Isn't C the first key of each group? If so, his black lines appear to be on the wrong side.
How I’d redesign piano sheet music
91–100 of 165 posts
Re: How I’d redesign piano sheet music
#92Does 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'm a violist, and I used to teach violin and piano. With stringed instruments, as you say, just making a sound and holding the instrument right are so difficult for beginners, reading music pales in comparison. Piano is unique-ish as an instrument that you can sit down at and start making a sound essentially right away. I found that for my beginner piano students, learning to read was probably the biggest challenge…
In my view the hard thing is sight-reading. With programming, if it takes one person twice as long as another, to read or write a program, at worst their productivity will be a bit lower. Or maybe higher. ;-) If you can't read music at tempo, then there are certain kinds of work that you can't do at all.
Granted, sight-reading skill is a matter of degree. I can read a jazz band gig, but would struggle with complex modern orchestral music. In musical styles that I'm familiar with, I can often make a good enough guess about what's next, that I only have to focus my attention on the dangerous bits. My attention often wanders away from the page.
I used to think that sight-reading was something that had to be learned, starting at an early age. I don't know if I still believe that, but I know that most adults who attempt to learn, find it to be prohibitive. This is one reason why it would be great to find an alternative. Even a piano with keys that light up.
Re: How I’d redesign piano sheet music
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I suppose one could also say "if you can learn to sight-read a novel you can learn to sight-read music" and it might be true but I think there is a certain natural ability prerequisite. I played in school concert bands for four years and could never manage to sight-read anything very complicated. Practicing was a chore and when we got new music I always had to sit and pick through it very slowly measure-by-measure un…
Are you dyslexic as well, or does it only happen with music?
Re: How I’d redesign piano sheet music
#94How 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…
1. It would make the equivalent keys even further apart and many songs harder, if not impossible to play.
2. The 2-3 key structure makes it obvious where each note is, it would be extremely difficult to find out where the notes are if all keys looked the same.
3. How often do you need to transpose music?
Re: How I’d redesign piano sheet music
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Good points. But I really don't understand why the keys need to be that big. People are used to typing on smartphones, where the sensitive area of a key is like 30% of the width of a finger. Of course, making them that small would be a little extreme, but I think piano keys could be much slimmer.
Typing is 1-0, you either press the key or not, there is no need for as much precision.
Re: How I’d redesign piano sheet music
#96This idea isn't entirely new (is anything?); for an earlier version, check out Klavarskribo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klavarskribo . It didn't really take hold, because it's much more inefficient than normal notation.
My grandfather was an expert piano player who used klavarscribo. All klavarscribo players I know have a very distinctive style/intonation, maybe because they were all either taught by my grandfather or from his generation or something. I'm not sure about any inefficiencies, my family said you needed to know classical script to get into music academies, and the academics wouldn't switch so they were locked out, but obviously my family is rather biased..
Re: How I’d redesign piano sheet music
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Good points. But I really don't understand why the keys need to be that big. People are used to typing on smartphones, where the sensitive area of a key is like 30% of the width of a finger. Of course, making them that small would be a little extreme, but I think piano keys could be much slimmer.
Have you seen anyone try to type on a smartphone? Slow, and riddled with typos. Keep piano keys the width they are, unless you want slow, error prone pianists.
Besides, we already have the ideal chromatic keyboard layout:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=hexagonal+music+controller&t=lm&ia...
Re: How I’d redesign piano sheet music
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suppose one could also say "if you can learn to sight-read a novel you can learn to sight-read music" and it might be true but I think there is a certain natural ability prerequisite. I played in school concert bands for four years and could never manage to sight-read anything very complicated. Practicing was a chore and when we got new music I always had to sit and pick through it very slowly measure-by-measure un…
Are you dyslexic as well, or does it only happen with music?
Not in the usual sense. If there is such a think as numeric dyslexia I might have that to some degree. I frequently transpose digits. I have trained myself to be very careful whenever I have to transcribe a number, fill out forms, or even dial a phone number. I find it helps to look at numbers in groups (pairs or triplets) rather than individually. I don't recall every trying that with music...
But I don't have any difficulty with reading text, and enjoyed reading a lot as a kid so in that sense I am not dyslexic.
Re: How I’d redesign piano sheet music
#99This is a very interesting subject. At least for me, as it draws on two of my passions: HCI/UX/usability and, well, music.
I think this kind of approach is defined essentially by a closer mapping between the sheet and the physical world (which is, according to usability tenets, something good). So, under this "definition", we can consider other approaches which are very popular and indeed work: guitar tabs and "Guitar Hero"-like games.
In the wise words of Thom Yorke, "anyone can play guitar", and I think this is - nowadays - mostly due to guitar tabs. Tabs make it very easy to step into guitar playing. So, I think, it's not a surprise that these approaches are so popular, as they have a easier learning curve for beginners, which is in itself also not a surprise if we consider the usability principle of close mapping with the real world. Traditional music notation just has more layers of translation, so to speak.
So, what are the drawbacks of this? I can think of three, which might explain why these approaches aren't promptly adopted by traditional music education:
1) As this is, essentially, a closer mapping to the physical world, said mapping has to be "done" to a specific instrument. An alternative notation such as this one or guitar tabs wouldn't be very helpful for, e.g., wind instruments. So, with this we would create specific "languages". Arguably, having musicians understand an universal language is a good thing - I'm no piano player, but I can read a piano sheet;
2) Repertoire, generally. The amount of music written in traditional notation is just huge, the inertia to start writing stuff with a different notation would be a problem;
3) Dynamics: I think these approaches overlook dynamics. It's not only about what and how long you play, it also about how you play it. For wind instruments, e.g., the dynamics can get quite complex - if a pianist has to read 5 notes, a flute player has to read one but with 5 dynamics annotations. This is, however, somewhat addressed in guitar tabs, as there are quite excellent tabs with not only dynamics annotations but also instrument-specific techniques. Maybe, in this approach, circle sizing could be used to communicate velocity?
Re: How I’d redesign piano sheet music
#100This idea isn't entirely new (is anything?); for an earlier version, check out Klavarskribo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klavarskribo . It didn't really take hold, because it's much more inefficient than normal notation.
I spent a long time Googling before finding this, only to see that it had already been posted. When I was in college I went on a tour of the Netherlands with my school's choir. We sang in a number of Protestant and Reformed churches and I remembered one of the music students pointed out a hymnal, still used by a congregation in Friesland, that used this particular notation system.
Someone else suggested that this was a notation with which they were familiar, from an old hymnal of the (U.S.) denomination affiliated with the college I attended. I had assumed it to be quite an old system as the hymnal appeared quite antiquated. Still, it doesn't surprise me that it (only?) dates to the 1930s, nor that there would still be churches using it. Many old Reformed churches have short institutional memories but nonetheless cling to assumed traditions. That, and the Frisians are, stereotypically, an old, stubborn people.