Clairnote: An alternative music notation system • Hacker News Board

Re: Clairnote: An alternative music notation system

#51

Post by scrozier » Wed, May 04, 2022, 3:57 PM UTC

TremendousJudge wrote: post #49

Jeff_Brown wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To add to your point, many people already use other systems. Tablatures are very, very common for guitar. Lead sheets are used in jazz, and they do away with many of the problems of regular notation (notably, the legibility of chords, and different clefs) by only using it for melodies. In a way, traditional music notation is really only used in classical music. And they're never ever going to adopt another system. Th…

> traditional music notation is really only used in classical music

And jazz and pop and rock and.... It is a universal language that allows musicians from many backgrounds to come together and play a tune together. Jazz is the most obvious example--where musicians often sightread a tune together. (Although, to be fair, a substantial part of jazz notation is chord symbols, which are not (directly) a part of traditional notation.)

Re: Clairnote: An alternative music notation system

#52

Post by scrozier » Wed, May 04, 2022, 3:58 PM UTC

wl wrote: post #41

scrozier wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Intervals are ambiguous on the staff in the traditional system. They're disambiguated by reference to the clef and key signature. The whole point of this new system is to remove that ambiguity so you don't constantly have to keep the clef and key signature in mind when analyzing intervals.

Fair point. I can see how that might be nice. I will say that, if you play music a lot from traditional notation, that ambiguity completely disappears into the background.

Re: Clairnote: An alternative music notation system

#53

Post by moultano » Wed, May 04, 2022, 4:09 PM UTC

I've struggled with reading music despite years of piano lessons, years of church and school choirs, and being the main arranger for my college a cappella group. Watching the video of the Blue Danube Waltz on that page was amazing. I felt for the first time like the shapes of the things on the page actually corresponded well to the musical concepts in my head.

I know it's an extremely uphill battle to actually get anything like this adopted, but I think it would do wonders for teaching and working with music. How many musical concepts would suddenly be obvious to people if they could actually see them directly on the page without layers of translation in between?

Re: Clairnote: An alternative music notation system

#54

Post by jedimastert » Wed, May 04, 2022, 4:10 PM UTC

Tantacrul made a really interesting video about how incredibly difficult it is to make a notation font that might be a good watch[0], and I say that to say this:

I see an issue here that left me confused for several minutes: the little bit of overlap when a note is attached to a line but not intersecting it looks like an alignment mistake and leaves ambiguity. My recommendation would be to have no overlap, with the top/bottom pixel of the note head in line with the top/bottom pixel of the staff line, like traditional notation.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGo4PJd1lng

Re: Clairnote: An alternative music notation system

#55

Post by exabrial » Wed, May 04, 2022, 4:13 PM UTC

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…

> microtonal variations

The vast majority of music probably doesn't need this

Re: Clairnote: An alternative music notation system

#56

Post by tgv » Wed, May 04, 2022, 4:20 PM UTC

blagie wrote: post #45

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…

The vast majority of users of music notation are amateurs, and being more friendly to amateurs would mean even more users. The vast majority of decision-makers are experienced users with a vested interest in the status quo. The issue is very similar to why corporate systems have such horrible user interfaces. The people making the decisions in IT aren't the normal users of the system. IT cares about features, integra…

The problem, IMO, is that once you have acquired a notation system is that you can’t/won’t make the jump the another one. So if you train beginners with eg. clairnote, they will have a hard time making the jump to a higher difficulty level. It’s not unlike a walled garden.

Re: Clairnote: An alternative music notation system

#57

Post by aidenn0 » Wed, May 04, 2022, 4:21 PM UTC

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…

Right, some highly chromatic music would be better represented in this notation, but it seems a poor fit for traditional western music.

Also, a single, brief, look at a piano keyboard will expose why whole-steps and half-steps always being equidistant on the sheet music might not be a desirable goal. There are similar affordances on woodwinds as well. Maybe a string-instrument player could comment on usefulness for string music?

[edit]

I'd also be interested in seeing examples of transposing in Clairnote; all of the examples in TFA were in the key of C and I don't have an intuition for how easy/hard this would be. As an amateur clarinetist I was often handed oboe music...

Re: Clairnote: An alternative music notation system

#58

Post by jedimastert » Wed, May 04, 2022, 4:23 PM UTC

The main "problem" I see this notation style as trying to "solve" is that the standard 5 line western notation is built around a very strong affinity and "default" of the western diatonic scales. For any key/mode, if you're within that pattern then relationships of notes and notation is very clear. This is also enforced by the note names themselves, with A to A being a Aeolian/natural minor scale that fits into this same pattern.

It's interesting (and useful) to step outside of this default, but IMO in for a penny in for a pound; there really should be a commitment to a complete separation, at least as a "default". The examples are trying to connect a notation decoupled from the diatonic scale back to that same diatonic.

Even if you do stick with the other "assumptions" made here:

  - 12 equal tones per octave  
  - octave-equivalent
  - divisive rhythm

IMO you should change the note names. Numbers would be preferable to me, although maybe confusing given the use of numbers in western music analysis. Perhaps O-Z?

Re: Clairnote: An alternative music notation system

#59

Post by stephen_g » Wed, May 04, 2022, 4:24 PM UTC

Toutouxc wrote: post #40

harry-wood wrote: post #35

Top search result for "alternative music notation" is https://www.dodekamusic.com which looks like it has the same ideas, plus a rectangular rhythm design which makes it all _look_ different at a glance (for better or worse)

What I like about Dodeka is not their notation, but the Dodeka keyboard. I'm learning to play the piano now and the amount of stupid unnecessary complexity stemming from the fact that we've designed the keyboard to make playing in a single specific key easier and fuck everything else, is hurting my programmer brain. That, and the fact that small-handed male players like me (and like 80 % of women) are gate-kept forev…

Would their keyboard really be better for hand size? Seems to me that unless the keys were uncomfortably narrow, it would actually require bigger hands to play big chords than on a standard piano because they’re fitting all the notes in a single row instead of two? But I’ve never seen one in real life, let alone tried to play one.

I wouldn’t say that the standard keyboard is designed the way it is to make any one key “easier”, it’s more just the result of mapping the mapping based on how our notation works, and it’s just happens to be that one key doesn’t have sharps or flats so you don’t need the black keys, so it’s easier at first… Thinking of it in the way you said is probably unhelpful.

Eventually every scale becomes as easy with muscle memory if you practice enough, but the best thing to do is to try and do scales and chords by thinking about what the intervals should be. Getting intuition for that is a killer skill, especially for playing by ear when you can hear something and your fingers instantly know where to go to play it after finding the first note.

Re: Clairnote: An alternative music notation system

#60

Post by dehrmann » Wed, May 04, 2022, 4:26 PM UTC

tgv wrote: post #56

blagie wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vast majority of users of music notation are amateurs, and being more friendly to amateurs would mean even more users. The vast majority of decision-makers are experienced users with a vested interest in the status quo. The issue is very similar to why corporate systems have such horrible user interfaces. The people making the decisions in IT aren't the normal users of the system. IT cares about features, integra…

The problem, IMO, is that once you have acquired a notation system is that you can’t/won’t make the jump the another one. So if you train beginners with eg. clairnote, they will have a hard time making the jump to a higher difficulty level. It’s not unlike a walled garden.

It's a bit like the Dvorak keyboard problem. It's slightly better, but too much of a hassle to bother with. You need something between 2x and 10x better to displace an entrenched incumbent.