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Clairnote: An alternative music notation system

clairnote.org

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Re: Clairnote: An alternative music notation system

#21

Post by Jeff_Brown »

iainmerrick wrote: post #8

I 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 i…

> the massive entrenched investment

At first I thought it would be like switching from Facebook to Mastodon. But if there is automatic translation software, it wouldn't actually be as hard -- you can just wear your own Clairnote lenses when you want, without bothering the other musicians.

> The difference between "sitting just above the line" and "sitting on the line" is quite subtle.

Agreed. It seems worth using different heads for the two kinds of notes.

Re: Clairnote: An alternative music notation system

#22

Post by Jeff_Brown »

scrozier wrote: post #15

Interesting, well thought out, and well-presented. Just not sure that it solves a problem. It certainly isn't radically easier to learn than traditional notation. And despite other comments here, huge numbers of young people learn traditional notation all the time, with little stress. Maybe, as is true with spoken languages, it becomes harder to learn musical notation as we get older? All the "problems" that this not…

Huge numbers of young people learn traditional music notation all the time, yes, but I wouldn't say with little stress. Music notation evolved much like English, and much like English it's widely recognized to be full of kludges and unnatural constructions. And similarly, changing it would resemble switching to Esperanto.

Re: Clairnote: An alternative music notation system

#23

Post by midenginedcoupe »

I'm not entirely sure who's the target audience of this new notation. I've been reading music for 40 years and don't think I've once needed the vertical gaps between notes to tell me whether an interval was a major or a minor third. In fact, I think in terms of steps in the scale, not whether those steps are flattened or not. So equi-distant vertical spacing for the notes in a major scale better fits my mental model.

But that's just my own preference/habit. The real sticking point for me is the ambiguity of whether a note head is exactly on a line or just below. Sight reading needs that decision to be immediate - picking out whether the note is just below the line inamongst some large and rapid intervallic jumps is going to be almost impossible.

Also, I'm not sure the author has understood one of the key rationales for these other clefs - that the number of ledger lines can be minimised. E.g. Playing in the upper register of the trombone is an exercise in parsing 4-6 ledger lines, which can get tricky especially with rough hand-written charts. Switching to tenor or even alto clef keeps everything nicely within the stave and easier to read. Where in the staff the 'C' sits is just a detail, and it's surprisingly quick to get used to different clefs with different centres.

Re: Clairnote: An alternative music notation system

#24

Post by iainmerrick »

Jeff_Brown wrote: post #16
InitialLastName wrote: post #7

At 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/ha…

That does appear to be its origin. And if you take 12 equal divisions of the octave as a given, Clairnote seems more natural. OTOH once you're thinking in terms of a 7-tone subset, maybe traditional notation is more natural. (It certainly is to me, but I haven't given Clairnote a try.) Traditional notation uses the scale degree as the fundamental unit, whereas this uses the 12-edo chromatic tone as the fundamental un…

I'm very surprised they don't make the sitting/hanging notes semicircular, so they're much more visually distinct (like stalactites and stalagmites).

Instead they seem to have tried two different systems for the sitting/hanging notes, both of which look very hard to read to me: https://clairnote.org/clairnote-dn-clairnote-sn/ (although as you say, if you already know traditional notation it's hard to look at this with an unbiased eye).

Re: Clairnote: An alternative music notation system

#25

Post by stephen_g »

scrozier wrote: post #15

Interesting, well thought out, and well-presented. Just not sure that it solves a problem. It certainly isn't radically easier to learn than traditional notation. And despite other comments here, huge numbers of young people learn traditional notation all the time, with little stress. Maybe, as is true with spoken languages, it becomes harder to learn musical notation as we get older? All the "problems" that this not…

Yeah, I had the same reaction. I can’t really imagine this would be any easier to learn, and doesn’t seem to solve any problem I’ve ever had with standard notation (this is with 20 years of music experience across several instruments).

Re: Clairnote: An alternative music notation system

#27

Post by scrozier »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #17
scrozier wrote: post #15

Interesting, well thought out, and well-presented. Just not sure that it solves a problem. It certainly isn't radically easier to learn than traditional notation. And despite other comments here, huge numbers of young people learn traditional notation all the time, with little stress. Maybe, as is true with spoken languages, it becomes harder to learn musical notation as we get older? All the "problems" that this not…

I mean, English isn't hard to learn if you grew up with it either, but it's still three languages in a trenchcoat with a ton of weird things. I mean, pronounce all of these words that have the same combinations of the letters "ough": though, through, rough, cough, thought, bough, plough, ought and borough. The notation is the same, but it's clearly not adequate to express the difference between pronunciation. If you…

This isn't a parallel argument. There are no ambiguities in standard musical notation that parallel the pronunciation issue you point out in English. Further, there are no non-traditional-music-notation "speakers" trying to learn musical notation. One is (almost) always learning it anew, unless perhaps you're coming at it from a different notation system, which is a different discussion.

Re: Clairnote: An alternative music notation system

#28

Post by iainmerrick »

Jeff_Brown wrote: post #21
iainmerrick wrote: post #8

I 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 i…

> the massive entrenched investment At first I thought it would be like switching from Facebook to Mastodon. But if there is automatic translation software, it wouldn't actually be as hard -- you can just wear your own Clairnote lenses when you want, without bothering the other musicians. > The difference between "sitting just above the line" and "sitting on the line" is quite subtle. Agreed. It seems worth using dif…

That's a good point; if/when all the scores are fully electronic, they could easily be transcribed automatically.

Anyone know how close we are to that? I feel like I'm seeing many more professional classical musicians using iPads rather than paper scores, but I don't know if they're just looking at scanned scores, or something like MIDI that can be freely transliterated.

Re: Clairnote: An alternative music notation system

#29

Post by MattPalmer1086 »

andrewzah wrote: post #26

To my eyes this is way harder to read than traditional notation, which really isn't hard to learn and works well for most music (and non-12TET music). It's hard to see if a note is on a line or just above/under it.

Same here. The different notes look too similar.

Re: Clairnote: An alternative music notation system

#30

Post by dwringer »

Jeff_Brown wrote: post #16
InitialLastName wrote: post #7

At 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/ha…

That does appear to be its origin. And if you take 12 equal divisions of the octave as a given, Clairnote seems more natural. OTOH once you're thinking in terms of a 7-tone subset, maybe traditional notation is more natural. (It certainly is to me, but I haven't given Clairnote a try.) Traditional notation uses the scale degree as the fundamental unit, whereas this uses the 12-edo chromatic tone as the fundamental un…

I always thought one of the main benefits of a 7-tone subset is that it fits inside working memory. It's also what anyone who grew up with commercial pop music or western classical music has a natural ear for. Not to mention that even just looking at it harmonically, all 12 tones are most certainly not equal from a given root.

AFAIU, historically 12-TET is really a compromise, sacrificing some harmonicity to simplify and enable having symmetrical 7-note tonality in any traditional mode starting from any point in any scale. Some modern styles definitely subvert this idea, embracing the full range of chromaticity - but without abandoning 12-TET, they are still playing with the audience's harmonic preconceptions that are based in conventional tonality.

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