Notation Must Die: The Battle For How We Read Music

If you want an excellent explanation of why proposals for new notation systems like you’re suggesting have been developed (and failed) Tantacrul has made an excellent video describing the history and tradeoffs that lead us to our current system: ▶ this video He’s product lead at MuseGroup developing notation software and his expertise lies at the intersection of music composition, UX design, and programming.

Pro jazz trombonist here. All there is to usefully say about piano roll notation, with or without colours has pretty much already been said. And if you want more (much more) detail, then Tantacrul (designer on MuseScore) has done a great video. ▶ this video The only useful head's up I can give is the current position marker on your playback is quite a long way behind the audio, around 1-2 beats on the one piece I tried.

There’s some previous work from the 1800s and earlier that feels relevant, especially Farbige Noten, which mapped notes to colors as a novel notation method. There’s a short segment dedicated to it at 1h5m ▶ this video

Super cool, great job. Looks like a really fun project. This really highlights why sheet notation is so much better at describing music than tablature. The advantage of tabs is that they tell you which version of the same note to play (You can play the same note in up to 6 places in the guitar). However, sheet notation tells you precisely the duration of each note, and can often include the intended articulation. Writing music is fascinating, here is an excellent breakdown of different systems which have been developed, and how they came to be: ▶ this video

Obligatory (long-form) watch if you're going to continue wondering about this: ▶ this video "Notation must die" by Tantacrul

▶ this video "Notation Must Die" ... excellent deep-ish dive into music notation by the inimitable Tantacrul

The problem is that once you get past the very initial stage, you want to read ahead of what you play at the moment. At that moment Synthesia-style falling blocks notation becomes difficult to read because the blocks don't have any position reference besides the keys and no time values. Even the scrolling sheet music or tab is distracting compared stationary black and white. With guitar there's the additional problem that you can't see both hands at the same time, and usually you won't be looking at your hands at all. And if you ever want to play without help from the app, you need to learn to find the notes anyway. This is by the way a great explanation of all the attempts to make music easier to read and how they fail: ▶ this video

In this video he speaks about piano rolls at large: ▶ this video The tl;dw is that piano rolls are intuitive to some degree but are inefficient at presenting information that musicians are interested in.

I watched it before and the thing that I will forever remember from it was the "jubilate": ▶ this video

I really like the points about symbols to the end, but am not sure the Music notation hits the right note. The symbols - besides Quarter note - for a rest/not playing are intuitive to almost every learner. They are just so different, so square, so alien compared to the notes in melody, that you don't make the mistake of playing a rest note in general. Yes, it's hard to learn the symbols that involve playing something (especially clefs and timing not being linear - see: ▶ this video for an amazing "documentary" on notation systems), but often finding the pitch/right note is the larger challenge (for beginners) than understanding the meaning of notes. Is this because we do not teach people to play songs with only one note, but many rhythms? I don't know. But I do not think the point of affordances in notation is a great example, especially given all the alternatives (see the video above) which, although in some cases clearer (e.g. a instrument-morphic notation), struggle in other ways (too much space used, too unable to represent timing, not transferrable between instruments, etc). The reality is also that our mind can adapt easily in such distinct systems as music notation to shifted realities. Sheet music for different instruments sometimes uses the same clefs, bars and all, but is several notes a part (eg... the music of Violin and Viola are notated differently, such that the notes of the respective instruments more or less span the whole bar without going too far above or below