Comment by jaggirs

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.