The future of music notation

[danny elfboy]

I would like piano teachers to consider how much easier learning the piano could be with a simpler music notation system.

I agree with you except for the treble and bass cleff read in the same way.
The grand staff is the specular image of the piano keyboard and this is very intuitive cause if students weren't taught first a treble cleff and then months later a bass cleff as if they were separate entities, but were at once exposed to the grand staff they would make sense of it immediately. A bass cleff which is read like a treble cleff would destroy this intuitive order.

If you take the grand staff and add a long line where the Middle C should be it becomes so obvious, even to yonger students, that the notes go up and down in sequence and if in the ledger line there's a C clearly in the line below there's an A (therefore logically the last line of the bass cleff, i.e. of the logic continuation of the treble cleff, must be an A and not an F)

[johnk]

If you have some method to get someone, especially someone who isn't particularly talented to play a difficult piece I'd focus on selling that instead. I'd sell everything I own to pay for that info. 

Well I would say these students ARE quite talented, but not good enough at reading TN to easily learn the FI. They read at a lower level than their playing capability. The first difficulty a student faces is simply knowing what notes to play. With TN you have to keep checking backwards for accidentals, or to see what clef and key signature you are in. And working out legerlines. All this causes frustation for the student and teacher alike. (How often do teachers have to correct notes? One teacher remarked that they are always yellling F SHARP! etc) Take away this problem and the student can see more fluently what actual notes they have to play. So then you can put all the teaching / learning effort into the physical processes involved (and rhythm).

In the FI the 4 against 3 is difficult at first. If you would like to know how i teach this, I have explained it in another post.

I feel sorry for you Leahcim, if I could show you how to play the piano, I would. It might be that in your younger days of learning, so much emphasis was on drilling the TN theory that you were not shown the physical side of how to play and practice. Actually if you have no problem in knowing what notes to press, i could easily show you the way to play. Do you know about arm weight, walking the fingers, rotary hand motion, wrist hinging, drooping the hand and totally relaxing the forearm muscles on release, slow practice, thumb tuck without elbow jerks, etc etc?

Did you see my YouTube videos?

To Danny Elfboy, have you heard of the French violin clef? It is a treble (G) clef on the bottom line instead of the 2nd line. It is thus read the same as bass. So there are simply 2 leger lines between bass and treble, middle C and middle E. What is so important about having a single middleC legerline? Think about the alto and tenor clefs! One has middle C on the 3rd line, the other on the 4th line.

You guys really are brainwashed by your early music learning experiences. I am probably more adept at reading TN music than either of you, but can also (at age 59) enthusiastically embark on a new learning experience. Playing new pieces from ES is great fun and I notice the extra fluency due to not having to check backwards. This is specially beneficial for learning transcriptions of jazz improvisations with their blues notes, funky scoops and cluster chords.

Frankly I am surprised and disappointed that so few people here seem willing or able to think outside the traditional square (or is it 'box'?)

But thanks for your replies  John
 

[nyquist]

I have played with alternative notations before.  (I own a full set of the WTC in Klavarskribo.)  I printed your version of the first movement of the Moonlight sonata.  I was surprised to find it easier to read than Klavar.  I expect also that it would be easier to sight-read from it than TN with some practice.

OTOH, TN is very good at representing diatonic music in a more "abstract" way.  It is easy to recognize intervals and chords: e.g., a third is two note-heads on adjacent lines or spaces, etc.  It is also, to a point, instrument-agnostic: it represents the music not what happens at the instrument.  Your notation could be more properly called a piano tablature.  A pianist would find it easy to go from your notation to actions on the keyboard, a violinist probably would not.

Even if we could ignore the inertia of tradition the fact that your notation is so tied to the piano would probably doom it for more general application.

nyquist

[johnk]

Wow thanks! A positive response! "Easier to read than Klavar". Great. 

I did try to make it so that TN readers would not be too put off. ES intervals are roughtly the same as TN - 3rds touch etc, scales proceed line to space etc.

There are a few things which can be mixed up by TN readers, eg while bass D is in the centre of the bass as in TN, I still misread middle D as middle C sometimes. Of course the condition of octave similarity means something has to give.

I play viola, and have played ES on viola, even a whole orchestra concert. I disagree that it is piano tablature. As long as the 12 equal tempered pitches are named unequally, ie as A to G plus 5 "sharps or flats", all instruments reading TN have to know whether a given note is a natural or a "black key" - so having the black and white noteheads is not just for pianists.

If you look at www.mnma.org you can read what we think are the faults of TN, one being that it only shows intervals to within a range, eg a "3rd", line to next line, could be either minor or major (3 or 4 semitones); actually if accidentals are present, it could be anything from a negative semitone (A double-sharp up to C double-flat) to 8 semitones (C double-flat up to E double-sharp)!

But I take your point, a 6-6 notation like Twinline may be more abstract and to your liking. And we will soon be offering software to transnotate music into many different notations. However I do believe my notation is the easiest to learn for TN readers.

[nyquist]

I play viola, and have played ES on viola, even a whole orchestra concert. I disagree that it is piano tablature. As long as the 12 equal tempered pitches are named unequally, ie as A to G plus 5 "sharps or flats", all instruments reading TN have to know whether a given note is a natural or a "black key" - so having the black and white noteheads is not just for pianists.

What makes me say it is a piano tablature is that the color of the noteheads is black or white according to the piano disposition. 

As long as we are throwing TN our of the window consider the following alternative.  Everything is as in your notation (noteheads at the same height, etc.)  with the exception of notehead colors:

black: Ab Bb C D E F#
white: A B C# Eb F G, actually make F and B as in your notation (white with a dot)

That is, white and black alternate as one moves chromatically.  The relationship to the piano keyboard is gone.  Interval relationships are easy (I think) to tell: a major third is always between two notes of the same color; a fifth between notes of different color and a certain distance, etc.  Chords of the same flavor have only two possible shapes (where colors switch).  Tonalities have finally equal rights.  Admittedly, it is harder to sight read on the piano but I claim it is easier to tell what is happening musically.

Your notation and Klavar are still tied to the keyboard.  J'accuse that you have not leaped far away enough  .

In wild speculation,
nyquist

[johnk]

Nyquist, you are very perceptive and clear thinking. The variant you describe is a 6-6 version of ES. Actually I reversed the colours, and B and F being black, dont need the dot (or dash as I now prefer in 7-5 ES); so as you say, the notehead colour codes for the two wholetone scales, and intervals are very clear.

Twinline has two notehead shapes (oval and triangle) and most inventors and AN forum contributors do agree with you that a 6-6 notation is best.

It is just much harder to learn, and I also wonder about the fact that all keys look alike in 6-6, whereas 7-5 ES shows the variations of keys around the key circle in a way that is similar to the TN idea of the easier, natural keys going gradually to the more difficult keys (big key signatures). When we follow chord progressions, i think it is useful to see some graphic depiction in the notation of whether chords are close or not in relationship. Not that some keys are easier and harder, just lighter or darker, flatter or sharper (but equal!)

Let me know if you would like a piece to try in another notation!



 

[gaest]

Well I would say these students ARE quite talented, but not good enough at reading TN to easily learn the FI. They read at a lower level than their playing capability. The first difficulty a student faces is simply knowing what notes to play. With TN you have to keep checking backwards for accidentals, or to see what clef and key signature you are in. And working out legerlines. All this causes frustation for the student and teacher alike. (How often do teachers have to correct notes? One teacher remarked that they are always yellling F SHARP! etc) Take away this problem and the student can see more fluently what actual notes they have to play.

Perhaps this is more a difficulty with teaching methods than with the notation system.  I'd venture to guess that the majority of people who've learned the TN and can read it reasonably well have no issue with the TN.  The people who do, as you've stated, are new students who are just learning to play.  Of course the TN will prove difficult to them when they're first starting out!  It's just like learning to read English for the first time.  At first, it's hard just to figure out what letter you're looking at.  But with enough practice, you have no difficulty reading, except when you hit words you don't know.  And once you've learned those new words, you'll be able to recognize it easier later on down the road.  The same principle applies to learning to read TN.  When you first start out, of course you'll trip up and find it difficult to determine what the music is saying.  That doesn't mean the system is broken and a new one is needed, it just means that you don't have the familiarity yet to be able to quickly understand what's going on on the page.  After all, we haven't replaced the traditional English written language with a pictoral language to make it easier for first time readers.  However, you're proposing to do just that for musical notation with ES.

Is it necessary to dumb things down for people who are just starting to learn about music?  ES will not make it easier for them to learn how to read TN, which will be an inevitable necessity once they reach a certain level.  You state that any music can be transferred over into ES notation, but actually you're highly dependent on finding .mus files for works you want to translate into ES.  It's hard enough just locating pdf and hardcopies of some of these integral and important works that any piano student must study, let alone finding a .mus.  In the end, ES students who want to go farther on will be forced to learn TN, because TN is not going anywhere.  ES will not help them out then; in fact, it may even hinder their learning of TN, because they'll have to develop a new mindset to understand an entirely different notation system, while trying to essentially forget the AN they'd learned.

In the end, I'm rather inclined to think that it's just laziness that is prompting this desire for a new and easier system of notation.  Uncountable numbers of people over centuries have learned to read music written in TN; the notation isn't hard, it just requires study, and practice.  The more that a student works with TN, the more familiar it will become to them and the easier it will get to read.  Of course a student starting off won't find it easy, but the more work they put into learning it, the easier it will become. 

As far as the key signatures go, I believe it's a failure of the teaching method when students end up thinking that hefty key signatures with lots of flats or sharps are "scary."  What's scary about them, honestly?  I don't understand that mindset.  Perhaps students should be taught those "scary" key signatures at the same time as they're taught the "unscary" ones, so that they see there is nothing to be worried about.

And how difficult is it, really, to remember what key you're in, or that there was an accidental at the beginning of the measure?  A student who can't remember the key signature a few measures into a piece has a bad memory.  He or she doesn't need a simpler notation; they need to work on developing an greater understanding of the piece of music and the key signature itself.

You guys really are brainwashed by your early music learning experiences. I am probably more adept at reading TN music than either of you, but can also (at age 59) enthusiastically embark on a new learning experience.

I know this wasn't directed at me, but I find it quite offensive for you to say that people who prefer to stick with a tried-and-true method - the universal standard - are brainwashed.  There's no need to fix what's not broken.  Pianists who prefer to spend their time developing their repertoire rather than learning an entirely unnecessary AN are not brainwashed; they're practical.  New learning experiences are all well and good, and ANs are interesting to consider, but it's not practical to spend time basically unlearning one system in order to learn another.

It's also an ineffective test of your AN.  It doesn't matter how well the practiced pianist can play using ES.  From your words, what your notation is directed towards is the group of new students who can't read a note. 

What I would like to see is how you manage to incorporate the inevitable transition from ES to TN, or how you would train your students who are transitioning.  I wonder, in the end, how easy it will be for one of the ES trained students to learn TN, if it will be easier or harder.  For ES to become a viable method of training on the piano, this is something you'll need to look at closely; it's pretty much a given that ANs are not going to be replacing TN, so correlation or a plan for some kind of transition between the two notations is a must.

Frankly I am surprised and disappointed that so few people here seem willing or able to think outside the traditional square (or is it 'box'?)

It's not so much that they are unable to, more that there is no benefit for most people here to learn a new notation system.  The majority of people here, I'm assuming, can read TN.  There is no reason to learn a new system, particularly because the repertoire they're looking for can not be found in ES and would be difficult to reproduce in the new notation without a .mus file.

I'm not trying to bash ES, I'm just trying to bring up the fact that there are issues to be considered if it is ever going to become a viable system of notation.

[counterpoint]

I would like piano teachers to consider how much easier learning the piano could be with a simpler music notation system.

Firstly, if bass and treble clefs were both read the same way.

Indeed, it's very confusing for beginners that bass and treble clefs are not read the same way. There would be a simple solution. Just use alto keys in both hands, LH 8va bassa, RH 8va I'm propagating this for a long time, but the problem is, that we pianists can't read the alto clef, and nobody wants to learn it 

Secondly, if all octaves of a note looked the same.

This would only be possible, if the range of a staff is limited to an octave. I don't think, that this would be very helpful.

Thirdly, if each of the twelve pitch classes had its own position on a 'chromatic' stave, and there was therefore no need for the five accidental signs and for learning fifteen different key signatures.

I would oppose that one. The interval Eb-F# is a dissonance, in contrary to D#-F#, which is a consonance. You press the same keys on the piano keyboard but the meaning is totally different. I will not sacrifice the differentiation of intervals and chords just for simplification, which would be a real distortion.

[johnk]

Thankyou to gaest and counterpoint for your posts.

Perhaps this is more a difficulty with teaching methods than with the notation system.  I'd venture to guess that the majority of people who've learned the TN and can read it reasonably well have no issue with the TN.

Well I read TN very well, having played piano concertos with, and being lead violist in our community orchestra. But you are correct, most people having mastered TN think it is fine. One of the aims of the alternative music notation website www.mnma.org is to raise awareness of the problems of TN. Have you never misread a clef? missed an accidental later in the bar, not applied the accidental to the proper note in a compact chord? had to work out a legerline rather than immediately recognising it, borked over double flats or double sharps, ETC ETC?

Try reading viola music! You know bass and treble, but alto? Where are the semitones? Are you fluent in a key sig of 7 flats? Why did the editors reprint Bach's C# major prelude in Db if there is no problem with 7#s?

I have ONE student that learnt from the start in only ES. He plays the same pieces as kids who have learnt 3 or 4 years longer. He is not particularly gifted but is very motivated. All other students learnt TN first and ES as a second language. There can be some confusion but no more than between bass and treble TN.

If TN is so good, why is there such a huge dropout rate in piano students? So much that the AMEB regard the statistics as confidential. Why are there so many YouTube videos of people showing others how to play stuff by rote!

This would only be possible, if the range of a staff is limited to an octave. I don't think, that this would be very helpful.

It is possible for a diatonic system to have cycling octaves. Look up Nydana.

In any case, if the TN staff had 6 lines instead of 5, every second C would look the same (one legerline) and bass would be the same as treble.

As far as the key signatures go, I believe it's a failure of the teaching method when students end up thinking that hefty key signatures with lots of flats or sharps are "scary."  What's scary about them, honestly?  I don't understand that mindset.  Perhaps students should be taught those "scary" key signatures at the same time as they're taught the "unscary" ones, so that they see there is nothing to be worried about.

The problem is there are 15 (fifteen!) different ones to learn, and they are usually taught in order of increasing numbers, so most students never reach the end ones. In orchestra the players are fine in the easy signatures and play more out of tune the more the key signature increases. I dare say this is the same in amateur orchestras all over the world. Why should one semitone up in pitch be associalted with so much additional difficulty?

I would oppose that one. The interval Eb-F# is a dissonance, in contrary to D#-F#, which is a consonance. You press the same keys on the piano keyboard but the meaning is totally different. I will not sacrifice the differentiation of intervals and chords just for simplification, which would be a real distortion.

Well if I play a blues lick on the piano, how do I know whether to write the notes as # or b? Do I "mean" a consonance or dissonance? Is the C blues scale correctly written as [C, D#, F, F#, G, A#, C] or [C, Eb, F, Gb, G, Bb, C] or any other combination? Is the Eb to F# that I just played a consonance or dissonance? Ask any jazz player and they will tell you it doesnt matter!

TN has a "theory" that justifies and explains the 12 et pitches in terms of 7 diatonic notes plus 5 inflections. ANs have a theory that is a different way of explaining it, but just as valid, even more logical, in that 4 st + 3 st = 7 st. (major 3rd + minor 3rd = perfect 5th).

In the end, I'm rather inclined to think that it's just laziness that is prompting this desire for a new and easier system of notation.  Uncountable numbers of people over centuries have learned to read music written in TN; the notation isn't hard, it just requires study, and practice.  The more that a student works with TN, the more familiar it will become to them and the easier it will get to read.  Of course a student starting off won't find it easy, but the more work they put into learning it, the easier it will become.

I dont see it as lazy to seek out easier ways of doing things, that have the possibility of more people succeeding. It is very old fashioned to think in terms of hard work is good for you! And even greater uncountable numbers have failed to learn to read music.

Why did guitarists invent TAB?

Best wishes to all for 2008.

John

[gaest]

You raise some good points, johnk.

Well I read TN very well, having played piano concertos with, and being lead violist in our community orchestra. But you are correct, most people having mastered TN think it is fine. One of the aims of the Music Notation Project (the new name for www.mnma.org) is to raise awareness of the problems of TN. Have you never misread a clef? missed an accidental later in the bar, not applied the accidental to the proper note in a compact chord? had to work out a legerline rather than immediately recognising it, borked over double flats or double sharps, ETC ETC?

I have done all of those and more, but I've always considered that to be my own fault, because I haven't practiced enough or didn't concentrate enough or was trying to play when half asleep (never a good thing, lol).

Try reading viola music! You know bass and treble, but alto? Where are the semitones?

I know the alto clef, but I am not entirely fluent in since I rarely use it, so I can't say much on this subject.

Are you fluent in a key sig of 7 flats? Why did the editors reprint Bach's C# major prelude in Db if there is no problem with 7#s?

Because they're catering to the people who have a problem with 7 sharps.  How difficult is it to be fluent in a key signature of 7 flats?  I'm serious, here.  I'm not sure if I'm explaining myself well here, but it's all still the same, just a slightly different mindset.  I just can't see how a piece being in C-flat major makes it intrinsically more difficult than a piece in C major.  All it takes is practice and experience with the key signature.

I have ONE student that learnt from the start in only ES. He plays the same pieces as kids who have learnt 3 or 4 years longer. He is not particularly gifted but is very motivated. All other students learnt TN first and ES as a second language. There can be some confusion but no more than between bass and treble TN.

I'm curious.  Has this student learned TN?  What was his feeling about it and the differences with ES?  What is his opinion of learning ES first, and what were the opinions of the students who learned TN first as far as how the two systems compare?  It'd be interesting to see a survey of the two different groups (although it's kind of a small sample right now, what with only one student having learned ES first).  As more students learn it (I'm assuming more of your students will be), it would be interesting to survey them.

If TN is so good, why is there such a huge dropout rate in piano students? So much that the AMEB regard the statistics as confidential.

I'm rather startled at this question; am I missing something?  After all, there are plenty of reasons why piano students drop out.  Surprisingly (or not), not everyone who takes lessons has a burning desire to play.  Many kids are initially forced into it by well-meaning parents.  Then there are lots of people who want to learn and start taking lessons, only to have to give them up for a variety of reasons: financial reasons, lost interest, can't put in the time to practice, move on to other areas of study (such as college-age students).  Sure, there are probably some who drop out because it requires too much effort, learning TN or learning some other technical aspect.  But that is definitely not the only reason why; I don't really think it is fair to place the blame solely on the notation system that we use.

The problem is there are 15 (fifteen!) different ones to learn, and they are usually taught in order of increasing numbers, so most students never reach the end ones.

That's exactly why I say it is a failure of teaching when students come to think sharp/flat-heavy key signatures are "scary" or "difficult."  They're really no difficult from any other key signature.  I may be alone in this, but I really see no difference in terms of difficulty between a C-major key signature and a B-major.  It just requires a slightly different approach.  Because students start with the C-major and progress upwards, they never get as much experience with the later key signatures, which leads the students to lack technical ability with them, and therefore, to dislike them.  Perhaps if the "later" key signatures were interspersed with the "early" ones, it would be less difficult for students to cope with them.  There are so many ways that different key signatures can be correlated to each other when they're being taught, so that the various keys make sense in relation to each other.  It's not just a bunch of random key signatures, completely separate and detached.  Why do we always just start with C-major and go up or down by number?

In orchestra the players are fine in the easy signatures and play more out of tune the more the key signature increases. I dare say this is the same in amateur orchestras all over the world. Why should one semitone up in pitch be associalted with so much additional difficulty?

Again, it's a lack of experience and practice.  I've never played a string instrument, so I can only imagine that it might be because the ear is not attuned to hear a particular key and the fingers not used to the intervals, so there could be a tendency to play out of pitch.

I dont see it as lazy to seek out easier ways of doing things, that have the possibility of more people succeeding. It is very old fashioned to think in terms of hard work is good for you! And even greater uncountable numbers have failed to learn to read music.

Heh heh, maybe I am old-fashioned.  In this case, I do think that hard work is good.  The piano isn't an easy instrument, not by any means, and any attempt to simplify the learning process is merely glossing over that fact.  By making it easier at the outset, the student is not prepared when it comes to crunch time and there're actual difficulties in front of them.  Will they have learned by that point the discipline they'll need to master more complex music?  Will they have learned how to practice and study and understand the music in terms of the complete picture (key signature included)?

I also still don't see how learning ES will make things easier in the long run, considering that a student will have to end up learning TN anyway.  For the student who is not serious and only wants to play the simpler, popular pieces, ES is all well and good and might actually be a better way to go for them instead of the frustration of learning TN.  For the serious student, though, ES really only delays the inevitable, doesn't it?

[counterpoint]

Well if I play a blues lick on the piano, how do I know whether to write the notes as # or b? Do I "mean" a consonance or dissonance? Is the C blues scale correctly written as [C, D#, F, F#, G, A#, C] or [C, Eb, F, Gb, G, Bb, C] or any other combination? Is the Eb to F# that I just played a consonance or dissonance? Ask any jazz player and they will tell you it doesnt matter!

Perhaps it doesn't matter for a blues pianist, because he knows his (few) chords, and they are the same in every piece. But for a classical pianist, correct notation of flats and sharps is essential. It does simplify the note reading, not complicate. And its much easier for me to play the Prelude in C# (with 7 sharps => all notes are sharpened) than in Db (with 5 flats). And for the intervals: people who know the intervals think in steps of the diatonic (minor or major) scale and not in chromatic steps. The idea of a scale with 12 equal (chromatic) steps is completely strange for me. There are 7 main steps, 7 flatted notes and 7 sharped notes => 21 notes in total in one octave.

How do you find a (major or minor) triad in a 12-tone notation system? They don't look like something special at all. So this might be a good way of notating atonal music. But for classical music, we need the diatonic system (7 steps per octave). The Nydana system seems to be such a system. I didn't know this system till now, so I can't estimate the pros and cons of this system. It looks interesting

TN has a "theory" that justifies and explains the 12 et pitches in terms of 7 diatonic notes plus 5 inflections. ANs have a theory that is a different way of explaining it, but just as valid, even more logical, in that 4 st + 3 st = 7 st. (major 3rd + minor 3rd = perfect 5th).

Yes, it's a bit confusing, that third + third = fifth    It's the same when counting the days from sunday to sunday (you get 8 days), then to the next sunday you have 15 days.
It would be more logical to name the intervals by distance and not by counting number.
third should be twostep (diatonic), fourth should be threestep (diatonic), then the mathematics would be correct: twostep + twostep = fourstep 

As I explained before, I do not like to calculate chromatic steps for intervals wider than thirds.

[leahcim]

Why did guitarists invent TAB?

Because the genres which dominate music today [amongst the general population] are usually composed by being recorded not scored - and the motivation for becoming a musician in those generes is, again in general based on simple techniques, simple harmony, improvisation, and creativity. Rather than, in comparison - playing some established "rep" that has a huge technical requirement which requires years, if not decades to get to a stage where you have the technique and musical knowledge to interpret music that was composed by being scored.

Yes? To be a rock god, I have no need to read music, because I generally need to play my own pieces to succeed and not someone else's.  But the stuff I need to learn to do that isn't particularly taxing theory or technique wise. Single-notes played, sometimes extremely quickly over chord progressions that generally have no thirds [so you can't hit a wrong note, major or minor] is probably the most advanced technique required for rock - and the big point of that is that you are supposed to improvise when doing it, not read a score.

Nevertheless, in spite of the fact that to be a guitarist in, say, rock, you need to play your own pieces, some guitarists, as you tube will testify, want to play those pieces they like from their "heroes"

Hence the problem. The pieces aren't scored - there is no music published. Quite often the guitarists won't even play the same solos and fills each time they play.

But creating sheet music is difficult. Try it. If you want to type in some music here you'll get stuck and start writing C D E and so on, perhaps with numbers to indicate octaves. This is a problem you haven't solved. You still need silly plugins and windows whatever software. Note how, by comparison, I can blather away in a multitude of languages using "text" and it works with just about everything. No magic software required to give you guitar tab. If you'd done that with sheet music, you might have a point or purpose.

So, the way to learn guitar music is to listen to the recording or other players. Which you'll note for 99.999% of the easy end of classical music doesn't exist. The ABRSM does some recordings with its books, but whilst you can probably buy the entire piano rep grade 8 and way beyond 10 times over for less than a fiver these days [if you aren't to fussy about the pianist] you'll be lucky to find any recording of a few simple pieces [at least pre-youtube]

Now as you are probably realising yourself "why tab" it's because getting the tab for Steve Vais song "look at me I'm bloody fantastic at playing, I am, and I've still got all my own hair" tab is, unlike the not-a-problem-in-the-first-place you're trying to solve, a very difficult thing for ordinary mortals to do. You need to transcribe it first - and this is why 99.999% of guitar tab isn't just wrong, it's obscene They lose everything - all the stuff that guitar tab doesn't have, and then they get the bit that's left wrong in a way that's more than just wrong notes.

If any argument wasn't going to work it's suggesting guitar TAB. Guitar tab sucks.

[Actually that's not strictly true, you can these days buy books of transcriptions, because the extraordinary individuals that can transcribe want to eat, like the rest of us, but since these books have both tab and sheet music in anyway they negate the point you were trying to make with your question and thus aren't relevant - unless you ask "why sheet music as well?" ]

So, guitar tab sometimes shows the correct frets to hold, in a way that could easily be recreated on a text based medium [like the internet. Yes it has pictures and videos and so on now, but maths and sheet music are still barely capable of being expressed via it. Especially compared with things that were invented for it, like programming source and guitar tab]

It shows it to someone who cannot [yet - generally books on guitar talk about developing the skill] get the notes from the record and who doesn't necessarily know the notes on his instrument either. Thus s/he cannot transcribe a middle C note to which string / fret [which, as you know will often have more than one possible choice too] he should play. Guitar TAB shows exactly where to play on the neck [although as often as not the transcriber picks the wrong choice - I've no doubt there are guitarists struggling to play pieces that, as transcribed, are difficult if not impossible to play yet, in reality and played correctly, are fairly straightforward, and make much more musical sense too]

But, TAB only works so long as he/she knows the piece [i.e it works if they can get 99% of playing the piece from listening to the recording of it, because the tab doesn't express it]

In short, it wasn't invented under some clearly false and asinine premise that by using it, it would make learning to play the guitar easy [or easier] Nor is it, in any sense, a replacement or alternative for sheet music [outside of the very limited role it has described here]

...and of course, classical guitarists, along with many good rock / jazz musicians, guitarists and so on, learn to read music.

Lastly you'll note that you tube, recitals, auditions, rock concerts, classical concerts and many other similar things show us that the vast majority of musicians, good or bad often sit and play without any sheet music, tab or whatever in front of them at all. Why invent "no sheet music at all? " Proving my new invention "blank pieces of paper" would work

No, what it does say though - it speaks loudly about the difference in time taken between reading the score, and being able to play it well. The time taken to do the latter is a large part of why, even those of us who aren't especially talented, manage to memorise the music we play without any special effort - because we have to play it over and over and over.

In short, it makes absolutely no difference how long it takes to read the score - and, profoundly, this is more true with the less skill you have in playing the piano - plus, the more you read it, the better you get at reading it - in essence you'll read music long before you'll be able to play it. I've no special talent, in fact, I'm the most useless and poor musician I've ever heard, nevertheless I can still sight read music several grades higher than I can begin to play.

That's without any special learning, education or classes. Simply being shown FACE and so on, and then starting with simple pieces. Yes, sometimes I've had to go "err, c d e..that's F" and thus I read the score extremely slowly - but note that same piece takes weeks and weeks of practise, I soon know every note...the next piece of a similar level, the score is easier to read.

Your notation is no different. No easier. I've used it.

The mountain I might have to climb to read more difficult music is tiny in comparison with the decades of practise I'll need to be able to play the pieces it describes.

Indeed, like many people do, as you note with the huge drop out rate, I'm  soon likely to give in because no matter how much I practise I cannot play the piano. What I play, even without music, even for stuff that I don't need the score any more, sounds like sh*t. That's why people drop out.  It's simple really - we practise, myself sometimes up to 8 hours a day and don't improve. Thus, still cannot play simple pieces well.

Worse of all, sadly, for whatever reason, teachers like yourself have nothing to offer which will help. Whether that's because you're all clueless as to why some of your students learn and some don't I don't know, but I can pretty much guarantee that it's sweet fanny adams to do with the sheet music and if that is your organisations motivation then you're wasting your time.

The failure rate will be exactly the same TN or not. If not worse. If you want to find the people that can play piano it's no different to why there are sports in some countries which have few good players. You need to get lots of kids playing piano and then you'll find the ones with the talent. Inventing asinine gimmicks and methods designed to turn the few kids that start but, like me, cannot play no matter how hard we try, into pianists is never going to work. Your notation isn't going to increase the number of successful musicians.

TBH, IME these gimmicks and things just tend to lose the authors credibility amongst their peers. Even if the person is otherwise a good musician and / or teacher. It's no different to "play piano in an hour!" "Play POWER piano' - we all know the author, if they can play, is just trying to make some money from no-hopers like me. They didn't learn to play using their method and neither will any good musicians.

That the huge drop out rate is linked to sheet music is a completely farcical notion. Anyone selling a notation claiming it makes playing the piano easier using that kind of logic is, imho, being completely dishonest.

They might get away with an [still arguable] claim about whether what they have makes reading music easier or not. But there's no question at all that playing the piano isn't made easier by changing from one kind of sheet music to another.

[johnk]

Hello Leahcim,

Thanks for joining us again. I am a bit mystified when you say you can read music but not play it. What do you mean by "read"? To me, reading music means looking at the score and playing it on the piano (or other instrument). It doesnt mean being able to name the notes, or hearing it in my head or any other thing. These all depend on the complexity of the music itself and the complexity of the notation. If a score has a lot of legerlines for example, it is slow to even know what the notes are, and this is one step that an easier notation can improve.

You are correct that some piano music requires a lot of practice, but having learnt a lot of pieces in TN as well as ES, the amount of practice is the same, once I know what the notes are.

My latest folio of pieces I have learnt from ES notation contains a variety of musical styles. An improvised boogie woogie by Jean Pierre Bertrand and Liszt/Schumann Widmung are two extremes, and technically the most difficult. I havent memorised them. If you take the music away I grind to a stop. I dont think what you say about memorising is true generally. It depends on the individual, but in my case, I have to go through a process to memorise, and I have deliberately not done this for the repertoire I have learnt in ES.

I dont know a lot about guitar TAB, like whether it is frequently wrong. My point was simply that a lot of guitarists found reading TN too difficult on their instrument, so they came up with something that is easier. And publishers accomodated them. But i suspect we are talking about different things. The guitar TAB I meant is written with numbers on a staff of 6 lines that represent the strings. There may be other forms (text notation) that are called TAB.

The way computer technology is going, it will soon be easy to change any music notation into the form the user likes, so I dont see a problem with students not learning from TN.

Addressing some other comments ...

From Counterpoint,

And its much easier for me to play the Prelude in C# (with 7 sharps => all notes are sharpened) than in Db (with 5 flats).

This proves my point. You havent done enough practice yet in 5 flats!!! With 15 different key signatures to learn, you will probably be "much" better in some than in others. And the "grammar" and "intervals" etc are the same, so its just the deciphering of notes that is different. But are you sure you have read it in both keys? The C# version has a lot of double sharps and goes into B# major, which when you play it, you realise is just C major!

As I explained before, I do not like to calculate chromatic steps for intervals wider than thirds.

I was the same till I thought about it - we know a major 3rd is 4 st, but after that we go vague! Well, the interval between a perfect 4th and perfect 5th is the tritone, ie 3 tones or 6 st. So the P4 and P5 are 5 and 7 st respectively. For the 6ths and 7ths, use you knowledge of inversions. The 6th is the inversion of a 3rd (an octave minus a 3rd) - a major 6th is the inverse of the minor 3rd, thus 12 minus 3 = 9. The minor 6th is 12 - 4 = 8. 7ths are 10 and 11, and octaves of course are 12.

And from Gaest,

You raise some good points, johnk.

Thanks! 

All it takes is practice and experience with the key signature.

Exactly!

I'm curious.  Has this student learned TN?  What was his feeling about it and the differences with ES?  What is his opinion of learning ES first, and what were the opinions of the students who learned TN first as far as how the two systems compare?  It'd be interesting to see a survey of the two different groups (although it's kind of a small sample right now, what with only one student having learned ES first).  As more students learn it (I'm assuming more of your students will be), it would be interesting to survey them.

Zac learnt ES from the start. He has no hesitation or confusion as to what notes to play. Even less than me because he hasnt had a middle C and two different clefs drummed into him. His parents want him, and he wants to learn TN, so i gave him a fairly easy piece, (without # or bs) but he avoids practicing it. He knows about FACE and EGBDF etc from school and he knows that the bass is virtually the same as ES, but he just didnt play the piece, so I think to him the ES notation just "looks" like what it is supposed to be, but with the TN, he has to decipher it and its hard. I'll do some more on it this year.

A lot of my students have learnt ES after TN. If TN is very well established, ES is still easy for them, but in a number of cases I taught ES too soon and they then forget TN or get it mixed up. In one case I inherited an advanced student who (typically) was not a good reader, and we learnt the repertoire for her higher school certificate exam in ES because even though this was new to her, she made fewer mistakes than in reading TN, and time was getting short.

Re the dropout rate of piano students, you may be right and I am too hasty to blame TN's difficulties.

Re the idea that students should be prepared for the difficulty of learning piano, I sort of agree, - we should not be saying it is simple; but seeing how Zac has improved last year makes me think that a kid who is motivated will do the practice, and that the difficulties of TN may very well destroy this motivation. This is why Im not going to push the TN reading too much. The main objective is to keep the motivation going.

Lots of points - I may get back to more later. Thanks for your comments.
 

[leahcim]

Hello Leahcim,

Thanks for joining us again. I am a bit mystified when you say you can read music but not play it. What do you mean by "read"? To me, reading music means looking at the score and playing it on the piano (or other instrument). It doesnt mean being able to name the notes, or hearing it in my head or any other thing.

In which case then, by that definition I can't read any music at all, because I can't play anything.

Clearly, you must be able to appreciate a broader definition. It can't be that much of a mystery.

One that can differentiate between someone who can look at a score and sees just a bunch of lines and dots that they don't comprehend at all - i.e someone who has no knowledge of sheet music at all - presumably the people you have taught ES from scratch are in this position.

Someone who can sight read and thus using your definition play Rach 3 [i.e probably no one]

Someone who can read the score, knows which notes should be pressed and what tempo, how long the notes are and so on,  but has to spend weeks, if not years to learn to physically play the piece on the piano. Whether they memorise the piece or not, there's a huge difference between the glances that give us the notes of pieces we know well and the longer process some will need to read a score when they are less experienced either with the piece itself [which most people will have, even when they can read music really well] or with reading music in general [which as I said, is something that takes time and you need to learn, it's just that it takes substationally less time than playing the piano does, otherwise an alternative notation would have been not only invented but adopted decades ago]

Between these "someones.."I've described above we can find degrees on a scale of ability to "read" music.

You see, someone who can sight read a grade 1 piece, might be able to play a piece that's grade 6, albeit they'd have to take longer over the score. They might see single notes and some simple triad chords at a glance, but not a piece that has 4 and 5 note chords in each hand.

Physically playing those chords is, from the point of view of learning, yet another problem. You can't combine them all into "reading music"

Surely this isn't a mystery? It seems self evident that some scores are harder to read than others. For a definition of "read" that you don't need to pretend is a mystery. Similarly, some scores are harder to play, even if you can see the notes you should be playing very easily.

Anyone who is intelligent can see that the scores which are hard to play won't benefit much at
all from making the score easier to read with.

Your idea "if you can't play the piece on the piano you can't read the score" doesn't seem like a worthwhile one given the very nature of this thread. That would also suppose that a piece I can play on the guitar I can read the score, but somehow I can't read the exact same score if I want to play it on the piano?

As you note, "the amount of practise is the same once you've learnt the notes" this is precisely what I was saying. I would also add that the amount of practise far exceeds any time taken to read the score though. Which pretty much makes your ES notation redundant. I would also state that the amount of time taken to learn ES is no different, and the problems, if any, in TN are no worse than the problems that will, however much you hope otherwise, inevitably be in ES.

Ergo you have done nothing to make playing the piano easier. I wish you had.

Your point that a lot of guitarists find reading TN too difficult is not really profound. A lot of them would find reading ES, playing the piano or flying a jumbo jet  "too difficult" too. Unless they spend the time to learn to do those things.

Tab is more straightforward firstly because they have to a greater or less degree, learnt to move their fingers around 6 strings and frets, and have forgotten that they once didn't know this [this is like learning where C is in relation to the black notes on the piano and so on..if you had a piano tab, it would be easy only when you'd learnt the layout of the keyboard...at which point it would be foolish to decide that piano tab was easier than traditional notation which you hadn't troubled to learn.

Trust me, I learnt to read music years before touching a piano, because I was one of those guitarists you claim reading music is too difficult for

The 2nd reason guitar TAB is easy is because it throws away 90% of what a score would tell you. i.e merely because it is showing so little. Something that a glance at any Guitar TAB book that has the score above it, will show you.

We are talking about the exact same thing BTW. I know what guitar tab is. Perhaps my point confused you. You can type a guitar tab into the text box, the kind that is in just about every piece of software used on the internet. You can't do that with a music score...that has a LOT to do with the amount of guitar tab created and used. That said, there are some programs that'll play guitar tab and do other magic which need bespoke formats, but the general ease with which guitar tab can be chucked around without special software, is important.

The guitarist has merely learnt different skills, it's not inherent in TN that it's too difficult for him.
The same guitarists won't say "Ooh look, ES, now it's so easy I'll learn it" They'll not bother with that either because they don't know it and don't need it. Because they have no interest in playing lute pieces, and have no requirement to read TN to play the rest of the rep they care about. ES is just as "too difficult"

To decide that learning languages is "too difficult" because you tried to speak Chinese and couldn't would conveniently ignore the billions of Chinese, from all walks of life, that have learnt it. Similarly for TN. It isn't rocket science.

"The way computer technology is going" Eh? That doesn't immediately suggest that exchanging snippets of music will be straightforward compared with a text based format like guitar TAB. Just do a search for guitar tab and find it all.

Yes, you can write software to convert formats, but this has nothing to do with technology going anywhere. Programmers [i.e people] write software, computer technology doesn't. It certainly isn't a straightforward task....even if you ignore a huge part of the problem as you have in your threads here [some points of which Alastair noted for example]

[counterpoint]

This proves my point. You havent done enough practice yet in 5 flats!!!

  











 

With 15 different key signatures to learn, you will probably be "much" better in some than in others. And the "grammar" and "intervals" etc are the same, so its just the deciphering of notes that is different.

The "grammar" and "intervals" etc are the same in theory, that's true. But on the trad. keyboard layout, the black and white notes are different (unpredictably different!) dependent on the key of the piece. So this different black and white combination has to be mirrored in a 12-tone notation => there is no advantage compared to TN.

But are you sure you have read it in both keys? The C# version has a lot of double sharps and goes into B# major, which when you play it, you realise is just C major!

No, I haven't played the transcription in Db - I can't make any sense of such a thing.

Could you please tell me, where the original C#version goes into B# major??? In the Fugue, there is a B#7 chord as a dominant to E# minor, which is quite funny but not that unusual, when you are used to the Sonatas and Impromptus of Schubert... 

[johnk]

Could you please tell me, where the original C#version goes into B# major??? In the Fugue, there is a B#7 chord as a dominant to E# minor, which is quite funny but not that unusual, when you are used to the Sonatas and Impromptus of Schubert... 

You caught me out! It doesnt go INTO B# but uses the chord of B#7 to go into E# minor. This occurs in the prelude as well as the fugue.

I guess i like Db much better than C# major because Db (5b) was the first key I learnt to play in after C major, I spent at least a year at age 17 playing everthing I knew by ear in Db and reading pieces in this key. Looking at the prelude and fugue in Db i can "see" the harmonic progressions, whereas the C# version keeps confusing me. I dont see the point of having notes written as B#, Cx, Dx when on the piano I just play CDE. Well i do see why Bach wrote it this way but it is more complex to read. Orlando Morgan agrees, or at least has acknowledged that others feel this way.

The "grammar" and "intervals" etc are the same in theory, that's true. But on the trad. keyboard layout, the black and white notes are different (unpredictably different!) dependent on the key of the piece. So this different black and white combination has to be mirrored in a 12-tone notation => there is no advantage compared to TN.

I get what you're saying, but there is an advantage, because in ES the notehead colour tells you which pattern to play. With TN you have to learn the 15 key signature codes, and as we agree, this takes more time.

Zac can play (for example) in 4#s. ES shows him the notes. With TN I would have had to teach him the coding, ie A is natural, B is natural, C is sharp, D is sharp, etc. He wouldnt be near this stage yet.

[gaest]

Johnk: I doubt it is very easy upholding your notation system against so many detractors, so thank you as always for your civil and informative replies.

All it takes is practice and experience with the key signature.

Exactly!

I'm rather curious about this reaction here.  Before, you made comments about how key signatures are too difficult, and "eliminating" the key signature is one way that ES will make it easier to learn (I have that in quotes because I don't really think that the key signature is eliminated, merely hidden by the pictoral nature of your AN).  In other words, I interpreted that to mean that ES would "solve" the issue of learning key signatures... but here, you're saying that really all that's needed is practice and experience after all?

In which case... ES does not really help with the learning of key signatures, because while the student may be playing an A-major piece, they'll never know from looking at the ES notation.  They'll never assimilate the idea of what makes up a major key, or a minor melodic key, unless it is expressly emphasized during lessons.

Zac learnt ES from the start. He has no hesitation or confusion as to what notes to play. Even less than me because he hasnt had a middle C and two different clefs drummed into him. His parents want him, and he wants to learn TN, so i gave him a fairly easy piece, (without # or bs) but he avoids practicing it. He knows about FACE and EGBDF etc from school and he knows that the bass is virtually the same as ES, but he just didnt play the piece, so I think to him the ES notation just "looks" like what it is supposed to be, but with the TN, he has to decipher it and its hard. I'll do some more on it this year.

A lot of my students have learnt ES after TN. If TN is very well established, ES is still easy for them, but in a number of cases I taught ES too soon and they then forget TN or get it mixed up. In one case I inherited an advanced student who (typically) was not a good reader, and we learnt the repertoire for her higher school certificate exam in ES because even though this was new to her, she made fewer mistakes than in reading TN, and time was getting short.

Re the dropout rate of piano students, you may be right and I am too hasty to blame TN's difficulties.

Re the idea that students should be prepared for the difficulty of learning piano, I sort of agree, - we should not be saying it is simple; but seeing how Zac has improved last year makes me think that a kid who is motivated will do the practice, and that the difficulties of TN may very well destroy this motivation. This is why Im not going to push the TN reading too much. The main objective is to keep the motivation going.

It's good to hear of success stories with ES.

However, I have to admit that I'm concerned by the fact that, while Zac would like to learn TN, he seems to be less motivated to learn to play using TN now that he has ES as an alternative.  Does ES (and other AN in similar situations) become a mere crutch for pianists just starting out?  After all, they can use ES rather than learn the harder TN, and why would a student want to push themselves to learn TN if they can rely on ES instead?  And I do believe it is important for them to learn the traditional system, not only because it is the standard, but because there is so much information expressed through TN that cannot be seen in what I've learned of ES.  Like leahcim has said about the guitar tabs, it may be simpler, but simpler often means that something has been lost in translation and you're only seeing half of the information that should have been there.  Key signature is merely one of those things that seems to be lost from ES.

ES could potentially be an alternate way to teach newbie pianists the basics, but I still don't think it will be successful until a strong method of transitioning over to TN is established.

Learning TN shouldn't destroy anyone's motivation to learn the piano.  Learning the traditional notation should open up the world of music to the student, not prove a hurdle that they have to cross in order to reach where they want to go.  Teachers should be motivated to teach this, so that their motivation might carry over to their students.  TN isn't scary, and students shouldn't be scared of it.  It requires work, true, but once learned it's incredible to see the amount of information that can be expressed with it.  I think it might be starting the student off on the wrong foot immediately to tell them, "the standard notation is pretty hard, let's use something easier instead."  Automatically, they get a mental impression that TN is a huge cliff to climb, rather than a stairway that can help them reach their musical goals.

It's no wonder, then, that they start wanting to push that cliff off as long as possible, avoiding it as best they can, instead of learning it simultaneously with beginning technique, so that while their technique is improving, their TN reading capabilities are being worked on as well.  And all the while, the longer they push it off, the taller that "cliff" gets in their eyes.

[johnk]

Gaest,

I appreciate your comments. And in some ways you are correct, in that a musician that reads TN fluently would be a lot more useful than one who reads ES fluently. But on the other hand if it could be shown that an alternative system like ES has a triple success rate in say numbers of students who drop out or speed of progress, wouldnt this be a good argument to 'legitimise' the AN and encourage publishers to have ES as well as TN versions of pieces.

KlavarSkribo has been around for a while and has quite a following. They could possibly give some statistics of success rates. I believe the Alfreds or Hal Leonard piano courses are available in it. You can see some YouTube videos of people playing from it.

My aim in ES was to design a system that has close similarity with TN, unlike Klavar. i do understand your concern that the AN system should have a clear correlation with TN, and ES does this better than most others imho. This is because ES is a 7-5 system, keeping the TN distinction between the 7 'naturals' and 5 'inflections'. Other systems are 6-6: they code for the two wholetone scales, which is much less correlated to TN. Mind you, the 6-6 system has a lot in its favour, for example a major scale is desribed as 3 notes from one wholetone scale then 4 notes from the other. This explanation is much more direct and simple than the TN key signature approach.

Re my comment:

All it takes is practice and experience with the key signature.
Exactly!

, I was referring to TN. It takes practice and experience with each of the 15 TN key signatures before one can really say they can 'read' TN music.

One doesnt need to know all the codes beforehand in ES, the sharps and flats are shown graphically, as if written as accidentals in TN. But this doesnt mean the student wont learn keys. They will still play scales and chords and learn their patterns.

... there is so much information expressed through TN that cannot be seen in what I've learned of ES.  Like leahcim has said about the guitar tabs, it may be simpler, but simpler often means that something has been lost in translation and you're only seeing half of the information that should have been there.  Key signature is merely one of those things that seems to be lost from ES.

The only bit of information that is lost from TN to ES concerns altered scale degrees. If a piece is in E major , for example, and modulates to A, you get a natural sign on a D to signal this. In ES you would see the 4 sharps in E and you simply loose one and gain a D, without the 'pointer' of the natural sign. But I do believe this awareness can be taught as one reads ES. And of course the ear will help just as it does in TN. It would be like watching a piano player play, the D wont have a natural sign attached when you see the note played, if you get what I mean. An astute observer will still see that the music has modulated though.

I dont think there is any other sort of information that ES loses from TN. Too much has been made of this. Rhythm is the same as TN. All articulations, phrasing , expressions etc are the same. Even sharps and flats can be distinguished when you know how to see it. Flats occur on top of the ES lines and accumulate downwards. Sharps begin under the lines and accumulate upwards. People who feel that a black key must be identified correctly as either the # or the b, can still do this. I personally am happy to describe the black key pitches with their own letternames H I J K and L. But if you want to name notes by only 7 letters instead of 12, you can - just call the black notes #s or bs of the A to Gs. Whereas this is harder to do in the 6-6 systems because the notes for black keys are not distinguished as a group.

If I have missed some of this 'other' information, let me know what else you think is lost.

I take your point that the longer TN is avoided, the less likely the student is to learn it. But honestly, I have taught students in the past that have avoided learning to read TN music even though thats the only system I taught, and they have passed all the exams. Lots of teachers must have this same experience. Kids tend to learn and memorise as they go, and end up not looking at the score at all. So when they get derailed they have to start from the top again. Zac doesnt do this.

Too much time is taken in lessons just teaching the notes, correcting wrong notes, the old 'F SHARP!!' teachers' cry. So we end up not getting pieces learnt fast enough to allow time to do sight reading practice routinely through the year. The kids with good ears are the ones who are likely to be the worst sight readers. This is well known. But I dont think this would happen as much with ES.

I agree with you that the ideal would be a way to teach both ES and TN concurrently. The bass clef is fine (see attached) but of course the treble clef, being different, is the problem.

[nyquist]

A big feature of Klavarskribo is the existence of  Klavarscript:

https://www.vdkolk.nl/klavar/mainpage-en.htm

"KlavarScript is software that allows you to create klavar music electronically. The program can read MIDI files, edit, print and save the music."

Klavarscript can be downloaded for free and, with the right midi file, produces beautiful output . I have gotten the best results when using midi files that have been hand sequenced or are the product of a notation program like lilypond or Finale.  There are good collections of midi files in the Internet.  I like particularly Mutopia,

https://www.mutopiaproject.org/

, and "Kunst der Fugue"

https://kunstderfuge.com/

I have been able to produce nice Klavar version of a lot of the music I am working with.

John's notation would have a much better chance of being adopted if there was equivalent (free) software to produce scores.  I understand that there is a way for Finale to do this, but Finale is most certainly not free.

nyquist

[johnk]

Hello Nyquist,

John's notation would have a much better chance of being adopted if there was equivalent (free) software to produce scores.  I understand that there is a way for Finale to do this, but Finale is most certainly not free.

Please send me any good midi files you have opened in KlavarScript. They just need to be opened in Finale to make MUS files. Once we have the MUS file, anyone can open them in the FREE Finale NotePad, 06 version, and with two other free files I can send, (the ES template and notehead font) the file can then be turned into ES within NotePad. I demonstrate this in my YouTube video:
https://nz.youtube.com/watch?v=pycujqUZuZM
It is just a copy and paste procedure.

As you say, there are good midi files on the internet. When turned into MUS files, they just lack articulations, phrase and expression marks, piano braces, clef changes etc. And the enharmonics and hand splits can be wrong, but otherwise anything you can turn into Klavar, anyone can turn into ES. Except that NotePad 06 doesnt open midis. NotePad 08 does, but this latest version wont copy the ES staff style over music. Finale "corrected" the anomoly that allowed it to work in 06. And unfortunately you cant open files in a previous version. I am told the Finale company cant afford the Save As Previous Version function because they need the cash flow of people updating to the the latest version. Its a pity ...

Anyway how do you find reading ES compared to reading Klavar?

The alternative notation website www.mnma.org hopes to soon have various transnotation facilities available for free download. I have developed the Finale method, and another guy has developed AN facilities in the free LilyPond application. Which is why the two of us were invited to join their committee. We aim to have the same facility for many of the ANs as you describe for Klavar.

Thanks a lot for your support and interest.

[johnk]

I find Express Stave easier to read and learn pieces from all the time. In the two years since I invented it, some of the pieces I have learnt are:

All the Bach 2 Part Inventions (Well I did know some beforehand),
Ginastera Danza de la Moza Donosa,
Grieg's March of the Dwarfs,
Schumann/Liszt Widmung,
Scriabin Etude Op8 no4,
J Lee Graham's Fugue on Twinkle,
- and a lot of improvised jazz, blues and boogie pieces.

Checkout my latest YouTube addition, a great boogie woogie blues transcription by the French boogie pianist Jean-Pierre Bertrand. Keep in mind the original was improvised, and I play it note for note reading from Express Stave notation.

https://nz.youtube.com/watch?v=eX6Ggsmzv3I

[johnk]

I am pleased to announce the launch of our new website for alternative music notations. It is called the Music Notation Project, www.musicnotationproject.org . This takes over from www.mnma.org .

The upgraded site is very readable. I would like to invite piano teachers especially to have a look at it to see why some of us think there might be easier ways to notate music than the traditional millenium-old diatonic system.

We are not radical ratbags, but thoughtful openminded people who have managed to escape from the confines of our own musical upbringings.

Some of the greatest musical minds have considered alternative music notations. See the quote from Arnold Schoenberg.

I have updated my Express Stave description, taking into account some of the very valuable feedback from this and other forums and emails. I invite pianists to try playing the Moonlight Sonata (1st mvt) from ES. A lot of you will know this piece quite well, but not quite well enough to play by memory, because of the various turns it takes. So reading the ES version may be interesting ...

[counterpoint]

Personally I don't believe that a notation which is based on the chromatic scale will ever be accepted by human musicians. We do not think in chromatical steps but in intervals. These intervals depend on the diatonic scale. The diatonic scale has 7 steps hence we have 7 note names: C D E F G A B. If we were thinking in 12 halftones, we needed 12 note names, To find triads in a given diatonic scale is very easy: just skip one step to get the third then skip again one step and you get the fifth. Based on a chromatic scale a major triad would be: starting note, then skip 4 steps (halfnotes) then skip 3 steps. Or even worse: when playing a triad in 1st inversion with bigger intervals (sixth + fifth) chromatic steps would be: 8 halftones + 7 halftones! Such a system is not practicable.

[johnk]

Thanks for your fast reply, Counterpoint. I was beginning to think noone was interested!

Personally I don't believe that a notation which is based on the chromatic scale will ever be accepted by human musicians.

Well time will tell, but I think you should speak for yourself only. I am a human musician and a good one! You may only think in diatonic steps, but I assume you do know whether those steps are wholetones or halftones. And the intervals you speak of are major, minor etc. But these details are NOT specifically visible in a diatonic notation which only shows the 'scale steps' and not the exact size of the steps or the type of scale.

If we were thinking in 12 halftones, we needed 12 note names,

Actually, I do often call the black keys HIJK and L, to give them equality with the white keys. If you are playing the piano, a chord on a black key can be (for example) called L 7th and it puts it on a par with say D 7th. Why should the black key pitches be forced to use white key names plus # and b? It is actually much simpler to specify the black keys directly. But anyway, AN readers can still use the diatonic 7-letter spellings. (Most AN inventors do seem to prefer this.)

Based on a chromatic scale a major triad would be: starting note, then skip 4 steps (halfnotes) then skip 3 steps.

I would say 'play the root then go up 4 pli then 3 pli'. OR go up a major 3rd then a minor 3rd, if I have taught how big the major and minor 3rds are. I notice you dont actually describe how you would form a MAJOR triad, just a triad in general. This is just the problem with TN!

...bigger intervals (sixth + fifth) chromatic steps would be: 8 halftones + 7 halftones!

I dont see too much difference here: 5 and 6 compared with 7 and 8

AN readers will still study the major scale as it is such an important part of music, but they can also study wholetone scales, blues scales, the diminished scales and other forms used extensively in jazz and many other musical genres.

In the Chopin F minor concerto I am revising, there are scale passages proceeding by tone and semitone based on a diminished 7th chord.

There are other ways to describe major scales besides successive letternames and tetrachords. See my other post.

[counterpoint]

I notice you dont actually describe how you would form a MAJOR triad, just a triad in general.

That's an interesting point!

You're right, I do not count the halfnotes. I just play a third in a given scale.

For example: E-G may be step 3 and 5 of the C Major scale. The note in between is a F.

In an other case, E-G may be step 1 and 3 of the E minor scale (or the 5th and 7th of an A7 chord). Then the note in between is a F#.

There is always a tonal relation, and this tonal relation depends on a diatonic scale. And all chords derive from diatonic scales.

A diminished 4th would be the same as a major 3rd in a chromatic system.  But it's not the same interval, I swear    C# - F  is not the same interval as Db - F: the first is dissonant, the second is consonant, something people do not understand who are only looking at the keyboard and don't look in the written music.

[johnk]

A diminished 4th would be the same as a major 3rd in a chromatic system.  But it's not the same interval, I swear.   C# - F  is not the same interval as Db - F: the first is dissonant, the second is consonant, something people do not understand who are only looking at the keyboard and don't look in the written music.

If a non-music-trained person read this, they might well question how the same sound played on the piano - namely C#/Db and F played together - can be both dissonant (sounds bad) and consonant (sounds good). We trained musicians would have to explain that it makes a difference in what context the sound occurs. If followed by A then E then D, (implying D minor) we would say it was dissonant. If followed by Ab twice, we would say its that beautiful Dvorak theme! Now I think the listener could still argue that the sound itself is no different, the notes surrounding it make the difference.

Now what if a composer wanted to deliberately play on the ambigiuty of the sound, say by approching it in one context and quitting it in another? What I am getting at here, is that there are cases where we might want to specify this interval without saying whether it is the diminished 4th or major 3rd, ie we want to say it is "C#/Db" without specifying either name. TN does not allow this. Composers are forced to specify one name or the other because TN does not have a simple unique name for the pitch C#/Db, nor a way of writing it on the staff without specifying one enharmonic or the other. Yet it is a unique pitch! Midi pitch 61! The pitch of C# is the same as the pitch of Db! Yet by having to specify these two names, we set up certain different expectations or impressions in the TN-trained musician's mind.

In these cases I prefer to call this pitch I (i). Its like you see the black note struck on the piano and not its traditional notation. You dont want to imply any context. It is for cases where you dont want to set up this preconception about where it might go to. Think of "I" as an IMAGINARY note, just as mathematicians can legitimately talk of imaginary numbers, the square root of minus one (also called i). In maths they serve a very real purpose and end up being extremely useful. Yet when they were first proposed, probably people said "you cant have the square root of minus one, it simply does not exist"! A similar argument can be made for giving the 5 black key pitches their own letternames. Well, in Germany one of them does already. Bb is called B, and B natural is called H. So I simply call the Bb "H", then B and H are reversed in German.

So a chromatic notation is just like a midi file. It specifies the midi pitches, but not the TN names for the black keys. Is this such a problem? Not really, because the context of the music will still set up expectations, and TN trained musicians will still be able to say "In this case, the midi pitch 61 is a C# because it is in the context of a D minor scale." But it has the added benefit of not forcing a specific enharmonic name if the context is meant to be ambiguous.

To finish off my black key pitch names, the two-black-key group is I and J  (the only two dotted letters), and the F# is K. This leads nicely to L, the centre of the 3 blacks which "links" each alphabetical set of white keys ABCDEFG to the next. This gives the 12 musical pitches the first 12 letters of the alphabet, A to L, but also doesnt change the traditional 7 'natural' pitches A to G. Whats more, you can contemplate things such as J# ( = E) just as much as D# (= J).

Equal rights for black keys !!! 
 

[musicrebel4u]

I don't think we should change music notation before we look at it from other angle)))

[johnk]

Pretty pictures showing the C symmetry of the traditional grand staff!  But with a nickname like MusicRebel, I would have expected you to be a bit more radical!

A number of teaching systems start off with the staff running vertically: Klavar, Soft Mozart and Play to name three. This is a good idea for beginner orientation at the piano keyboard, but the principle could be applied to any notation system.

Showing that the Cs are equally spaced outwards from middle C is a very simplistic concept. The mirror symmetry looks nice, but it is shamelessly weighted in favour of the white notes of C major, and it completely disregards the positions of tones and semitones. It lines up the notes on either side of doh (C). Re (D) lines  up with Te (B) - But doh-ray is a tone and doh-te is a semitone, so the symmetry is not real! Also think of key signatures, the first sharp is F#, and the first flat is Bb; where are they in your symmetrical drawings?

I prefer to notice the symmetry of the bass staff. Here the semitones are equally placed relative to the center D line, As are the key signatures! One sharp (F) is at the opposite line to one flat (B) and legerlines bear a mirror relationship as well. The mirror image of C on the keyboard is E, and these are the first legerlines above and below the bass respectively.

Cheers, JohnK

[johnk]

Oh I see now that you are the Soft Mozart Lady!

Is this your own system? It seems quite impressive, but your YouTube video also tends to agree with what we at the Music Notation Project have been saying - that reading music is very difficult, and most people who start learning, never master it.

A lot of people like yourself have tried to develop better teaching methods, and this is very admirable.

But we take the view that it would be better to just invent an easier system!

Regards, John K

[musicrebel4u]

Oh I see now that you are the Soft Mozart Lady!

Is this your own system? It seems quite impressive, but your YouTube video also tends to agree with what we at the Music Notation Project have been saying - that reading music is very difficult, and most people who start learning, never master it.

A lot of people like yourself have tried to develop better teaching methods, and this is very admirable.

A lot of people tried - I developed

But we take the view that it would be better to just invent an easier system!

I am originally from Russia and there we have very advanced music education. By our standards, piano is a starting point of music education - all the musicians have piano lessons from the very beginning. By playinng piano and reading Grand Staff students develop the most essential - let's call it 'music mind'. They do it by sight-reading a lot of music literature, writing down music dictations, improvizing etc. It makes them learning other music system piece of cake.

Regards, mudicrebel

[johnk]

Congratulations on developing your system. Did you develop it in Russia? Or only in the west, because here a lot of kids dont have the discipline to learn the traditional way.

[musicrebel4u]

Congratulations on developing your system. Did you develop it in Russia? Or only in the west, because here a lot of kids dont have the discipline to learn the traditional way.

I was working on this project since 1980 in Soviet Union and in USA. Kids everywhere are the same. In Russia we have more people/hours involved in music education and government fundings. But results of ' traditional way ' in general the same in Russia and USA: selected few learn and the rest don't. Children love to learn when they CAN.

Please, watch this video. Maybe, it would explain why kids don't have discipline to learn music traditionaly:

[lostinidlewonder]

I think given it took hundreds of years to come up with the standard musical notation we have today, trying to force changes in a matter of a few years is crazy.

[johnk]

Who is forcing changes? I am adding another form of notation for those who wish to try it. Cant you see that the existing system has a poor success rate? If a few extra people play the piano by learning from Klavar or Express Stave, is this not a good thing? People learn from piano TAB, chord symbols, some singers learn by the relative solfa letters, then theres shape notation ... its all good.

John

[musicrebel4u]

Cant you see that the existing system has a poor success rate?

Cant YOU see that traditional notation have 100% success rate with a little development?
You know, people used to teach beginners to read from the Bible.
Only selected few succeeded. Thanks goodness new letters were not invented! All what it took - is to LOOK at the letters differently and to create ABC.

I am for changes, but the changes have to be made after learning rules of our perception. Do you know, how exactly human eye SEE? How exactly we focus? Center of every invention is a human with all his/her abilities and limitations.

[johnk]

Cant YOU see that traditional notation have 100% success rate with a little development?

Nothing will have 100% success rate. Sure, new teaching methods will improve results, but you still have to teach 2 different clefs (4 if you play viola and trombone), when one should have been enough, 4 different sets of legerlines, 15 different key signatures.

If you put all your wonderful teaching methodology into a system which reads all clefs the same way, has recurring octave similarity throughout the staff, and has no need for the timeconsuming task of mastering all the keysignatures, then the result would be quite a bit better still.

You cannot argue with this. If we apply modern understanding of how humans learn, then a simpler system will naturally give better results than a complex one.

Please tell me the rules of perception, how the eye sees, how we focus! Give me the references! All these will be great to incorporate into my Express Stave teaching method.

[keypeg]

Is it the eye that perceives?  We have created an audio-visual world in the modern era, and one that is predominantly visual - almost an oxymoron for music, which is audial and tactile, except for music reading itself.  The traditional staff, on the other hand, comes from a non-digital analogue time period where people followed patterns and relationships.  From the earliest time when I learned to read music by myself, even without knowing note names, I was able to follow tho notes and play pieces such as Beethoven and Clementi as a child.  It is there in the patterns: step-wise arpeggios, smooth-line runs, things that looked like clusters of grapes which were the chords in shapes that made the hand want to shape a certain way, and the ear to hear a certain thing.  I never found the clefs to be daunting or intimidating - maybe nobody made them complicated for me through explanation.

When I see all these alternate systems, what worries me is the fact that music is still written the old-fashioned way.  If a student learns to read through these systems, does he or she not still have to learn to read the regular clef?  Does it become harder, like learning two languages?  Is there a transition?  What do you do about the fact that the clefs exist: treble, bass, grand, the various C clefs?  Anyone studying music halfways serious, or even the amateur wanting to be able to buy or download their favourite music, still has to be able to read traditional music.  What are the thoughts on that?

[johnk]

Hi Keypeg,

I dont think there is a fundamental difference between todays digital and the pasts analogue approach to notation. Teaching methods have changed, and we will no doubt see more interactive approaches such as Soft Mozart and the video game idea, to catch kids interest. But the notation itself has always tried to capture visually the patterns and relationships that are aurally there in the music.

When you say you learnt to read music yourself as a child, I presume you meant just the white keys. There is a one to one correspondance between notes on the staff and the white keys on the piano. So shapes on the stave can easily be seen as shapes on the white keys. The hand can learn to associate the keyboard shape of chords with the notational shape. But unfortunately this is not an exact relationship, and it soon breaks down.

People that say reading a different clef is easy ... Have you really tried playing music at the same level of difficulty as you could read in your familiar clefs?

As far as asking if it becomes harder to learn traditional notation after you have learnt an easier one, Im not sure. I guess it would depend on the way it is taught. Id buy Soft Mozart to make sure!

Do all serious musicians read traditional music well? Among jazz and rock musicians, I would say a lot dont!

But I am interested in developing the transition between Express Stave and traditional notation.

Cheers, John K

[counterpoint]

People that say reading a different clef is easy ...

The keys with the many b's or sharps do not exist to make playing easy -

they exist to make playing more difficult. 

A musician is not expected to take always the easiest path and to think as little as possible.
Music reading is like chess playing. The difficulty is the stimulus. Advanced piano players all want to learn more difficult pieces (the preludes&fugues with the many # and b) and they want to learn the most difficult Chopin etudes.

Composing music does not have the intention to make the musician a simple life. 

[johnk]

The keys with the many b's or sharps do not exist to make playing easy - they exist to make playing more difficult. 

The thing is, the PLAYING is NOT more difficult, only the READING is!

The difficulty is the stimulus. Advanced piano players all want to learn more difficult pieces (the preludes&fugues with the many # and b) and they want to learn the most difficult Chopin etudes.

Tell me about it! I am one of them. I learnt all the Chopin Etudes in my late teens and most of the WTC since then. Wanting to PLAY difficult pieces is the stimulus. I dont want to play stuff that looks difficult in notation but sounds easy! (Unless it is superb music of course.)

Composing music does not have the intention to make the musician a simple life. 

Yes I guess some composers think like this. "I am the greatest composer because noone can play my music!" On the other hand, if they wanted to earn a living ....

[counterpoint]

I dont want to play stuff that looks difficult in notation but sounds easy! (Unless it is superb music of course.)

The difficulty is for the enjoyment of the musician, not for the audience. Otherwise you should play Liszt   

[johnk]

I have played some Liszt, and yes, i think the audience enjoyed it more than me.

[musicrebel4u]

Dear JohnK,

I can't write long posts: it is just difficult for me to express myself in English the way I do it in Russian. So, here is 2 important points:

1. Music - is a language of multiple sounds and foundation should be absolute - traditional piano keys layout, octave of 12 even pitches and Grand Staff.

All other Staves for single-voice  instruments could be easily learned by any musician with solid foundation. In Russia every professional musician plays piano and every professional musician can write music by ear on Grand Staff and knows ABC and Solfeggio with no 'movable do'. When I was stady composition, we learned different staves and specifics of different instruments.

2. Problem with music notation lays in physiology and has nothing to do with music theory.

Please, read some articles like this and understand: any 'innovation' won't do any good for people, 'till they will consider...
https://www.arn.org/docs/glicksman/eyw_041001.htm
'Focus, Focus, Focus
I’d like you now to turn and look out a window or through the door of the room you’re in and gaze at an object of interest as far away as possible. How much of what your eyes see do you think that you are truly focusing on? The human eye is capable of high visual acuity. This is expressed as the angular resolving power, i.e. how much of the 360 degrees in the visual field the eye can clearly focus on. The human eye can resolve one minute of arc, which represents 1/60th of a degree. The full moon takes up 30 minutes of arc in the sky, i.e. about ½ a degree of arc. Pretty remarkable isn’t it?

Some birds of prey are capable of resolving 20 seconds of arc which gives them a higher visual acuity than our own.

Now go back and look at that faraway object again. But this time take notice that although at first glance you seem to be focusing on a larger portion of the field, when you really concentrate on what you’re indeed looking at, you’ll realize that it represents only a small sliver of the whole image. What you’re experiencing is your central vision which is dependent on the fovea, and the macula that surrounds it, in the retina. This region consists largely of the cone photoreceptor cells which work best in bright light and allow us to see sharp images in color. Why and how this happens will be discussed in next month’s column. More to the point, people who suffer from macular degeneration are intimately aware of what can happen when one’s central vision is compromised.

Now, go back again and look at that object that’s faraway, but this time take note of how fuzzy and poorly colored everything else outside of your central vision appears. This is your peripheral vision and it is mostly dependent on the rod photoreceptor cells that line the rest of the retina and provide us with our night vision. This too will be discussed in next month’s column when we look at how the retina is capable of sending a nerve impulse to the brain. But in order for you to be able to appreciate the need for the eye to be able to focus, you first need to have some idea about how the retina actually works. After all, that’s what the light rays are being focused on. '

[keypeg]

Hi John

I dont think there is a fundamental difference between todays digital and the pasts analogue approach to notation.

I should have qualified my use of the words "digital" and "analogue".  I was waxing philosophical and being metaphorical.   I had a conversation with a 14 year old: he can barely decipher analogue clocks, and his grandmother is mystified by digital time.  It goes to the level of life view and relationship to the world.  "Noon" or "quarter to three" is relational and inclusive, part of the world and other things.  12:03 is a tiny, compartmentalized pinpoint of time separate from all other pinpoints of time, and separate from life.  We have the same phenomenon in many areas.  We have moved from an analogue world to a digital world.  As a child I related to the grand staff in an analogue manner and can still do so.  I did not read every note - well in fact I didn't read any note since I didn't know note names: I followed what was happening within the scale that was in my head on which melody was based, watching the patterns.  Although I have since learned to read notes as actual notes, and to go from eye to finger instead of eye to ear to finger, it strikes me that many modern people seem to relate to the notes on the staff "digitally" - one by one, like the digital clock.  They would seek an alternative, and/or view the staff with different eyes because they inhabit a different world.  Why was this notation system ok 200 years ago, and why is it no longer considered ok?  Are we also "seeing" differently?

When you say you learnt to read music yourself as a child, I presume you meant just the white keys. There is a one to one correspondance between notes on the staff and the white keys on the piano. So shapes on the stave can easily be seen as shapes on the white keys.

It is interesting to see your question phrased like that.  The first thing that strikes me is the perception of reading music going from the visual to the visual: notes on page to visual layout of the keyboard.    I don't know whether my first development follows any norm - It went from page to sound to keyboard.  I started with movable do at school, knew how to find the tonic, half saw and half heard the sounds along the scale and broken chord patterns.  My music was from the period that would use the standard scales so that didn't fall apart on me.  I would play something, and if it sounded "off" I went up or down a semitone to a black key until it sounded right.  The grand staff was intuitive and non-threatening.  I learned to see notes in groups and patterns so I never had to contend with distinguishing a G on a line in the treble clef from a B in the bass occupying the same position.

People that say reading a different clef is easy ... Have you really tried playing music at the same level of difficulty as you could read in your familiar clefs?

I would have to try that - There should be some viola music lurking around somewhere.  But I would probably use my old trick of fixing the tonic, then switch partly to intervalic reading, and if I know what the key is the rest is logical.  I still move partly from sound to keyboard, or a mental map of the scale to the keyboard, rather than strictly notes on the page to keyboard.  I play a number of instruments and I don't know if that makes a difference.

But I am interested in developing the transition between Express Stave and traditional notation.

I haven't even caught up to Express Stave.  But when I read about alternate notation and students, the first thing that comes to mind is the fact that those same students will be faced with traditionally written music and will need to be able to read it.  The first thing you are exposed to tends to stick, because impressions are raw and new.  So if you begin with an alternate notation system, does that become a handicap for learning to read standard notation, or has a transitional phase been designed into the system?

[keypeg]

Problem with music notation lays in physiology and has nothing to do with music theory.

Please, read some articles like this and understand: any 'innovation' won't do any good for people, 'till they will consider...

'Focus, Focus, Focus

Musicalrebel4U - So the reason for your system is primarily because of the way the human eye and mind sees, and how that relates to the grand staff?

[johnk]

MusicRebel wrote:

1. Music - is a language of multiple sounds and foundation should be absolute - traditional piano keys layout, octave of 12 even pitches and Grand Staff.

and

2. Problem with music notation lays in physiology and has nothing to do with music theory.

You have a way of making statements like this without really giving reasons or a logical augument.  How can we even start to discuss a topic if you just say something "should" be this way or that? There are some fantastic musicians in the world who do NOT play piano or read traditional notation. But i suppose you would say they are not musicians by your definition.

I dont see how your study of the physiology of the eye can logically lead you to deduce that traditional notation is better than other possible notation systems.

The link you gave on the eye physiology is making a case for intelligent design and against evolution. Perhaps you make your statements because God designed traditional music notation!

I dont see how you can be so dogmatic about the superiority of one music notation, when in language there are so many different ones, each with its own written notation, and yet people manage to learn them in all their variety. You even speak two languages yourself. How can you say what is basically the equivalent of "Russian is the superior language"

Keypeg, thanks for illustrating your own musical beginnings in more detail. It is of interest to me that you were introduced to moveable doh, and feel that this gave you a nice uncomplicated introduction. (Musicrebel would say you "should" have been taught fixed doh.) You say this enabled you to perceive patterns of notes both aurally and visually, and that you would adjust to a sharp or flat if it sounded wrong. This is what a lot of people do I guess. Can you say that you are really "reading" the notation if you do this though? You are partially reading it, then "guessing" when something sounds wrong.

One of the aims of alternative notations is to take away this hesitation and adjustment, by making the exact note or interval immediately evident.

I have been learning a Scriabin prelude in B. I read alternatively in TN and ES to see what is the subjective difference. The main difference is when he starts modulating and throwing in double sharps that must be remembered later in the measures. This is where the TN version makes for more hesitation.

On the other hand, I did initially miss a change in harmony where the only change was from E to E# (ie F) in ES, whereas in TN, the accidental alerted me to it.

Regards, John K

[musicrebel4u]

Musicalrebel4U - So the reason for your system is primarily because of the way the human eye and mind sees, and how that relates to the grand staff?

All the written languages on Earth are linear, because human's speech is a one-voice production. Grand Staff – is a unit of multiple tracks designed for music language of multiple sounds. When music is sounding in real time,  the sounds are having 2 physical essential parameters – pitch and timing and these parameters cross vertically. But this 'golden section' is not presented in music notation and unprepared human eye is unable to see the 'golden section', because each voice of music language is dispersed all over the Grand Staff.

By music sight-reading first of all we have in mind production of multiple sounds with help of 10 fingers. In this case, the interaction of learning music must be connected between the lines and spaces of the Grand Staff and an instrument with multiple sounds (piano/keyboard) through visual and audio support.  In order to be fluent in the complete process of learning music, all the skills should be developed from the very beginning as a team; i.e., ear, eyes, voice and the 10 fingers of the student.  In this respect, the voice is a 'manager' of ear development, but coordination  is an essential part of music making or execution.  This is precisely why piano keys and lines and spaces of Grand Staff should be united visually from the very beginning and 'golden section' has to be presented as a visual support for beginner's focus.

Hope, the video would help you to understand my poor English:

[musicrebel4u]

Please, read my last post

[keypeg]

Keypeg, thanks for illustrating your own musical beginnings in more detail. It is of interest to me that you were introduced to moveable doh, and feel that this gave you a nice uncomplicated introduction. (...You say this enabled you to perceive patterns of notes both aurally and visually, and that you would adjust to a sharp or flat if it sounded wrong. ... Can you say that you are really "reading" the notation if you do this though? You are partially reading it, then "guessing" when something sounds wrong.

You are right, I was not really reading, and I've rectified it since.  It's been quite a journey.

[keypeg]

All the written languages on Earth are linear, because human's speech is a one-voice production. Grand Staff – is a unit of multiple tracks designed for music language of multiple sounds. When music is sounding in real time,  the sounds are having 2 physical essential parameters – pitch and timing and these parameters cross vertically. But this 'golden section' is not presented in music notation and unprepared human eye is unable to see the 'golden section', because each voice of music language is dispersed all over the Grand Staff.

I was actually asking about the eye because of your previous post featuring sight, and wondered if there was a connection.  In regards to what you are saying, doesn't the grand staff represent both, in that time is represented linearly, and pitch is represented vertically so that in a sense we do see both aspects at once?  I am at a disadvantage at the moment in regards to your system and the videos, since my present computer doesn't allow sound momentarily.  Once that is fixed it will be interesting to hear and see how your ideas are translated into the system.

Hope, the video would help you to understand my poor English:

No poor English noted.  For the explanation, Спасиба!