A new system of musical notation

[bernhard]

Here is an interesting site on musical notation:

https://www.mnma.org/

Any thoughts?

Best wishes,
Bernhard.

[abell88]

Some very interesting ideas...perhaps it's too late, though, in that there are so many thousands (millions?) of pieces of music in standard notation...it would be very hard to attain critical mass to make the transition to a new system.

I like the one that showed the black keys and white keys as different coloured notes -- although it's obviously only useful for keyboard instruments -- what would you do if you wanted a violinist friend to play a line of your piano piece?

Also I noticed that some of them seem to take a lot of room (vertically) just to write the notes of a single octave (because there is a line or space for every single chromatic note); I'd be curious to see a piano piece with big chords or arpeggios in both hands notated this way.

[ted]

They are all interesting but, from my point of view, not much better than the conventional system for piano music. This is because all notation systems concentrate on pitches, and pitch is not the real problem of visual notation of sound - rhythm is. In general rhythm varies continuously and is not amenable to any discrete, or metrically based notation at all. That is not to say that felt rhythms cannot be recognised and transmitted aurally from one person to another; it is only their translation into a visual medium which complicates things.

So my strictly personal opinion is that since all visual representation falls far short of the mark we might as well stick with the normal one. However, I think it could, indeed should, be constructively "tampered with" in many ways falling far short of complete innovation. Certain conventions, for example the so called "dotted note convention" for triplet rhythms, cause more bother and complexity than they avoid, especially for beginners. The system for repeats and jumps is limited and would be better replaced by a scheme based on a computer programme with go tos and labels. In modern music, accidentals would be better used to clarify the momentary keyboard pattern in the simplest way for the reader rather than their being forced into some old fashioned theory of keys and scales.

Musical sounds and ideas come first and their visual representation comes a very poor second, at least for me. This is why I have difficulty using software packages to compose - because they tend to make visual notation omnipotent. Notation is not omnipotent; musical ideas and sounds are, and the notation is a very secondary device. 

In short no, I couldn't be bothered with any of those schemes. I would rather keep the present one but fiddle with it.

 

[shoshin]

Will this be compatible with Vladimir's revolutionary notation?     

[shoshin]

Actually looking through the ones they had I liked the:
Twinline Notation

the best. Less lines the better and it gets rid of key signatures.

[rjones5766]

For piano sheet music there is also the Klavar Notation system which is explained here:

https://web.inter.nl.net/hcc/Jo.Jansen.Deurne/totfreng.htm

https://www.klavarmusic.org/


Rodney