How I’d redesign piano sheet music

[0] I say "some sense," because tabs are still fairly limiting, particularly in depicting complex rhythms. Traditional sheet music is still very common (and, I contend, indispensable) for advanced guitar study.

However, I'm skeptical that this is it. First, looking at the 2 notations of "Let it Be," we can see that the new notation does not convey the same data, or even a simplified version of it. It's a different version of it. I find that odd.

Second, I don't think learning music notation is very difficult. I learned to read treble and bass clef when I was 5 years old. It was much harder trying to make my fingers press the right keys at the right time than memorizing which circle on which line matched with which key or note.

Looking at this, I'm reminded of Laban notation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laban_Movement_Analysis) and Benesh Notation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benesh_Movement_Notation) for notating dance. Both are very complicated and essentially never used by the people who actually do the dancing. Furthermore, I'm told that Benesh, for example, allows a notator to add written (human-language) notes below the staff to convey additional information. In other words, they know it doesn't convey everything it's supposed to.

So what do dancers do? They learn from video. They watch the masters who went before them directly performing the movement. Frankly, I think it would be great to see something similar for music. Having a video of someone playing a keyboard from above, possibly with a graphical overlay showing the notes pressed would be way better (in my opinion). (Which isn't to say it's without issues - far more bandwidth, video codecs, playback hardware, etc.)

I hope this doesn't entirely replace staff notation. The reason for this is because of its connection to music theory. Once I got to a certain level with the violin, I didn't have to think about how notes mapped to the violin physically, but was able to think more in terms of music theory (or at least it was rather easy to switch between the two). This opens up an entire world if you start tinkering with improvisation and gives you a common language with other musicians.

I think staff notation is also quite amazing because it represents music in such a way that it can be easily understood by musicians of many, many instruments at a glance. Imagine writing a symphony of however many instruments in different kinds of notation, or being the conductor who has to read it all simultaneously...

All that being said, I could totally imagine a world where a huge percentage of musicians (especially amateurs) learn only these easily readable musical languages, while people who want to dive deeper learn staff.

So, no way it could replace traditional notation. It could be used to show how to play something to a newcomer, but it's not novel, then — I've seen visualizations with highlighted piano keys since like as long as I remember myself. And not that practical anyway, since it's not that hard to remember how to read musical notation and start using it right away (especially if there's no alteration symbols in the key signature and no somewhat obscure symbols like fermatas and stuff).

This is silly. Standard notation isn't absolutely perfect but it's pretty darn good. If a symphony can come out of dozens of musicians consistently by using standard notation I think we are OK.

I think the problem often has to do with not wanting to put in the time to master not only the notation and the instrument but also the hours and hours of work required to crate the synaptic connections necessary to read and play without thinking.

It's like complaining about vim because it is hard to learn. The problem isn't vim, the problem is the person who doesn't want to do the work.