

mattbasta wrote: post #4

I 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 s…

So does a deck of flash cards. If you learned multiplication tables you can learn to read music. And if you can play video games you can play piano.

And it's NEVER too late to learn.

Re: How I’d redesign piano sheet music

#37

Post by maho »

By pure chance I had just sat down at a piano, trying to figure out my old music sheets that I had managed to play, with lots of stress and never well in any sense of the word, 10 years ago. (My piano lessons got me to "Fröhlicher Landmann", before my teacher and I gave up.) Now I struggled with the most basic lessons and contemplated about the inefficiencies of the notation.

I gave up, somewhat frustrated, and then saw this post. Here is my experience:

- The top to bottom timescale is easy to get use to and makes sense, given that you need a wide space just to fit all the keys. I placed my iPad on the piano in horizontal mode and could well imagine an app that scrolls the sheet for me, for time progression. Edit: Sorry, I was so excited about the article, I did not even see that it goes on after the notes, where the author talks about this.

- With the standard sheet music, because decoding was so inefficient, I would first figure out the keys and then try to memorize the finger pattern as quickly as possible, so that I don't have to decode the notes again. With the new notation I got lazy and kept my eyes on the sheet for the whole time, which actually slowed me down. I had to remind myself to memorize more. Just something to get used to, I guess.

- The notation does not give an exact rhythm, which I actually loved. If you've ever heard the song, you quickly figure out what the rhythm is supposed to be. The minimal rhythm notation is great, because it's not in the way of the notes.

I had a lot of fun learning the start of this song, and I would love to see more. I always wanted to learn some Beatles songs, and the sheet music that my mother bought so many years ago was always too complex to be fun. With this notation, songs like that are a lot more approachable. I don't think it makes sense for classical music, where the timing is not as obvious, but for pop and folk songs, or playing along to Studentenlieder ("im schwarzen Walfisch zu Askalon", anyone?), it seems like a great choice.

One minor sugestion to the original author: It would be great if the grey lines that correspond to the black keys would be bolder and darker. I had trouble seeing them, but I don't have the best eyesight...

Re: How I’d redesign piano sheet music

#38

Post by raverbashing »

Yes, musical notation is hard. But no, this is not an improvement.

While a lot of the problems of it comes from its limitations at the origin (think medieval musicians writing music) it is a very flexible and interesting format

What are the problems I see with it:

- Apart from the center notes, it's hard to know which note is which. I know that the second line from the bottom is a G, beats me what's that thing 3 lines above the regular lines

- It's hard to capture what's happening. Chords on top help

- Having to identify notes in G clef, F clef (and C clef sometimes)

- It's an absolute mess when you have lots of simultaneous notes

I know there are a lot of historical, instrumental or music-theoretical reasons things are like that, but there's room for improvement

I just wouldn't think of twinkle twinkle little star when designing it, I would think of something more complex (and Let It Be, props to him, is not very complex but also not very simple)

(And that's not touching the issues with the piano, that's another load of items)

Re: How I’d redesign piano sheet music

#39

Post by jdpage »

goodside wrote: post #20
theseoafs wrote: post #6

The 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.

"[The] target user is probably learning easy, contemporary songs, and already knows what they sound like before they learn them." Leaving out exact note durations is intentional, and probably the main reason why it's so easy to read. The shaded tails from notes just have to evoke what's already in your head.

The problem there is that 90% of people have the lengths of notes in their head wrong. Sure, if you ask them to hum a song, they'll produce something that sounds rhythmically passable, but it's a far cry from being correct.

Re: How I’d redesign piano sheet music

#40

Post by tacos »

hluska wrote: post #29

Disclosure - this is a local startup and though I don't know the founder (or founders, I don't even know) I did fall in love with this app at an open house a few years ago. I am always biased in favour of entrepreneurs, but I double down on local entrepreneurs. Disclosure 2 - I'm generally a horrible musician, but when I was very young, my Grandma Yvette taught me to play the fiddle before the Suzuki program tried to…

Back when Electronic Arts made tools for electronic artists, there was a great program called Deluxe Music Construction Set. I've heard similar versions of your story from people who experimented with that software. Clicking notes on a staff, seeing things light up on a piano keyboard. Some people prefer to learn like this, and some people did.

Professional notation software is an utter shit show. Microsoft Surface 3 launched with an interesting touch screen notation program in their promos. Stuff is out there, though notation isn't as popular (or nearly as well done, or as immediately rewarding) as some of the other apps like Ableton Live.

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