How I’d redesign piano sheet music • Hacker News Board

Re: How I’d redesign piano sheet music

#21

Post by bbx » Sat, Jul 04, 2015, 4:33 PM UTC

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

The only novelty here is to match a piano's physical horizontal pitch range, which forces the time axis to be vertical instead.

I guess sheet music is like code: sometimes you just need to learn it the hard way.

Re: How I’d redesign piano sheet music

#22

Post by hyperbovine » Sat, Jul 04, 2015, 4:44 PM UTC

theseoafs wrote: post #6

The traditional notation system has lasted so long for a reason. It's super difficult to figure out how long notes are meant to last with this notation system. It also takes up a lot more space than normal music notation. Moreover, it looks really difficult to write because of how note durations are represented.

But think of the alpha channels!

Re: How I’d redesign piano sheet music

#23

Post by ChuckMcM » Sat, Jul 04, 2015, 4:45 PM UTC

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 to at least match that, otherwise you spend to much time flipping pages and not as much time playing.

Re: How I’d redesign piano sheet music

#24

Post by analog31 » Sat, Jul 04, 2015, 4:45 PM UTC

I'm a bassist, of the "don't quit your day job" variety. Owing to the accident of having a certain musical background, I'm a fluent sight-reader, and the groups that I play in require this skill. I frequently encounter a mixture of standard notation (SN) and chord symbols, plus the occasional Nashville number chart.

From what I can tell, people have explored different notation systems for a couple of reasons. The first is that SN is an entry barrier for beginners. The second is to express musical ideas that don't fit within the bounds of SN.

But in my view, the reason why SN remains in use, is that there's a symbiosis between composers who can write it, and musicians who can sight-read, i.e., perform it directly from the sheet. Tabulature, or other pictographic notations don't work because the composers don't intimately know all of the instruments that they're writing for (including the variety of tuning and fingering systems for each instrument), and nobody knows how to sight-read those notations.

Another issue with any method involving computer graphics, is that there are still a surprising number of composers who use pencil and paper, because notation software is so cumbersome.

In one band that I'm in, the composer brings new material to each rehearsal. It's all written out by hand.

Re: How I’d redesign piano sheet music

#25

Post by gdubs » Sat, Jul 04, 2015, 4:48 PM UTC

I don't want to diminish the author's effort here, but this system feels like it would have difficulty beyond basic cases. And, in the most basic cases, it doesn't offer much more than simply calling out the chords over the lyrics.

It does lead me to think that a simple piano roll layout, like the ones found in Logic and other digital audio workstations, would be useful for those of us who are terrible at sight reading music.

Re: How I’d redesign piano sheet music

#26

Post by jahewson » Sat, Jul 04, 2015, 4:50 PM UTC

laurent123456 wrote: post #5

It's not really new as it's used in most MIDI software to represent chords over time [0], or in many music videogames [1]. I think this style might work for very simple music sheets, but would become way too confusing and imprecise for complex ones. [0] http://www.musicmasterworks.com/MMScShot.gif [1] http://i.ytimg.com/vi/rNg50UGkXfw/maxresdefault.jpg

There were similar interfaces on the Atari ST in the mid 1980s, see The Music Studio and Cubase.

Re: How I’d redesign piano sheet music

#27

Post by thret » Sat, Jul 04, 2015, 5:01 PM UTC

jdbernard wrote: post #8

Marazan wrote: post #3

It looks like a keyboard doesn't it Not really.

Yeah, I couldn't see it until the graphic of it next to the piano.

The graphic overlaid on the piano keys was much easier to read - as easy as guitar tabs. Why didn't he just do it all that way.

Re: How I’d redesign piano sheet music

#28

Post by amsilprotag » Sat, Jul 04, 2015, 5:02 PM UTC

bbx wrote: post #21

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 evenly, as they are in reality. This allows for fast visual recognition of chord types and intervals.

Re: How I’d redesign piano sheet music

#29

Post by hluska » Sat, Jul 04, 2015, 5:02 PM UTC

Disclosure - this is a local startup and though I don't know the founder (or founders, I don't even know) I did fall in love with this app at an open house a few years ago. I am always biased in favour of entrepreneurs, but I double down on local entrepreneurs.

Disclosure 2 - I'm generally a horrible musician, but when I was very young, my Grandma Yvette taught me to play the fiddle before the Suzuki program tried to save me and show me the violin. French Canadian fiddle music is all about patterns and so it's possible that that shaped my brain to look at music and its theory as a set of patterns.

However, those aside, I wonder about a tool like Musix (or Musix Pro) for notation. Within about five minutes of playing with the app, I felt like I had absorbed more real, practical music theory than in my years of formal instruction. Entire melodies started to make intuitive sense to me.

I wonder if a tool like Musix could be useful as a notation tool?? It still makes timing difficult to express and it would likely completely break with more complex pieces so I can't picture it seeing much uptake amongst highly experienced musicians, but I feel that if I had been exposed to an isomorphic notation at a young age, I'd be a significantly better musician today.

Anyone with more experience care to weigh in??

Re: How I’d redesign piano sheet music

#30

Post by hluska » Sat, Jul 04, 2015, 5:09 PM UTC

joshuapants wrote: post #15

peeters wrote: post #9

I think this a cool idea. I think piano needs its own version of the guitar tab to be more approachable. For someone who knows the basics, just seeing the chords goes a long way. But this gives better detail. One thing it glosses over is how the format responds to greater range. It acknowledges the fact that only 3 of piano's ~7 octaves are shown, but it doesn't address how much difficult it would be to read if there…

> I think piano needs its own version of the guitar tab to be more approachable But then you end up with the same problem you get on guitar: beginners use tab as a crutch and don't develop skills as readily as they should once they're over the beginner hump.

This is the hardest part of learning and teaching music. On one hand, it's hard to stay motivated when you're mangling Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, but almost any shortcut you take in this stage will retard your growth later...