Get started making music

> Wow. I have to say I hate this. This dumbs it down for sure.

I can see how this dumbs it down for people in the beginning, but where does a beginner learn how to play an instrument with a 90% failure rate in the first year? It's clear that the problem hasn't been solved, otherwise more than 6% of the US population would playing a musical instrument.

> This is just one step up from guitar hero, which is at least premised as a game.

Partially correct, it's as easy as Guitar Hero in the beginning, but the only correlation is that there are buttons instead of strings on the fretboard. Otherwise, it's an entirely different product. We're a computer that is shaped like a guitar.

> It sounds like there is just no room for nuance and personality in that guitar.

While it's fun to think that guitar made of wood with tensioned strings and metal has more personality vs. a guitar made of plastic and metal, without trying the instrument yourself I beg you to defer your criticism until you try it.

Kind of like electric cars vs. ICE cars. I'm a car geek through and through and there is nothing like slamming your foot into the gas pedal and going fast. The smell of petrol and the noise from the engine/exhaust are the visceral traits people talk about when they drive their ICE cars. Does Tesla lack personality and nuance because you don't smell and hear the same things? I like to think it's a different personality because I still get the same goosebumps when you switch to insanity mode and floor it.

Me too. But you think about it, all you really is a graphical representation that describes the pitch of sounds relative to each other as well as their duration relative to the beat. And the conventional notation is not bad at it !

The current system is essentially:

a dot on a coordinate system representing the pitch, duration, and position of the sound in a sequence of sounds.

- a horizontal position axis: you draw an invisible x-axis representing the position of the note in its ordered sequence. It gives no indication on its duration.

- a vertical pitch axis defined by western notes (do, re, mi, etc): You draw your pitch lines, y-axis with y=Do, y=Re, y=Mi etc.

- a duration axis (let's say it points towards you): We can't draw it for a 2d representation of music, so we'll project this coordinate on the time-pitch plane which is your staff. We'll decorate the dot representing the note w.r.t. to it's duration coordinate: say it's duration is half a beat, the the dot is a black filled circle; if it's a full beat then it's a white circle; it's its a 4th of a beat the it'll be a black filled circle with a hook. Etc etc etc.

And then you start making all the addition of music notation: blank for 1/2 beats, vibrato, tempo, etc

Now there is this choice not representing note position and duration on a single axis. That may very well be so it's easier to standardise and read probably. You could also choose to represent the duration coordinate with colour, would that make it easier ? :)

Maybe the problem doesn't come from the notation, but the system in itself. The half step between B and C, the 12 notes but really it's more, etc. That's why solfeggio is hard ! I think some greeks considered the study of harmony to be at least as intellectual as that of counting ! I wonder if there's an algebra for harmonie. An H-Algebra why not ?

But really, it's not the only notation: guitar tabs, guitar chord representation, etc

"the best-documented experiments, as well as recent ergonomic studies, suggest little or no advantage for the Dvorak keyboard."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvorak_Simplified_Keyboard#Con...

"The trap constituted by an obsolete standard may be quite fragile. Because real-world situations present opportunities for agents to profit from changing to a superior standard, we cannot simply rely on an abstract model to conclude that an inferior standard has persisted. Such a claim demands empirical examination."

http://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/keys1.html

Musical notation is a vastly more complex system than keyboard layout, and I don't believe we have a Dvorak of music notation to even compare with. There are no contenders for musical notation that a large group of people believe are superior. So there's no reason to believe that inertia is keeping people from using another notation.

To go one step further, music notation is constantly changing, it has been evolving, adopting and incorporating the best ideas for thousands of years. What reason is there to not start with the assumption that it already took the best changes so far? I have no doubt that if superior ideas for notation develop in the next hundred years, that at the end of it, we'll still call the result 'standard music notation'.