Comment by dhosek
15 hours ago
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).
> 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
Mostly this is straightforwardly correct. Notes on a staff are a textual representation of music.
There are some features of musical notation that aren't usually part of linguistic writing:
- Musical notation is always done in tabular form - things that happen at the same time are vertically aligned. This is not unknown in writing, though it requires an unusual context.
- Relatedly, sometimes musical notation does the equivalent of modifying the value of a global variable - a new key signature or a dynamic notation ("pianissimo") takes effect everywhere and remains in effect until something else displaces it. In writing, I guess quotation marks have similar behavior.
- Musical notation sometimes relates two things that may be arbitrarily far apart from each other. (Consider a slur.) This is difficult to do in a 1-D stream of symbols.
> although, one can argue that musical notation is not able to adequately preserve some aspects of musical performance
Nothing new there; that's equally true of writing in relation to speech.