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How I’d redesign piano sheet music

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Re: How I’d redesign piano sheet music

#51
Compared to normal sheet music, this system mostly deletes cues. In normal sheet music, you have both the shape of the note and its rough position horizontally on the page as cues about the rhythm. Measure lines are removed in this system, which is a pure loss of readability, like removing periods and commas from English and replacing them with extra spaces (while saying you are trying to aid beginners, who may be still learning what a sentence is!). In normal sheet music, a note is either on a pitch line, or between two lines, where as in this new notation, a note may be on the left half or the right half of a space between two lines. It's just visually more difficult to parse.

The octaves are seemingly delimited by solid black lines, but these lines actually represent the note C#, counterintuitively. My feedback there is that you've been staring at this too long if you think it immediately resembles a piano keyboard. Make it look more like a piano keyboard if you want it to be more readable than sheet music for beginners.

Make the example of your notation match the example of traditional notation. There should be three notes in the right hand at the beginning of Let It Be.

Re: How I’d redesign piano sheet music

#52
How I'd redesign a piano, is with the black keys equal in color and shape to the white keys. That way, transposing a song by a semitone is equivalent to shifting your hands by one key. Much more natural.

I think they call an instrument with this property "chromatic", but I'm not sure.

Actually, perhaps somebody can explain why the black keys were invented. Because their existence makes little sense to me. For example, a guitar is a chromatic instrument, and can be played perfectly fine without any difference between "black" and "white" notes.

Re: How I’d redesign piano sheet music

#53

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 line…

It's clearly stated that the solution is meant to be like guitar tabs for piano. It's a limited, instrument-centered approach and not intended as a complete or universal solution.

Re: How I’d redesign piano sheet music

#54
post #46

I don't understand why insist in "little dots" notation in music if you plan to redesign how it's written. There are common patterns in music that standard notation does not take into account, e.g. a chord is much easier to read and recognize by its name rather than figuring out the dots. There are many more rules that would allow such groupings of notes in a way that's much faster and easier perform. Why not take th…

You lose a lot of information that way, e.g. voicing/inversions. Also, reading text names get a lot more cumbersome when you need stuff like "Ab half dimished +9".

Re: How I’d redesign piano sheet music

#55
post #52

How I'd redesign a piano, is with the black keys equal in color and shape to the white keys. That way, transposing a song by a semitone is equivalent to shifting your hands by one key. Much more natural. I think they call an instrument with this property "chromatic", but I'm not sure. Actually, perhaps somebody can explain why the black keys were invented. Because their existence makes little sense to me. For example…

Such an instrument exists! http://www.rogerlinndesign.com/linnstrument.html

My biggest gripe with this notation is that it assumes you're playing in a key, so the lines go for the key of D. That causes the spacing for a D chord and an E chord to look different, even though they're composed of the same intervals.

Re: How I’d redesign piano sheet music

#56
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…

The 90° isn't the big problem with traditional notation. It's that the same note in different octaves looks different. It's as if in programming you wrote a for loop differently for every level of nesting. The new notation draws against the same pattern of staff lines for each octave; plus, you don't have to remember sharps and flats from the key.

I've long wished for these two improvements, especially the first one; OTOH I'd keep the traditional whole note, half note, etc., for precision and concision -- the piano-roll style feels more like training wheels.

Re: How I’d redesign piano sheet music

#58

Does the author actually play piano? I didn't see him explicitly say it. I play violin, and reading sheet music was never a limiting factor. It was not a challenge to learn, and you don't learn all the symbols in the beginning. As you get more proficient and read harder music, only then do you learn new symbols. Maybe sheet music can be improved upon, but the real question is should it? Sheet music is easy enough to…

Indeed. Basically the only somewhat difficult part is remembering the key signatures without having to count which notes are flat/sharp.

Re: How I’d redesign piano sheet music

#59
Those are great, I could start reading those immediately for piano. I think it would be more enticing for newcomers to learn this "Guitar Hero sheet music" than traditional sheet music.

Just imagine if Guitar Hero had been done with traditional sheet music. I don't think it ever would have taken off.

Re: How I’d redesign piano sheet music

#60

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 line…

It's clearly stated that the solution is meant to be like guitar tabs for piano. It's a limited, instrument-centered approach and not intended as a complete or universal solution.

Yes, but since he frames it in the title as a "redesign," it's hard to get out of the frame of thinking about it as such. If he had titled it "A Simpler Notation for Piano Music" or something, his intent would've been clearer.

But then again, probably wouldn't have gotten to the front page without the word "redesign"

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