Quote:
Originally Posted by brainwreck
How about time notation? Is there real benefit to using differing noteheads, flags, and dots vs. more directly using numbers to notate time divisions?
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The origin of typesetting features of notes has more to do with ink quills than anything else. The notation for quarter-note-rest being the difficult squiggle that it is, is because the ink quill makes that pattern with a wrist motion(*). The use of dots is from the ease in making ovals (they're not supposed to be circular).
(*) and it's different in France
Therefore staff music today is essentially limited in functionality because some monk had to sit in a cavern hand-writing with an ink quill. A completely outdated system. Music has not caught up with modern typesetting, fonts, graphical user interfaces, etc.
Note stems have a variety of ad hoc rules defined by player preference for speed of reading. Groupings, stem direction, flags. It is a notational system which evolved yet still has many ingrained kludges. Ask any drummer!