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Old 08-15-2019, 12:13 PM   #1
superblonde.org
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Default How to revamp the ancient music notation and music theory system which is flawed?

Music notation is terrible to understand and confusing (eight note names A,B,C,..., sharps, flats, use of roman numerals in capitals and lowercase, numerals 1,2,3,.. for scale degree and/or chord number). It seems to exist in its present state because musicians themselves are too overwhelmed with practice & performance to improve the system. The current notation system overtook the few competing systems pretty much because other cultures didn't write music down and then through the western church which destroyed everything else. Music theory is limited to describing music within the outmoded notation system, so music theory is terrible too. It's no wonder that most musicians choose to remain musically illiterate, it's easier to play "what sounds good" than try to understand the terrible system.

* Note I'm completely ignoring staff notation because that is a whole other set of pictograph problems in time (how to indicate simultaneous notes and how to indicate rhythm). When I say music notation, I'm just talking about written notation for theory and composition, I'm not talking about notation for real-time reading during a performance, although there is some overlap of usage, since charts contain both staff music and chord names, etc.

In software languages and software notation (aka markup), there have been hundreds of languages and language systems, it is a constant state of improvement, the language systems have unique benefits and drawbacks and those systems which have more drawbacks than benefits are quickly abandoned, with the benefits morphed into the next new language. Imagine if everyone were forced to program in original IBM BASIC for the entire duration of humanity. Yuck. This is really, really obvious problem to computer programmers who immediately fix the problem by creating new systems to fit the purpose (Microcode to Assembly to BASIC to PASCAL to C to NextStep Objective C to Java to Python etc etc, plus on the scientific side, LISP to MATLAB to R etc, etc, plus on the engineering side, various CAD basic-like script, boolean languages ABEL, VHDL, etc etc). One test of the usefulness of a software language being: can a compiler be developed in the language and then compile itself. Another test of the usefulness of a software language being: how does it physically look, how simple, how elegant is it, to write the most basic program which simply prints "hello world" on the screen, does it take a million confusing symbols or does it only take four short human-readable lines.


In music notation, the current system developed for church music, with only two modes (major and minor), is now extended to jazz and modal music so my charts are a mess of "EbMajb5#11/B" or something - what the actual?? If there were ever a sign that a system should be discarded, that is it ! Why wouldn't this chord be indicated with a single letter or digit and a single token modifier, if the notation system were sound and free of most exceptions, for example: "9w"


The idea that the music notation is terrible seems horrifying to musicians (who say either, "meh who cares I just play what sounds good," or, "Don't mess with what I have because it took me 4 years to learn this and I don't want to change my charts") and entrenched academics (who say, "don't you dare threaten my elitism by proposing something more understandable by the public where I can't continue to pretend to be the rare in-demand expert"). "Don't mess with tradition!" Therefore the result is a non-productive flamewar circular argument which goes nowhere. I am not much interested in nonsensical arguments on why a malfunctioning system should be kept. The current western music system for 99% of the music made today is dramatically flawed. If you don't like the discussion then opt out of it. It's also not productive to bring up edge cases like microtones which the majority of musicians don't use today and 99% of music theory is not concerned with.


At rehearsal, the musician says, "Play the five." That is really ambiguous and depends on a lot of context. Does it mean the fifth note in the scale? Or does it mean the fifth chord in the scale, and if so, what mode of the chord, what form of the chord? So the musician says, "I mean, play the dominant." That's not much better. Then the musician says, "I mean, play the second inversion F major no five." Wait, play the five but play no five? It's no wonder that musicians completely give up on verbally describing anything about music in the broken system: "Shuddup and play, you'll hear it."


What are the replacements to current musical notation? Here are a few alternates but they are not complete systems either. What are the others? Who is working on this?


1. ABC notation. This was developed on USENET decades ago for typing and sharing non-copyright melodies, archiving them, transposing them, and running computer analysis on them. It uses note letters and apostrophies for octave (a''', b''', ..., a', b', ... A, B, C, ...). The language is strict and has software error correction. It is compilable. The drawback is that it still uses base-8 (8 letter names). I dont believe this system has chords. It is for single-line melodies only.


2. Dozenal. There are 12 notes so the notation system should use 12 unique tokens (not just 8 like A,B,C..). There are base-12 notations very loosely discussed. Consider how well hexadecimal math works with computers which are base-2 extended to base-16 (0 1..9 A B C D E F). Music using base-12 would use twelve tokens (0 1..9 T Q) to represent the 12 notes in music. What remains is how to describe chords, scale degrees, etc.



3. MIDI note numbers & messages. This isnt great for humans. But all notes are given their own digits, with middle C being 60, so sharps and flats are eliminated. This isn't great for readability since humans reading or writing a string of multiple digits is difficult ("60 62 65 67"). No musician is going to say, "The melody goes, sixty sixty-seven sixty-two sixty-five sixty".


4. There's some neo-musical methods from the 50s onward using graphical techniques and matrixes (tone rows etc). I have seen a little of this but don't know much about these - other than they can be very fast to write new music after choosing the desired scale, etc. The trouble with using a matrix or diagram is that it is hard to quickly talk about. The difficulty could be compared to describing how to play a Novation matrix instrument.

5. Solfege - is a system used by vocalists for scale degrees of melody, often as the primary music theory known by a vocalist; in these cases there's no "A, B, C, .." only the solfege syllables, of which there are two incompatible subsystems used in different "schools of music", relative pitch and fixed pitch.

6. Nashville Number System - is a popular chord charting system which allows easy transposition and does not rely on the traditional note alphabet nor does it use fixed pitch. For example, "C=1, D=2, E=3, F=4, G=5, A=6, B=7. In the key of B♭, the numbers would be B♭=1, C=2, D=3, E♭=4, F=5, G=6, A=7." As this is an industry-used system (vs. academic/theorist-made system), it has minor variations to it, although it sounds like it has become more standardized over time. Most importantly it does use relative pitches successfully and specific players seem to prefer it. But as far as I know this is not a complete music system, it is intended for chord charts similar to jazz charts, not complex harmony description etc.


What others are there? It is surprisingly rare to find alternative systems.


Personally I have thought that a truly great system would incorporate both the musical note tuning ratios as well as use base-12, while still allowing a single token (letter or number) to be used for chord names and a single other token for a modifier (mode type or etc).

Great composers have proposed some systems since about the 1950's, such as the below.

Music set theory with 12-tone integer notation





Last edited by superblonde.org; 08-24-2020 at 01:19 PM. Reason: add solfege system, add nashville system, 12 tone text, update image links
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Old 08-15-2019, 02:19 PM   #2
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And this has what to do with Reaper?

Dude, if you don't want to learn the language of reading music, don't do it. Tons of good players can't read a note. Sounds to me you may be ashamed that you don't know some things. It's fine, there's nothing wrong with asking questions.
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Old 08-15-2019, 03:04 PM   #3
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Ha ha. Been there in the frustrations of the standard music notation system.

Designing out the bad parts isn't such an easy thing. Try it. Really. It's the only way that you will better understand the good and bad parts of standard music notation and what are some of the problems in designing a new notation system.

Someone on the forum actually came up with an alternative notation system to midi that is written in plain text. It's pretty good too.

Maybe the biggest problem in coming up with a new notation system is general lack of interest. Either people don't see the problems with it (the 'Everything is wonderful; quit whining' culture), or approaching coming up with something better seems like too much effort. So if you have a go at it, expect to do it alone with no real constructive external input. And irrationally, some people won't want you to even try to come up with a new system.
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Old 08-15-2019, 03:31 PM   #4
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Do you understand why 7 letters are used? If you try and design a new system, you most likely will find out why.
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Old 08-15-2019, 03:34 PM   #5
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The above mentioned alternative notation system.
https://forum.cockos.com/showthread....light=notation

There are other systems. I'm not at my desk right now though.
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Old 08-15-2019, 03:48 PM   #6
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Hmm the Tbon system is interesting. I see it uses letters and a fixed (predetermined) key.

Using numbers with 0=tonic would allow for relative pitch study by default, with base-12 math easily allowing transposition. There is no urgent requirement for assign notes to pitch until playing on a real instrument or software synth, by that I mean: the notation system and theory system can be separate from the "playing system"
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Old 08-15-2019, 04:08 PM   #7
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Yep, 'systems' can be separate, but that throws out a major benefit of standard music (it is universal....sort of).
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Old 08-15-2019, 04:18 PM   #8
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Standard notation is actually pretty easy to read (in real time and for theoretical analysis) and very logical once you understand it.

Trying to come up with an equally useful alternative will be much more difficult than you realize.
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Old 08-15-2019, 05:14 PM   #9
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Hi, superblonde.org
Please, let me remind you that because of the nature chords and intervals are structured, more often you would be using their so called Inversions.
Those are not quite clear in any Music Notation (and because we are not talking aout the Music Staff, more correct term would be - Music Nomenclature) I have seen... except in the one I have created. It is called Pashkuli Music Notation (PNS or Plain Music Notation), also includes "staff" (but not in the way you might think of it). Please, see the images at the end of the post.

Also,
It is not only the Music Nomenclatutre (originally based on a church psalm "Sancte Ioannes", etc.) → Do, Re, Mi, Fa... following the corresponding syllables over the respective notes from the chant.
So we would have had... D, R, M, F...
The Western (modern) nomenclature of A, B, C... and so on is based on the simple Latin alphabet order of its letters. Why is A assigned to its corresponding key on the piano, you might ask?!



Can you see? The Piano Keyboard is also wrong and badly designed. I tried to fix that as well. Please, see the images at the end of the post.

Well, on a standard grand piano the actual first key far left maybe had been assigned to... the first letter of the alphabet... (also matches the layout of the first short range harpsichords at that time)

Music Alphabets around the world
The VI-century philosopher Boethius is known to have used the first fourteen letters of the classical Latin (Roman) alphabet (the letter J did not exist until the 16th century):
A B C D E F G H I K L M N O
... although, Claudius Ptolemy (the astronomer) had the system applied centuries before Boethius, which had more traditional (at that time) approach of naming all the notes!

Pythagoras (the ancient philosopher and founder of the Just Intonation) had completely different names for the 12 notes and each one was unique.

Pashkuli Notation System (Plain Notation System)










Pashkuli Keyboard















The subject is HUGE!


---------------------------------------------------------
Pashkuli Keyboard on Youtube

Pashkuli Keyboard on Instagram

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Old 08-15-2019, 06:01 PM   #10
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Can you see? The Piano Keyboard is also wrong and badly designed.
This is great! i'll study it in detail. The idea of a clef note to indicate mode (is that right?) is very interesting. I'll have to look closely at how the chords are represented.

The piano is "off" for sure. Although the systems developed somewhat together, the music world is stuck with a lot of awkward piano-centric thinking. Middle C, being considered the center, while the musical alphabet starts with A.


I have been comparing alternative systems to see which allows for easier and closer-to-nature description of the music (nature does not care about # or b), and maybe a system which allows for built-in transposing due to base-12 (making it a relative pitch system, instead of absolute pitch).

Yours is a complete system with new staff and a new instrument. The important question is, what specific primary goals were you trying to solve in the new system? Was it to have a new means of performance? Or a faster way to learn (or teach) music?
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Old 08-15-2019, 10:27 PM   #11
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Do you understand why 7 letters are used? If you try and design a new system, you most likely will find out why.
there's many explanations as to why, i'm not sure which one you're suggesting, maybe you could explain in 1-2 sentences?

There have been musical systems with 11 (or 12?) unique letters instead of 7 ...

Solfege has multiple sets of nomenclature, there's the main 7 tokens (Do Re Mi ..), but there's also the chromatic ascending 11 (Do Ri Re Mi ...) and the descending 11 (ahhh I forget, its late nite) - only some notes of which vary between ascending and descending, essentially equivalents of calling out sharp or flat. So there are two different ways of naming all 12 notes or the main 8 notes. And that's just for relative solfege, it gets into another convention completely for absolute solfege. Many trained-amateur vocalists don't ever learn music notation or theory at all, they start with solfege and that's all they ever do, because they find it toooo confusing (or something).
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Old 08-15-2019, 11:28 PM   #12
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Originally Posted by superblonde.org View Post
there's many explanations as to why, i'm not sure which one you're suggesting, maybe you could explain in 1-2 sentences?

There have been musical systems with 11 (or 12?) unique letters instead of 7 ...

Solfege has multiple sets of nomenclature, there's the main 7 tokens (Do Re Mi ..), but there's also the chromatic ascending 11 (Do Ri Re Mi ...) and the descending 11 (ahhh I forget, its late nite) - only some notes of which vary between ascending and descending, essentially equivalents of calling out sharp or flat. So there are two different ways of naming all 12 notes or the main 8 notes. And that's just for relative solfege, it gets into another convention completely for absolute solfege. Many trained-amateur vocalists don't ever learn music notation or theory at all, they start with solfege and that's all they ever do, because they find it toooo confusing (or something).
It is because standard notation represents western music, which is diatonic. And standard music is absolute pitch, not relative. If you use 12 letters (or other symbols) instead of 7, the key spellings and notation becomes even more complex than standard notation.

The only practical way to reduce the complexity (that I can see) is to use a relative pitch system. But when it comes time to implement those ideas (being discussed within a relative pitch system) in an absolute pitch system, things get more complex again. And now you have two systems: a simpler relative pitch system, a more complex absolute pitch system, and a translation between the two. Has the complexity problem been addressed or made worse?

One thing about standard notation is that it is very efficient. I guess paper was a major concern before industrialization and mass production. And I guess that is a tradeoff for more difficult legibility. We can get something of a one-line or two-line system that is easier to look at. But is it easier to read?
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Old 08-15-2019, 11:39 PM   #13
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It is because standard notation represents western music, which is diatonic. And standard music is absolute pitch, not relative. If you use 12 letters (or other symbols) instead of 7, the key spellings and notation becomes even more complex than standard notation.
parts of music are chromatic, jazz especially. so, abbreviate the system down to base-8 which means the chromatic aspects need special modifiers, or make the system base-12 which forces all notes to be written as the notes they are, without modifiers? That is a tradeoff, yes. Removing the need to indicate sharps & flats is desirable, for sure.

Whether that means "even more complex" is debatable. Does increasing english vocabulary make sentences "more complex" or does it make them less complex yet more descriptive & precise?

Removing the emphasis and terminology for major vs. minor is also desirable. There should be just modes, with the zeroeth mode being the default mode (for example ionian). The theory emphasis on major vs. minor is archaic and obsolete.
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Old 08-19-2019, 01:08 PM   #14
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At rehearsal, the musician says, "Play the five." That is really ambiguous and depends on a lot of context.
But I would say that if well communicated by the speaker, the context has always, when I've been present, made it not ambiguous. It depends on the context, but then the context serves to prevent ambiguousness.

I get what you're saying, and I do appreciate the desire to not stick with old language for a purpose it doesn't serve well. But I'm more or less in the camp that in the hands of good communicators there are far less issues than with a perfect language in the hands of less good communicators. When I'm with people who can express themselves well there's rarely any problems in musical communication, especially given that context is king.

If we beat into the heads of people how to convey the music clearly it may be better than changing the language so that the poor conveyers can keep trashing its revised form into submission.

Or maybe not.
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Old 08-19-2019, 01:53 PM   #15
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Originally Posted by vdubreeze
If we beat into the heads of people how to convey the music clearly, it may be better than changing the language.

Or maybe not.
So, what is the problem of learning to speak and understand at least one other language (I do it with 4).
Ah, time and dedication... and first of all - a will to do it (or maybe a lack of need).
Different paths of life, I guess. Why would you solve a problem, if you can not see the problem?!
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Old 08-19-2019, 02:20 PM   #16
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So, what is the problem of learning to speak and understand at least one other language (I do it with 4).
Ah, time and dedication... and first of all - a will to do it (or maybe a lack of need).
Different paths of life, I guess. Why would you solve a problem, if you can not see the problem?!
In addition to your ability and willingness to "speak" and "read" this new language, you'll have to convince the music-making public at large to do the same.

And then you'll have to convince software developers that it's worth their time to abandon what they've been doing for years to adapt to your new methodology.

And then you'll have to convince the publishers of sheet music to convert all of their existing material to this new methodology.

And then... well, you get the idea.

Even if there's a consensus among the REAPER community about a wonderful new way of communicating music as a language, there's going to be a huge uphill climb before it's accepted by the musical community at large, especially if you're going to go so far as to have a new naming scheme for chords, etc.

That's not to say you shouldn't be pursuing this a an intellectual exercise. It's been an interesting conversation to date and something interesting is bound to come out of it. But it's difficult to see this as anything that will go past these conversations.

If that makes me a Luddite or a naysayer, then so be it. In the meantime, think back on the previous comments made by others about the lack of adoption of Esperanto and (at least in the US) the metric system.
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Old 08-19-2019, 02:39 PM   #17
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In the meantime, think back on the previous comments made by others about the lack of adoption of Esperanto and (at least in the US) the metric system.
Maybe there is some kind of misunderstanding that my involvment to this thread or the OP is... to trying to convince someone to accept or convert their opinion about something.

Me, personally, I've got no time for that. I prefer making music, playing, doing CAD, friends, family, etc. That is why there is Internet - to share. As the eastern wisdom says...
"When the student is ready, the Master will come".
or
"Master, how long do we have to wait for the change to come?
If you wait, it will take a long time."


I see a problem. I solve it. Done. No time to wait.

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Old 08-19-2019, 03:07 PM   #18
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I see a problem. I solve it. Done. No time to wait.
So what's the best-case outcome of this discussion?
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Old 08-19-2019, 03:23 PM   #19
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Quote:
Originally Posted by tls11823
So what's the best-case outcome of this discussion?
Quote:
Originally Posted by adXok
That is why there is Internet - to share.
Share opinions, ideas... things you may not find in search engines every day prior to the publications in question.

Btw, Esperanto is not a good example, because it was a mixture, an amalgam of languages... a linguistic Frankenstein, if you will. It was not a new language, rather an attempt at unified language to please much more nations. (If you want to please everybody, you won't be able to please even a single person.)
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Old 08-19-2019, 09:47 PM   #20
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you'll have to convince the music-making public at large to do the same.
no one has to do any such thing. if you dont like it: bye.
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Old 08-20-2019, 07:02 AM   #21
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no one has to do any such thing. if you dont like it: bye.
So you're saying that you're going to come up with a new "standard" for notating music, but you don't care if anybody else uses it? So what then is the point, other than as an intellectual exercise?
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Old 08-19-2019, 03:26 PM   #22
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But I would say that if well communicated by the speaker, the context has always, when I've been present, made it not ambiguous. It depends on the context, but then the context serves to prevent ambiguousness.
The point here is that the language and notation itself should not be ambiguous. If possible and practical, it should transcend context. On that point specifically, I agree with AdXok on a 12 tone naming system. But I think there are other things to consider and weigh.
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Old 08-19-2019, 08:36 PM   #23
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I suppose this thread has about ran it's course. Thanks for all the discussion though. It's an oddly interesting topic.
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Old 08-20-2019, 02:22 PM   #24
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if well communicated by the speaker, the context has always, when I've been present, made it not ambiguous.

the five contains the four
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Old 09-06-2019, 09:14 AM   #25
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The OP, which I quote in full :

Quote:
Originally Posted by superblonde.org View Post
Music notation is terrible to understand and confusing (eight note names A,B,C,..., sharps, flats, use of roman numerals in capitals and lowercase, numerals 1,2,3,.. for scale degree and/or chord number). It seems to exist in its present state because musicians themselves are too overwhelmed with practice & performance to improve the system. The current notation system overtook the few competing systems pretty much because other cultures didn't write music down and then through the western church which destroyed everything else. Music theory is limited to describing music within the outmoded notation system, so music theory is terrible too. It's no wonder that most musicians choose to remain musically illiterate, it's easier to play "what sounds good" than try to understand the terrible system.

* Note I'm completely ignoring staff notation because that is a whole other set of pictograph problems in time (how to indicate simultaneous notes and how to indicate rhythm). When I say music notation, I'm just talking about written notation for theory and composition, I'm not talking about notation for real-time reading during a performance, although there is some overlap of usage, since charts contain both staff music and chord names, etc.

In software languages and software notation (aka markup), there have been hundreds of languages and language systems, it is a constant state of improvement, the language systems have unique benefits and drawbacks and those systems which have more drawbacks than benefits are quickly abandoned, with the benefits morphed into the next new language. Imagine if everyone were forced to program in original IBM BASIC for the entire duration of humanity. Yuck. This is really, really obvious problem to computer programmers who immediately fix the problem by creating new systems to fit the purpose (Microcode to Assembly to BASIC to PASCAL to C to NextStep Objective C to Java to Python etc etc, plus on the scientific side, LISP to MATLAB to R etc, etc, plus on the engineering side, various CAD basic-like script, boolean languages ABEL, VHDL, etc etc). One test of the usefulness of a software language being: can a compiler be developed in the language and then compile itself. Another test of the usefulness of a software language being: how does it physically look, how simple, how elegant is it, to write the most basic program which simply prints "hello world" on the screen, does it take a million confusing symbols or does it only take four short human-readable lines.


In music notation, the current system developed for church music, with only two modes (major and minor), is now extended to jazz and modal music so my charts are a mess of "EbMajb5#11/B" or something - what the actual?? If there were ever a sign that a system should be discarded, that is it ! Why wouldn't this chord be indicated with a single letter or digit and a single token modifier, if the notation system were sound and free of most exceptions, for example: "9w"


The idea that the music notation is terrible seems horrifying to musicians (who say either, "meh who cares I just play what sounds good," or, "Don't mess with what I have because it took me 4 years to learn this and I don't want to change my charts") and entrenched academics (who say, "don't you dare threaten my elitism by proposing something more understandable by the public where I can't continue to pretend to be the rare in-demand expert"). "Don't mess with tradition!" Therefore the result is a non-productive flamewar circular argument which goes nowhere. I am not much interested in nonsensical arguments on why a malfunctioning system should be kept. The current western music system for 99% of the music made today is dramatically flawed. If you don't like the discussion then opt out of it. It's also not productive to bring up edge cases like microtones which the majority of musicians don't use today and 99% of music theory is not concerned with.


At rehearsal, the musician says, "Play the five." That is really ambiguous and depends on a lot of context. Does it mean the fifth note in the scale? Or does it mean the fifth chord in the scale, and if so, what mode of the chord, what form of the chord? So the musician says, "I mean, play the dominant." That's not much better. Then the musician says, "I mean, play the second inversion F major no five." Wait, play the five but play no five? It's no wonder that musicians completely give up on verbally describing anything about music in the broken system: "Shuddup and play, you'll hear it."


What are the replacements to current musical notation? Here are a few alternates but they are not complete systems either. What are the others? Who is working on this?


1. ABC notation. This was developed on USENET decades ago for typing and sharing non-copyright melodies, archiving them, transposing them, and running computer analysis on them. It uses note letters and apostrophies for octave (a''', b''', ..., a', b', ... A, B, C, ...). The language is strict and has software error correction. It is compilable. The drawback is that it still uses base-8 (8 letter names). I dont believe this system has chords. It is for single-line melodies only.


2. Dozenal. There are 12 notes so the notation system should use 12 unique tokens (not just 8 like A,B,C..). There are base-12 notations very loosely discussed. Consider how well hexadecimal math works with computers which are base-2 extended to base-16 (0 1..9 A B C D E F). Music using base-12 would use twelve tokens (0 1..9 T Q) to represent the 12 notes in music. What remains is how to describe chords, scale degrees, etc.



3. MIDI note numbers & messages. This isnt great for humans. But all notes are given their own digits, with middle C being 60, so sharps and flats are eliminated. This isn't great for readability since humans reading or writing a string of multiple digits is difficult ("60 62 65 67"). No musician is going to say, "The melody goes, sixty sixty-seven sixty-two sixty-five sixty".


4. There's some neo-musical methods from the 50s onward using graphical techniques and matrixes (tone rows etc). I have seen a little of this but don't know much about these - other than they can be very fast to write new music after choosing the desired scale, etc. The trouble with using a matrix or diagram is that it is hard to quickly talk about. The difficulty could be compared to describing how to play a Novation matrix instrument.

5. Solfege - is a system used by vocalists for scale degrees of melody, often as the primary music theory known by a vocalist; in these cases there's no "A, B, C, .." only the solfege syllables, of which there are two incompatible subsystems used in different "schools of music", relative pitch and fixed pitch.

6. Nashville Number System - is a popular chord charting system which allows easy transposition and does not rely on the traditional note alphabet nor does it use fixed pitch. For example, "C=1, D=2, E=3, F=4, G=5, A=6, B=7. In the key of B♭, the numbers would be B♭=1, C=2, D=3, E♭=4, F=5, G=6, A=7." As this is an industry-used system (vs. academic/theorist-made system), it has minor variations to it, although it sounds like it has become more standardized over time. Most importantly it does use relative pitches successfully and specific players seem to prefer it. But as far as I know this is not a complete music system, it is intended for chord charts similar to jazz charts, not complex harmony description etc.


What others are there? It is surprisingly rare to find alternative systems.


Personally I have thought that a truly great system would incorporate both the musical note tuning ratios as well as use base-12, while still allowing a single token (letter or number) to be used for chord names and a single other token for a modifier (mode type or etc).

Great composers have proposed some systems since about the 1950's, such as the below.

Music set theory with 12-tone integer notation





Last edited by superblonde.org; 08-24-2020 at 01:38 PM. Reason: fix image link
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Old 09-06-2019, 12:08 PM   #26
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The OP, which I quote in full :
Haha, the OP quoting himself as OP.
Yeah well....
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