Clairnote: An alternative music notation system
clairnote.org
Clairnote: An alternative music notation system
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Re: Clairnote: An alternative music notation system
#2This is interesting. Growing up, I had 8 years of music theory, so reading standard notation is second nature. In high school and later on in rock/metal bands, I never actually used it. It was far more common to use guitar tablature (even though I was the drummer). Tab is more of a short-hand system, giving you fret markings and measures, but usually omitting rhythmic notation.
To me, this system is actually more confusing. The spacing is kind of hard to see. Maybe it's because I keep trying to read it as if it were standard notation. I wonder if it would help someone starting from scratch.
Re: Clairnote: An alternative music notation system
#3This is interesting!
As weird as the standard notation system is, it works pretty well for tonal music. If you know how to play your instrument within a given key, music takes the same basic shape on the staff, even if it's transposed. It also keeps most pieces pretty compact, even if they have a wide range.
However, standard notation is also notoriously difficult to learn, to the point that many virtuoso players never actually learn it (especially guitar players).
Clairnote appears to respect most of the most useful properties of standard notation, except maybe efficiency with vertical space. Maybe some day I'll give it a try.
Re: Clairnote: An alternative music notation system
#4I am of course sceptical whether this notation system will gain a bigger following, but I really appreciate their nice website and how they clearly communicate their idea. They even have a nice interactive online tutorial: https://clairnote.org/learn/
Re: Clairnote: An alternative music notation system
#5This is interesting. Growing up, I had 8 years of music theory, so reading standard notation is second nature. In high school and later on in rock/metal bands, I never actually used it. It was far more common to use guitar tablature (even though I was the drummer). Tab is more of a short-hand system, giving you fret markings and measures, but usually omitting rhythmic notation. To me, this system is actually more con…
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Re: Clairnote: An alternative music notation system
#6I like it. As a kid (and well into my 30s[1]), any time I tried to learn 'music theory' I was put off by the feeling that what I was learning was more about the goofy and confusing standard notation than it was about music. By fixing the notation that barrier could be removed and students could get straight into the interesting stuff sooner. At least I think it would have helped me!
[1] I eventually came to understand a lot of the concepts about scales/keys/etc by ignoring the notation and just horsing around on my MIDI keyboard a lot.
Re: Clairnote: An alternative music notation system
#7At a glance, this is a neat concept, but doesn't seem to come at the problem from the perspective of the most common users of music notation (experienced musicians); rather, it appears to have been written by somebody who was frustrated by trying to learn to read music. For experienced musicians, the priorities are a) legibility for sight-reading and transcription (which this system, with indistinguishable sitting/hanging notes and pervasive ledger lines fails) and b) musical context for expressive decisions, such as information about key, mode, modulation and harmonic content as hinted at by the key signatures and accidentals (which this system downplays as unnecessary).
Re: Clairnote: An alternative music notation system
#8I hate to be too much of a downer as there are some nice ideas here, but I can see at least three problems with this:
1) First and foremost, of course, the massive entrenched investment in traditional notation. It's like trying to replace the QWERTY keyboard.
2) More risk of transcription errors in written music. The difference between "sitting just above the line" and "sitting on the line" is quite subtle.
3) This is strictly tied to the 12-note equal temperament scale, with enharmonic sharps and flats. Traditional notation works fairly well with many alternate tunings, e.g. 19-note equal temperament (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/19_equal_temperament) Edit to add: looking more closely, it does include a notation to distinguish between e.g. G# and Ab, but as it's optional for most music it comes across as an afterthought that most people won't learn; and as in the previous point, it looks ripe for transcription errors. # and b are a little weird but at least they look very different!
I really like that this tries to be a more general-purpose system without being biased towards western classical diatonic music, but it looks significantly worse for that style of music (point 2) while not necessarily being significantly better for other styles (point 3).
Easy transposition across octaves is nice, but not exactly a killer feature. That's already one of the easiest things you can do on most instruments.
Re: Clairnote: An alternative music notation system
#9Applause for the effort but I doubt that this will become popular. Music notation has been a certain way for hundreds of years for musicians around the world – a notation with the universal legibility of mathematics.
However, as someone who sight-reads all of his piano music, I'd be interested in experiencing if this makes sight-reading any easier or harder. It's taken many years of experience to be able to spot and predict patterns several measures ahead of where I'm playing, and I wonder if future musicians could get to advanced sight-reading levels more quickly using an alternative notation.
Re: Clairnote: An alternative music notation system
#10Applause for the effort but I doubt that this will become popular. Music notation has been a certain way for hundreds of years for musicians around the world – a notation with the universal legibility of mathematics. However, as someone who sight-reads all of his piano music, I'd be interested in experiencing if this makes sight-reading any easier or harder. It's taken many years of experience to be able to spot and…
>Applause for the effort but I doubt that this will become popular. Music notation has been a certain way for hundreds of years for musicians around the world – a notation with the universal legibility of mathematics.
This system is really compatible with the standard one though? It's essentially a visual skin.
Removing the middle line is kinda nice - I remember as a kid having trouble and counting lines a lot to figure out what not something was.
The sharp/flat notation seems pretty week though/visually unclear?
I'm not sold on the the numbers in the clef symbols - I don't find it so helpful, and don't have a very intuitive sense of what the number of the octaves are. Especially because the rest of the notation is quite visual/geometric, it's odd to see it resorting to adding numbers here (where the normal notation leaves them out unless the clefs are in non-standard octaves).