Comment by tomjakubowski
12 hours ago
> B♭ is text.
Yes, but musical notation is far superior to text for conveying the information needed to play a song.
12 hours ago
> B♭ is text.
Yes, but musical notation is far superior to text for conveying the information needed to play a song.
I don't understand, musical notation is text though so how can it be superior to itself?
I think they mean staff notation, not a textual notation like "B♭".
Although, one could make the argument that staff notation is itself a form of text, albeit one with a different notation than a single stream of Unicode symbols. Certainly, without musical notation, a lot of music is lost (although, one can argue that musical notation is not able to adequately preserve some aspects of musical performance which is part of why when European composers tried to adopt jazz idioms into their compositions in the early twentieth century working from sheet music, they missed the whole concept of swing which is essential to jazz).
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For complex music, sure, but if I'm looking up a folk tune on, say, thesession.org, I personally think a plain-text format like ABC notation is easier to sight-read (since for some instruments, namely the fiddle and mandolin, I mainly learn songs by ear and am rather slow and unpracticed at reading standard notation).
Yes. And I create and manage the musical notation for over 100 songs in text, specifically Lilypond.
If we accepted the validity of this argument, then literally everything that can be represented by a computer can be referred to as text.
It renders the term "text" effectively meaningless.
To be fair, in Lilypond's case, it is an ASCII interface that renders to sheet music (kind of like openSCAD).