It's pretty clear the person(s) who created this is/are not (a) very proficient musician(s).
The current notation has been in use for hundreds of years because it works. The notes are large, bold, and easy to recognize and also easy to write. Memorizing GBDFA, EGBDF, ACEG, and FACE is not that difficult.
This new notation has many egregious flaws. Removing the key signature is one of them. Not only does the key signature allow for instant recognition of the pitch and tones used and a general idea of what the piece should sound like, but it also makes writing sheets that much easier for arrangers and composers.
Second, who thought it was a good idea to replace the accidental signs with squiggly marks? A huge step down in usability, I'm afraid. Maybe in sevenths and chords with very close note spacing, but unless you're playing Death Waltz, it is not a problem (usually).
Also, the Consumer Reports-esque notes are also distracting and don't serve any purpose. If I saw what is an "E" on this note, I would play it for 4 beats -- that is, assuming that this is in x/4 time. It's more confusing for longtime music readers than musicians, but it would still throw off many, I'd guess. At any rate, however, if you can't memorize the staff lines and spaces, you aren't a musician. Period.
The uselessness of this notation is compounded by the fact that practically no instructor will be willing to give up a notation that has been in use their entire life, and also for centuries.
Do I see this being successful? Maybe, in small circles (no pun intended). But the harsh truth is that the current notation is easier to write, easier to read, and more efficient.
I'm not going to comment on their musical abilities but I noticed their pain points were common pain points that students have.
Perhaps not surprisingly its similar when you learn a foreign language, for a while you see a word, translate it into your native language, and then understand it. But once you "get it" or reach a certain level of fluency, you read the word and you just know what it means.
When I started playing Trombone I would see a note in the stave and count lines or spaces to figure out what note it was, and then play that note on my instrument. There were actually two translations going on, one from music to note 'name' and then from note 'name' to instrument configuration. At some point however it changed and I stopped seeing a 'B' or an 'A' or a 'C' and instead saw instrument positions (and alternates) so that playing stopped being a translation exercise and simply became execution.
The other interesting thing is that looking at the sheet music I heard music. And that was when everything clicked together because initially I could play things "by ear" by recreating the same sounds in my instrument that my ear was hearing, and now my eyes would see the music, my ears would "hear" it, and my fingers would make it real. Notation stopped being an issue until I tried to play keyboards :-)
Funny I know plenty of proficient musicians who can't read music at all. I don't disagree with what you are saying per sey but saying the creators can't be good musicians because they want to try a new approach to teach music feels awfully elitist.
They are only "proficient" in a very limited sense, then. I'm sure we can argue semantics here, but a musician needs to understand the concepts that govern music. And these concepts can only be understood and visualised by using notation.
The circle of fifth, musical modes and any advanced form of transposition, alongside the basic theory involved in cords, their components and their succession are necessary for a musician. [1]
Technical proficiency does not make you a musician, just like being able to type really well doesn't make you a programmer if you can't...read code.
[1]: This may not apply for percussionists, but even there, playing together with others necessitates the same understanding.
> And these concepts can only be understood and visualised by using notation.
That's not true at all. One can have a deep understanding of all the elements of music you mentioned without knowing any traditional notation. Maybe it's understood in terms of modular arithmetic and fractions and visualized as such, or visualized in terms of a piano or an abstract spiral structure or not even visualized at all. Traditional notation is only one possible representation (an a fairly arcane one at that); others are certainly possible and don't preclude deep understanding.
I am well aware that Western notation is not the only one, however, I cannot see how music theory works without any notation. Whatever form of notation you choose to encode information in will still have to be decoded, i.e. read. The reason why some notations have been more durable than others is the relative amount of information that can be stored.
Tabs for guitar and bass are just one example of a deficient mode of notation, since they cannot provide all information necessary to play something.
If you want to forego all notation, however, understanding theory becomes even harder than with a deficient notation. For that, you'd have to solely rely on somebody's ear in order to explain roots, scales and afterwards more complex topics. The only other option is teaching visually, which ist somewhat possible with a guitar, and somewhat possible with a piano, but is not transferable to another instrument afterwards.
All forms of notation are deficient. If you want proof, just listen to a muzak (elevator music) cover of your favorite pop song. It is correct according to a professional transcriber's notation, but it loses nuances and imperfections that classical music notation doesn't cover.
You are right that tablature by nature does not cover rhythm and that is a gap that won't even get you to muzak. However, there is nothing about classical music notation that makes it an ideal form for representing all forms of musical sound. How would you notate a Jay-Z or Skillrex song?
those are actually pretty easy. The only issue with skrillex would be identifying an instrument to play the notes, but other than that he's low on the polyphony scale (pun intended).
When I clicked this I was hoping for a notation that describes midi values against timbre (filters, distortion etc), and blends it with traditional notation, I think that is a missing link between old and new - but rewriting accepted notation for generations? That's like replacing a-Z with some sort of base 26 number and saying its easier to learn.
I was hoping for a notation that describes midi values against timbre
Dream on. You could show controller automation lanes as digital audio workstations do, but those are only as informative as they are consistent with some scheme like General MIDI and a standard sound architecture. Once you start resampling or using modular routings any kind of timbral notation schema goes out the window.
I've seen attempts at this, and if you email I'll try and dig you out a reference but the particular book I'm thinking of is in a box in my attic right now. However I can't say I've found them very informative. When I think about timbre I think about the whole synth architecture and program it in my head, for many timbral ideas it's just a matter of walking up to the synth later and dialing it in.
Most electronic musicians stick with simple diatonic scales or within modes, at most switching in and out of relative minor. Harmonic complexity and timbral complexity don't go very well together.
I would absolutely love if you could post the reference of this book here - and I'm sure a couple of other folks would as well! It sounds quite interesting. Thanks a bunch.
I went up and had a look, but haven't turned it up yet. I'm supposed to be getting new shelves in the next week or so and getting all those books up onto them, so I'll keep an eye out.
> They are only "proficient" in a very limited sense, then. I'm sure we can argue semantics here, but a musician needs to understand the concepts that govern music. And these concepts can only be understood and visualised by using notation.
That's pretty narrow. Some people aren't visual thinkers and don't need to see something on the written page to understand it. I personally know several musicians who have a deep understanding of music theory, but don't read music. You can explain and understand modes, transposition, chords, etc without having to write it down.
> I personally know several musicians who have a deep understanding of music theory, but don't read music
"don't" or "can't" read music? I think this is a critical distinction. If the answer is the latter I would still argue that they cannot have a deep understanding of music theory, since a major component of music theory is generally accepted to involve understanding notation.
Edit: I can accept that there are many aspects to music theory that go beyond just notation, but I am skeptical of 'deep understanding'.
So would you consider the various blind musicians (such as Ray Charles) not real musicians? After all they can't read music.
Edit: I do otherwise agree with you that a full musician should understand much of the theory of music, and not just be able to repeat a group of notes that they heard (that is, they should be more than just a human tape recorder).
That is very wrong... You are implying that the concept of music can only be understood through theory and knowledge of the musical notation. And that's just plain wrong because there has been thousands of famous musicians who cannot read music.
One doesn't need to know musical notation to understand any of those ideas. Related, one can learn how to read music and never learn any of that stuff.
You can understand music without being able to read music. I know a fairly famous guitarist who can tell you all about voicings, harmonization, and any other bit of music theory you'd care to know about. He uses all this to write and improvise music. You put a piece of music in front of him and he'll take five minutes to figure it out. He'll be counting lines and spaces and humming notes to do that.
Technically it is "reading music", but it's so slow that learning a piece takes much longer than it should. Over the years I've had a couple motivational spurts where I felt like playing piano again, and lack of frequent exposure to sheet music slowed my reading skills down to a crawl.
Reading music is the ability to look at a line of music and being able to hear it in your head, or at the very least play it back almost immediately on the instrument of your choice. My buddy's music "reading" ability is more on the order of a kid who doesn't really read but knows a few words. He's effectively illiterate, but he's not stupid and can figure it out with difficulty.
You confusing musicianship with musicology. I'm a better musicologist than I am a musician (which is to say I understand music theory quite a bit better than I can play it), and I really think your claim that 'these concepts can only be understood and visualized by using notation' is utter bullshit.
Musicians are not composers. Who cares if they can run scales if they dont know how read/write music. That's like memorizing Numa numa and not speaking the language.
> The current notation has been in use for hundreds of years because it works.
It is not necessarily just because "it works". Learning conventional music notation is optimal only in the same sense as learning a conventional language is optimal - i.e. it lets you communicate. That it is convention is more important than "it works". The human brain is adaptable enough to learn strange things like touch typing on a QWERTY keyboard.
Very much this. Tradition is a terrible way to measure something's merits. And even if it did 'work', that's no reason to not try and improve it (though, I'd agree that just throwing something out there that might fragment things isn't terribly helpful either).
There are some good things about traditional sheet music notation, but that doesn't take away the fact that it's bloated with historical baggage. It's really not terribly efficient at communicating the 'essence' of music, it's just that we've all gotten used to translating piano notation into practical [insert_your_instrument_here] implementation in our heads. It's neither a useful 'source code' for other instruments to interpret, nor is it an efficient 'byte code' to describe the fundamental elements of music.
That's not to say that I have a solution to these problems of course (yet -- been working on my own project for a while that will eventually try to address this), but the issues aren't hard to spot, and they certainly seem like areas that can be optimized. And there will always be the problem of adoption, but I don't think that's even an argument we should bother raising until somebody proposes either a system that's either truly an upgrade, or a system that starts getting so much traction and starts fracturing music notation without any added benefit.
Personally, I sympathize with the aims of this project here, and think some of the ideas are clever, but considering how many things it changes, I don't think it really adds much efficiency when parsing/writing it in return. It actually strikes me as odd why they wouldn't just move to a chromatic grid system if they were getting rid of key signatures, that way they'd just eliminate accidentals all together -- or if not, then just combine them into one, since the key is a big reason for why they even have 2 designations in the first place. Which brings up the point that those symbols are all really quite complicated to be able to parse very quickly; the controversial 'note names' especially, but the accidentals really did not have much of a reason to be changed other than to just look 'fancier' -- which just makes them harder to parse, and to draw (IMO, but I have terrible hand writing).
Oh well, I wish them the best anyway. This isn't a terribly progressive field so I'm just glad to see anything happening.
I couldn't tell; is the key-signature completely elided in favor of putting explicit sharp/flats on all the notes? If so, it's a huge fail, as I play the clarinet, and regularly have to sight-read oboe parts, which means transposing.
This means that accidentals need to be distinct from sharps/flats in the key-signature, and in particular an explicit natural on deviations from the key signature is also helpful.
> The current notation has been in use for hundreds of years because it works.
But it doesn't. And that's why tablature notation is far and away more widely used these days. Old-style musical notation is horribly designed and is gradually dying a natural death.
The current notation has been in use for hundreds of years because it works. The notes are large, bold, and easy to recognize and also easy to write. Memorizing GBDFA, EGBDF, ACEG, and FACE is not that difficult.
This new notation has many egregious flaws. Removing the key signature is one of them. Not only does the key signature allow for instant recognition of the pitch and tones used and a general idea of what the piece should sound like, but it also makes writing sheets that much easier for arrangers and composers.
Second, who thought it was a good idea to replace the accidental signs with squiggly marks? A huge step down in usability, I'm afraid. Maybe in sevenths and chords with very close note spacing, but unless you're playing Death Waltz, it is not a problem (usually).
Also, the Consumer Reports-esque notes are also distracting and don't serve any purpose. If I saw what is an "E" on this note, I would play it for 4 beats -- that is, assuming that this is in x/4 time. It's more confusing for longtime music readers than musicians, but it would still throw off many, I'd guess. At any rate, however, if you can't memorize the staff lines and spaces, you aren't a musician. Period.
The uselessness of this notation is compounded by the fact that practically no instructor will be willing to give up a notation that has been in use their entire life, and also for centuries.
Do I see this being successful? Maybe, in small circles (no pun intended). But the harsh truth is that the current notation is easier to write, easier to read, and more efficient.
Case closed.