Comment by jerf
19 hours ago
It kind of reminds me of the periodic declaration someone makes on HN that textual programming sucks and we all need to switch to something else, usually visual programming in this case.
If someone takes time to deeply understand the advantages of the textual approach and then builds an alternative, I'll listen.
But at this point, anyone who is doing this and their criticism of the original approach is shallow and uninsightful, where it's basically just "it's old and it must therefore suck", is unlikely to produce a good answer.
I think that applies to the music notation case too. "Conventional" music notation isn't just a staff and a couple of types of notes. By the time you handle all the use cases that conventional notation handles, or even just a solid subset of it, your brand new notation is probably a lot less elegant than it started out as in someone's head.
Exactly. Music theory is a programming language for musical composition and performance.
Unlike most languages it's inherently two dimensional because music includes both horizontal (time, rhythm) and vertical pitches (chords/colours, harmony) information.
And - especially important - melody is an element that needs both.
You can't represent the same information with text without losing a lot of important content, which is why toys like Sonic Pi are more limited than they seem.
You can kinda sorta represent the same information on a piano roll, but it's not any easier to read than dots - in some ways harder, because you're not going to see the relationship between a bass line and chords as clearly.
Is it a good programming language? It's quite dense, but not denser than some code idioms. The 2D element is unique, and hard to represent in other ways.
The learning curve is steep, but it's probably as good as it can be given the requirements and constraints.
Don't forget about the dynamics (loud or soft) dimension of music.
Have a look at http://terpstrakeyboard.com/about/ and the janko keyboard
I know neither is about music notation per se (but about fixing the piano), but it is analogous: Music notation has exactly the same problem as the piano -> it defaults to C, which makes everything else relative to C and overly complicated.
For the record, I don't think this means we should switch to a new system, but it is usefull to recognize that it is suboptimal, if only to be able to accept it and continue (because nobody is going to translate everything to some new notation)
Context: I played piano for about 15 years.
I think the discussion around changing the piano keyboard is somewhat more obvious and less subtle. It's pretty obvious that the main thing keeping the current piano keyboard alive is the same thing keeping QWERTY alive. Now, the current piano keyboard is not as bad as QWERTY, which is all but an objectively bad layout, whereas the current piano keyboard is one with pros and cons.
I am typing this comment in Dvorak on a split keyboard so split that the two halves are literally on one side each of my chair's armrests, separated by about two feet, so I am no stranger to heterodox opinions about keyboards and putting them in action, and have a track record of not defending the status quo just because it's the status quo.
The current piano keyboard, while it does require you to learn the 12 keys separately, is something that is demonstrably possible for a normal human being, and the advantage is then that you are in fact in those 12 keys separately. You can not be playing in D major and then, for any period of time, accidentally slide into D# major and be confused, which Terpstra makes very easy to do. Of course, recovery is then not difficult either, but it might take a moment.
But other than that, the debate around the piano layout is really a matter of just trying it out and seeing what works.
For notation, I see a lot of people trying to replace the current notation without realizing how many subtleties are in it. It's not just about single quarter notes being banged out in a regular rhythm. It's about many different instruments. It's about dynamics, how the notes are struck, it's about subtle details in how the notes are horizontally spaced, it's about how the notes are played, even things like vibrato can be indicated as starting halfway through the note, and it's about a lot of other things. It's about having a representation for the conductor, it's about working for percussion, it's about guitars and other things. The usual "notation sucks, let's use X" is "let's just use piano roll notation", but if you make a full inventory of what conventional notation has and compare it to "piano roll notation", piano roll notation isn't even close to filling the gaps.
A more fully-fleshed out proposal could. A more fully-fleshed proposal to break up the proposal based on instrument (classical notation does some of this anyhow) might get closer. But that's not what people propose. They generally propose that piano roll notation is already what we need. But it isn't even close to fitting the bill. I don't even have to start asking questions about how exactly one distinguishes between a minor and major 10th interval with their notation (a huge problem generally left unsolved) because they haven't even developed their supposed notation far enough to be a serious competitor. Maybe there's a solution to that too, if someone puts the work in. I wouldn't care to try to categorically exclude it... but I've never seen anyone demonstrate it or answer the question. Conventional music notation doesn't necessarily even have the final word on that question, it certainly has issues if you go too far above or below a clef, but it has an answer to that question. Proposals based around something other than piano roll notation are generally even less fleshed out than piano roll notation, which at least does have some decades of prior use in computer software, which I've also clocked some years with, I used to compose music for fun. Even whackier proposals are generally complete nonstarters even on their own terms.
I think if someone is going to come up with a new, useful notation, it is going to have to retain the non-representationality that the current notation has, where we are not trying to directly encode pitch changes into a literal, 1-to-1 geometry on the page, and especially not a direct 1-to-1 representation of time. Current notation is correlated to those things, but it's not even close to a 1-to-1 map (for example also 8ve block notation for jumping up and down). I have no problem with the idea that there could be something much better if it was worked out, but I doubt that much better thing is going to have those characteristics either.