81–90 of 165 posts
I'd use it though, even though I can read music I like to use tabs for guitar. This would be nice for me since I don't play piano, but would like to play a simple tune once in a while.
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…
I play both piano and trumpet and I think two hands make reading music at least a little bit more difficult. I've never struggled with reading trumpet music, but lots of piano sheet music still gives a hard time at tempo.
However, you can't create such a notation for every situation because, some times, piano pieces are hard and notation is not going to make things easier. There's hardly a way to clearly see the notes you have to play and their timing when there're multiple notes in different melodic lines. with different rythms: it's just hard and it's not because of the notation.
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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"
Only the simple, combative, stupidly contrarian mind. Albeit, such minds are much too common on HN.
I understood the scope of the OP's suggestion. I just thought it could've been presented more clearly. The fact that tons of the comments here are directed at the idea of this notation as a replacement would seem to bear this out.
For my thoughts on the notation itself, see this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9831337
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…
In my app, I figured I'd try to distill written music down to its basic elements — pitch and time — and allow users to draw on notes arbitrarily, with the equal temperament pitch grid as a guide and pitch/time snapping available as an option. (As an aside: the pitch axis is basically a logarithmic graph of tone frequnency — cents from A440. Because of this, I can swap out the equal temperament scale with basically any arbitrary scale. I've implemented *.scl file import and have been playing around with odd non-equal tunings from huygens-fokker.org's archive[2], though I don't know if this will end up in the final user-facing product.)
[1]: Early demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ra8OvnoxKQw
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…
This preference for some keys over others is pretty much built into the piano keyboard too, and the notation is specifically intended for keyboard music, so it's not obviously crazy. But it certainly doesn't have the property that the semitones are equally spaced.
Reminds me a bit about how Mark Twain would redesign English spelling. Once you've read sheet music for a while and played it you don't really see it any more, you hear it in your head and you play it. I'm sure there are many different ways you could write it but they all suffer from the same challenge, which is is first training your brain to read it. Given the amount of information on a page though, you would have…
I am surprised all the JavaScript programmers on HN are so opposed to an accessible notation for beginners.
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Thanks for your explanation. I think there is another advantage (to merely having the white keys) besides just transposing being easier. And this is that the same intervals will always have the same spacing on the keyboard. I guess this should be my main argument for this type of layout being more natural.
Yes, they would be the same spacing, but that spacing would be extremely uncomfortable and lots of pieces would become impossible to play. Making the black keys the same size as the white keys, a 8th would become a 13th. I don't have small hands and I can barely reach a 11th interval. Basically, a lot of simultaneous notes could no longer be played. A solution would be to make the keys smaller, but then you wouldn't…
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.
It never sticks, because there's literally an entire industry devoted to traditional notation and traditional keyboard design.
Meanwhile in pop and electronica everyone started using button grids to trigger loops and samples, and the notation thing was almost completely bypassed.
This is very, very limited a anything busier than a few block chords - which includes a lot of music - will be too dense for it.
Notation evolved in an ad hoc way, so there's certainly a lot wrong with it. But it's good as an efficient representation of music. Most of the examples here would fit on a single line of notation - so this model is around four to eight times less dense.
Try setting something simple like Bach's Prelude No 1 from the WTC and you'll see how inefficient it is.
