Thanks a lot for watching. This video took around 8 months to produce and involved a reasonable amount of production costs. If you would like to help me finance my future videos and get a sneak look at how I put them together, please consider becoming a patron. www.patreon.com/Tantacrul. Alternatively, you can support me by signing up to view non-youtube content on Nebula: go.nebula.tv/tantacrul I'm also a founding member of a really cool Discord server too. Come check it out! Discord: t.co/a3oYi1Rbnc?amp=1
Alright, I might watch your Nebula content, but hear me out: What if we represented music using visual representations of the sine waves that cause the sounds meant to be played? The reader can not only immediately understand the instrument being used to perform the music, but also the exact tone, loudness and duration. It is objective too, as everyone listens to sine waves the same. Please, make a video where you talk about this outright amazing system that no one has ever thought of before.
Problem: There are 15 different standards in the XYZ industry. Proposed Solution: Create a standard that unifies all standards in the XYZ industry. Result: There are now 16 different standards in the XYZ industry. Edit: xkcd 927
I feel this cynical take but remember: shit can work out. TCP/IP is pretty solid, UTF8 works pretty well which is even more astounding. MP3 and h264 are not my preferred formats but we've reached a state in the world where every FlowerpowerAliWishBang factory manages to produces capable decoders. Standards are worth pushing for even if they're imperfect.
tantacrul is nuts. i clicked on this video interested about hearing what he has to say about notation and ended up getting genuinely invested in a random chess game from 1590
@@stevenhthe21st literally the only difference there is whether or not you want to allow inferring things or not; the shorter algebraic notation encodes all of the moves with no ambiguity, but when parsing with a computer, it requires more coding to make the logical deductions necessary, whereas always noting the start and end location removes that requirement
@@technoturnovers7072 And then there's the numerical notation with one-byte row and columns, without the piece name. Functionally equivalent to UCI it is supposed.
For the "That's the letter G": If there is a really badly printed like orchestral sheet or something and the conductor wants to go from a rehearsal mark (the letter in a square), the G may look like another letter eg C so someone near to them may say "That's the letter G". solved
Juggling went through a standardization of notation 20-30 years ago. It has been interesting seeing how the rise of siteswaps as the main way to describe juggling has shaped the growth of the art. The patterns people juggle most tend to be in line with the patterns easiest to describe in siteswaps. Jugglers value uniqueness and individuality so many people are intentionally pushing other areas of development, but those jugglers all still tend to have a strong background in the now standard style of juggling patterns.
Clearly jugglers need to enumerate all their moves to represent as different MIDI CC control inputs and then, now that it's just MIDI, display it in piano roll notation. You can even make juggling synthesizers!
Actually, he didn't touch on modal notation, pre-mensural, which is extremely interesting & bizarre. It conveys rhythm but not through note shapes, rather each piece is in a rhythmic mode which sets the basic rhythm, and various conventions indicate where you deviate from it.
I think there's a fun video or maybe even video series to be had from bringing Medieval music to a wider/younger audience via a mix of period-correct examples and the modern-day magic of Bardcore.
The fact that you spent the first 9 1/2 minutes of this music notation video talking about chess (in great detail), all as a means of building up to an insane punchline is why this is my favourite RUclips channel.
Small tidbit that I can contribute from my area of expertise (psychology): around 1:08 you're questioning the chunkability of numbers - that's actually well researched! The example that came to mind for me was a study done on horse racing enthusiasts that were able to memorise stupendously long number sequences by chunking them into horse racing format (I don't exactly remember the system, but it was something like date, race number, horse number, finishing position, which would be around 12 digits per chunk). So I think it'd be perfectly viable to chunk the necessary single-digit amount of numbers that form a chord, given sufficient practice
I’m not sure that the study demonstrates an analogous measure of “chunkability”. I’m the case of music, successful chunking is connected to the physical action of real time playing rather than recall of the passage.
@@fivemoreminutespleas chunking is a working memory function though, not one of lon-term memory, so I reckon that instant recognition of a set of numbers as a chord chunk would still be possible
@@Tantacrul I've just arrived and am bouncing around in the video--did you talk about _continuo_ at all in here? Here, the numbers sometimes function analogically (like a pictographic representation,) and sometimes symbolically. Accompanying, say, a single violinist, I (a harpsichordist) have to pay attention to their line and recognize which numbers are simply redundant (i.e., what the violin is playing,) and what I'm responsible for producing. But if I'm just "comping" along with the orchestra, they work just like a chord symbol on a fake sheet: for instance, when I see the little six-five (standard notation for a first-inversion seventh,) my hand is instantly ready to assume one of three positions: thumb, middle, and pinky spread apart; thumb and index adjacent together with the pinky far away; middle and ring adjacent with the thumb a slight distance away, with the specific notes extrapolated partly from the the bass note and partly from the key signature/accidentals, but this is because I spent time drilling these and other shapes under my professor's watchful eye. (Incidentally, this really helped with theory!)
It would be if it was true, and in many cases it may be. But it's also true that proficiency in a system can blind a person to the idea that it could ever be improved, or simplified for those that don't want to use it to become professionals.
something else worth bearing in mind about colour-based notation systems is that it makes it a lot more difficult to quickly jot something down on paper
it's also just impractical to to distribute it physically because of the level of scrutiny required for correct reproduction of the prints. Using only a single type of ink in normal printing processes is just simpler. Color-based notation is only really feasible in a digital space.
Jian Pu is quite useful for my work, as I have to transcribe lots of pop songs, standards etc. I could write down the melody pretty faithfully using numbers and symbols during the first or second time listening to the songs, then I could quickly translate the Jian Pu to music notation. I learned Jian Pu when I was playing in the Chinese orchestra
Also, 59:40, if I wanted to hand my friend, who we assume is called Geoff, a written piece of notation for him to learn on his own time i would obviously first wrap it in a protective casing, potentially made of paper. Then, to clarify my intention with this package that i am handing him i would say "This is the letter, G."
Thats why he releses um once or twice a year i suppose I love the topics, and the aproach its bloody amazing Engageing through and through Have a good day
Because this video is the result of his research into the topics for the purpose of integrating them into MuseScore. Essentially, we get to see what's eating at his brain. The big drag isn't the commentary, though I'm sure it takes time to write the script. What really drags on production time is the incredible production values in visuals, composition, music, etc. I'm sure Tantacrul could pump out lecture style discussions on a blazing fast time scale relatively, but the audience retention would fall through the floor.
Wow, despite being utterly bizarre and impractical as a system of notation, Farbige Noten is an incredibly striking piece of modern art. I could look at those illustrations all day.
Same. It's a wonder. I'm really curious how exactly it was made. How did Huth afford to publish it with that level of detail and that range of colour back in the 19th century? Did he commission an artist to create all the wonderful illustrations? Hard to know. There's very little info on him.
@@Zmok That's a fascinating idea! Assuming they are able to learn the system well enough to use it, I suspect that might be bothered by the system's built in color code not matching the ones they already envisioned for different pitches, barring exceptional coincidence.
43:00. This confusion of clefs is why even after 7 years in school I couldn't intuitively read the bass clef, and here I am decades later and can still read the treble clef but not the bass clef.
You see this in fighting games constantly. We used to use more descriptive language, often inspired by the control decks of arcade cabinets, which led to goofy terminology like "towards forward" (hold towards the opponent and hit medium kick). There's abbreviations for special move motions like QCF (quarter circle forward) or do (dragon punch, a z-motion) but these days the 2d fighter community has mostly come around on numpad notation where the joystick is mapped to the positions of a numpad. To this day you get constant notation arguments because there's a million resources out there with their own unique way of marking things. And heaven help you if you read an old GameFAQs guide because they probably have their own awful method.
I like doing shit like “Qfc > hk+lp” which is just quarter forward circle into heavy kick and light punch. It’s like q is quarter, circle is a direction, f is forward, b is back, uf is up forward and ub is up back. And then you just have l for light and k for kick, etc. maybe it confuses other people but it’s way better to me than that like 263 a stuff because I don’t use fight sticks lol
@@MothFableone benefit to the numpad notation is that it's langauge agnostic. QCF doesn't hold much meaning to say, an italian or arabic player, who might have a completely different phrase that means Quarter Circle Forward. My opinion is that numpad notation is much more sustainable and generalizable in the long run.
@@MothFable the numpad notation works for any of the regular control schemes though, it's just indicating directions. So unless you're using something rather exotic to do your qfc's it'll map all the same to your joystick or dpad or whatever
numpad notation is so much easier to read and immediately understand it’s unreal here’s a bnb from 2002um cr.Ax1~2, st.B(2), hcf+P (> qcf+K) 2A 2A 5B(2) 41236P 236K
I've yet to ever meet any musician who has ever said "Ya know what? I really regret learning all that theory and all that notation and sight reading! It's holding me back!".
I've never met any string theorist who has ever said "Ya know what? I really regret learning all that theory ...! It's really holding me back!" Well, until they did.
I am dyslexic. Nonetheless, I am a published novelist (mild dyslexics often find ways to overcome their disability). I am an amateur musician who plays by ear. I watched your video because I would like to understand standard notation, but can't. In my mind, the notes actually shift their positions on both the horizontal and vertical axes, making reading very difficult. However, I appreciate your comments on ways to make the notation easier for dyslexics to read. If I was still young (I'm 71), I would have been very interested in using some of your suggestions. Even if I wouldn't be able to sight read, it would (I believe) have allowed me to achieve a better grasp of musical theory. Thanks for the lesson.
I too am dyslexic, and I spent many years as a child learning to read music and play piano. If I was given the choice, I would have quit many times. I hated reading music, it was torture. But I did enjoy playing music, and I did well by reading slowly at first, but quickly memorizing. I also developed a skill for playing "by ear" I didn't know I was dyslexic at the time, so I often felt like a failure for finding it so hard to read music. I understood in theory how the clefs and notes worked... but I couldn't immediately "see" what a note was. For someone else, it would be obvious that it is on the 4th line of the staff. I would have to count the lines to find that out. Unless it was something simple like the middle C... it took time for me to figure out what it was. And my brain just couldn't store what key it was in... If the note had a sharp sign beside it, sure that made sense. But if the sharp sign was back by the clef... I can't trace that to the line I'm currently at.
@@aliquida7132 Your challenges that you described exactly match mine. It's reassuring to know it wasn't just me. It shows our love of music, that despite being dyslexic, we persist. Keep on playing!
Thank you for confirming that sight reading dyslexia is a real thing. I'm the same age as you and have been playing keyboards since age 9. Though I know all chords and just about all their variations and can play the blues in every key, I never progressed beyond hunt and peck in sight reading - despite working with multiple teachers and putting in many hundreds of hours trying. (Weirdly, I am not dyslexic in reading written words.) I have played some baisc piano peices via sight reading, but only by figuring out the notes, practicing each piece until I'm sick to death of it, and then playing it by ear anyway - but never correctly and by using the written notes as an occasional guide. How anyone can read treble and bass clefs simultaniously boggles my mind.
@@sonicboomer8617 You might be mildly dyslexic in your reading as well. I discovered that I see words as pictures. I have to force myself to look at the letters. If the internal letters are out of order, I can easily read it. When I do proofreading for spelling, I read backwards. This forces my mind to look at the spelling.
"In my mind, the notes actually shift their positions on both the horizontal and vertical axes," BINGO! The vertical axis is the pitch of the notes - how low or high they are. The horizontal axis is how long the notes last, i.e. how many beats. In professionally-printed sheet music, the notes are spaced horizontally according to how long in time they last. There's also a third dimension - how loud or soft the notes are, indicated by companion notation. I've never heard of music dyslexia - it sounds like a dyslexic actor having difficulty reading a script.
Martin, once again you have knocked it out of the park. An hour of captivating entertainment for musical novices and experts alike. As a fellow tech person/musician hybrid, you give us all something to look up to. (…also audibly laughed at the Epic guy’s piano roll idea; I’m glad that was not a goal of Bandcamp during their tenure in charge.)
I note that Fortnite now includes some in-game music production features, in an update that landed today, the same day as this video essay. Coincidence? You be the judge.
@@Tantacrul This is irrelevant to this comment, but please, please tell me there is somewhere I can see those scans of Farbige Noten. Those illustrations are incredible.
Imagine you are back in high school. You're sitting in music class, next to the foreign exchange student you are hosting. They understand musical notation, as it transcends language barrier, but they soon get confused by the name of the song. They point to it and ask what that character is. You look them dead in the eye and say, " That is the letter G."
Reminds me of a sort of similar story. We had an exchange student in my bad class, I forget where he was from but they used solfege notation. Sometimes our band direction would help him out by saying things like, "This is in the key of do-sharp", which always made me do a double take.
The big problem for me in current common usage (that means, there is no point having a go at me - it's just common) is that solege can also be movable do, which, is a really cool system as well. My wife uses do dieze si bemoll so i'm used to both systems but A B C D E F G comes quicker, and bemoll is an extra syllable, so 'E flat' rolls off the tongue slightly quicker
I like the implication that, with the knowledge that they're only confused about the single character (at least according to our perspective) of uppercase G, and assuming that the rest of the name of the song is longer than just "G" (or that they understand and can read things such as a tempo, forte, etc given that they didn't express confusion with the music and musical notation itself), they just somehow never came across the uppercase letter G in their studies. It makes the hypothetical a lot more entertaining to think that after all the time they probably spent learning the language, it just somehow never came up
I literally forgot the video was about musical notation till he started talking about the perspective of musicians. Tantacrul is really good at telling a story.
I don't play an instrument, have never tried, and am terrified of notation. BUT THIS WAS AWESOME. Thanks for all the work you put into making this video and explaining things so well. I'm interested in linguistics, con-langs, and how language (spoken and written) evolve. This is surprisingly right up that alley. Many thanks for the ideas and fresh perspective
omg fellow conlanger and amateur linguist here i kept þinking about þis-reforms are often necessary because language/music evolve. BUT most people (‘)mistaking þeir ignorance for fresheyed perspective(’) ain’t know what þe actual problems are native english speakers are like ‘wow lololololol silent Es amirite ain’t english a doozy‽’ but ⋯ no þat ain’t why english is hard. english is hard because ‘know, now, knowledge, house, you, blood, wood, food, pour, poor, door, and tour’ (see the ‘oo[r]’s, ‘ou[r]’s, and ‘ou’s) people say ‘þere are more exceptions þan rules in english’ but all languages have exceptions-anecdotally, i’ve found french and german to have similar amounts of exceptions-no, english just has too many, contradictory rules we’re written as if we were 300 *other* languages
I feel like the VR/AR piano playing stuff is mostly just a way to get someone to just start playing the instrument, like a complete beginner, rather than an actual serious notation it just shows you what to press and when, I feel like it could build a bunch of confidence for someone just starting out and get them hooked on learning the instrument properly
Yeah, I played a lock of rocksmith and synthesia, then learned guitar/piano away from those games, now I find i'll use either written tab (guitar) or sheet music (piano), and those games are actually distracting/cumbersome, even just to follow along and learn a song.
i remember my first ever piano teacher letting me trace my hand and putting a number on each finger of it 😭 i was like 5, and tho i have bad memory, i never forgot that
I tried Piano Vision for my quest 3, but I don't see much use for it. Since I mostly play pop / rock stuff, I usually think in variations of chords. This app however doesn't give you any clue WHY you have to press these specific keys...
This is a really great video, and as a rhythm gamer it made me happy to see you bring up guitar hero as I've thought a lot about the connections between real music notations and the sorts of notations that are made for rhythm games. I think there's a lot more that could be said about how rhythm games do "notation". Not as an alternative to standard notation, god no, but as something interesting in its own right. I've played a lot of Taiko no Tatsujin (a Japanese arcade game about playing a taiko drum) and i find the notation to be really cool. Even though it's a note-scrolling game it's closer to standard notation than tablature, in my experience. Every note is a circle, and the pitch of the note is indicated by colour instead of vertical position - red for the face of the drum, blue for rim. What brings this closer to standard notation in my mind is that the scroll speed is standardised so that one bar always takes up the same space on the screen (ignoring scroll speed effects, it is a game after all). But this means that you learn to read the timing of notes based on their relative spacing - a taiko player can, at a glance, see that some notes are played in 16ths, or 12th note tuplets, or what have you. I'm talking about this because when you talked about how notation is read in chunks, like language, that's exactly how taiko players read our notation. We read patterns of 2-7 notes, and sort of "calculate" the rhythms and pitches, and store them to be played later. I never got good enough at music notation to sightread it, but I think learning how to read taiko really helped me appreciate why musicians talk about why standard notation is better than tablature, because they can read groups of notes in a chunk by their *shape*. I find I do the same thing in Taiko, reading notes as a chunk by their shape - though, perhaps in a sillier context. But the ability that this gives some Taiko players in sightreading complex and fast songs can be honestly kind of incomprehensible. Anyway, this rhythmic information encoded in the format means that even though most rhythm games will tell you to "hit the note when it reaches this point on the screen", experienced players aren't *actually* doing that - instead we're reading ahead, figuring out the type and timing of different notes by chunking, feeling the rhythm in our mind and sort of "storing" it to be played later. Most rhythm gamers actually tend to look at the centre of the note field or even the other side of the field from where the notes get played. So ultimately I think there can be more to rhythm games' styles of notation than meets the eye here. Don't get me wrong - I am NOT suggesting scrolling notes as an alternative to sheet music, the criticism you levied to guitar hero is absolutely valid here, especially because rhythm games are about being 100% accurate to some predetermined rhythm and music is, well, more artistic than that (and of course there are many other reasons to use standard notation but this comment is overly long as it is). However, I do think there's a lot about the way that rhythm gamers read notes that's similar to the way musicians read sheet music. It's interesting! I find it amazing how us humans are able to look at these complex, abstract encodings, and in real time turn them into movements that make real music. Or in the case of rhythm gamers, make a score go up. We're a strange bunch. Anyway, I hope anyone found this interesting.
Also I didn't mention this in the comment but the coloured notes system reminded me of Taiko but I agree with tantacrul's skepticism of it, even though i technically do read a "coloured note system". Two colours is easy enough (any change in colour is just read as "go to the other note lol" but the whole scale? Probably too much
Stepmania player here. I agree that "reading ahead" is absolutely necessary when moving up to intermediate difficulty. Learning an instrument also grew my understanding of how to step in tuples. While I will never be competitive, I still impress layfolk by hitting 8-footers while keeping the scroll rate locked to 216bpm. (Because A=432 meme, and yes we are a weird bunch.)
I've played a lot of Project Diva and definitely learned to "read" the music and a lot of it is muscle memory. It also spaces notes depending on duration and when I got it on Switch I found I had to go back to the Play Station symbols because the different letters confused it too much even though the colours were the same. (Then you tell yourself that playing games like these will help you with proper music reading and rhythm when 99% is just simple pop beats ahaha.)
Pause to comment on chromatic staves: It's not only pianos that treat "black key" notes differently. The fingering layouts for woodwind instruments, for example, are often simplest for the key of C and then become more complicated as the number of sharps or flats in the key signature increases. This means that when reading the traditional five-line staff system with sharp and flat symbols, the natural notes are simpler to finger and the sharps and flats are often played with additional keys that modify the natural notes, so an accidental is like a flag that says "hey player, you're going to be adding an additional key to your 'default' fingering". It turns out to be fairly intuitive in that way. My brain recoils at the thought of trying to read a notation system that does away with sharps and flats on a clarinet.
I imagine you would get that same intuition on a chromatic scale. "Here comes a 6th line note, better lube up the joints". In practice, none of these sorts of changes are likely to occur with already established musicians. It would be like learning a whole new language just to say the same thing over again. The amount of knowledge and practice that would need to be tossed simply because someone else says "it's better" simply wouldn't be worth it for most individuals. New musicians don't have that same calculus and thus are more capable of trying out new styles. This is where Tantacrul's final argument comes into play as digital scoring allows for the presentation to be whatever the new reader wants it to be without sacrificing readability from existing players.
This is really interesting as a brass player. Strictly speaking some notes are a bit more awkward than others but generally they're all the about the same. We generally only have 3 buttons and in the high range often only use two of them.
@@WaluigiisthekingASmith I'm trumpet, trombone, and piano. Trombone doesn't even have buttons. Yet these alternatives definitely look like they'd only complicate things, even for brass.
I remember returning to piano after a few years of not touching it, and trying to learn songs from Synthesia videos on RUclips. It went alright. That was, until I found some sheet music for a piece I wanted to learn, decided to print it out, and WOW there was a huge difference. It was like coming back home after being away for a long time.
Yeah, I have a similar feeling about some tablatures for bass and guitar. Sometimes I buy sheet music from a publisher know as sheetmusichappens, and they insist in using a hybrid system (rhythm from tradicional notation combined with tab numbers instead of regular notes). I can’t read this kind of thing! I always need to transcribe everything for the tradicional notation system. I can read traditional notation very well and also tabs isolated (when I know the music), but both of them combined is a no go for me!
Coming back to sheet music after a long time is always a trip. I find my hands run “ahead” of my eyes, and I keep stopping to second-guess myself only to find I subconsciously saw the patterns just right. Very interesting given how that went unused for over a decade in my case!
It is really important to note that jianpu is used by professional Chinese orchestral musicians (e.g. erhu, yangqin), sometimes to the point that they struggle more with stave notation. My yangqin (dulcimer) teacher can still read stave notation, but jianpu works better in her mind (and for me as well when playing Chinese music) due to the change of scale/pattern you have to play on the instrument; and with different keys of dizi (flute), it's easier to remember a fingering=number as they work for scale degrees, rather than remembering every possible note each fingering could mean on a different key of dizi. There are whole Chinese orchestral scores written in jianpu, which can sometimes make harmonic analysis much easier as everything is written in scale degrees. There's this concept called "bimusicality" where one can swap between different methods of thinking and playing depending on what culture or style they're playing, which i think ties in incredibly well with discussions on notation. E.g. I read stave music when it's more in a European tonal understanding or on western instruments, but I will read jianpu when it is more traditional Chinese music or on Chinese instruments.
Fascinating! Thanks for sharing your experience. It makes sense that different types of notation with different strengths and weaknesses might tie more strongly into different musical traditions.
See, as a private music teacher who will figure out students’ favourite songs by ear to help them play music they already love, I am a MASSIVE fan of music notation. It’s only ever been a tool to aid memory and analysis and the fact that we can recreate music composed centuries ago shows how robust it is. So often I’ll spend an entire term teaching a kid a song to memorise through repetition that they could have learnt in a few weeks if they put the effort in to figure out how to read a score. Plus, when I figure out their favourite song in a matter of minutes they’re all like “How did you do that?!” and I just point out that I create a virtual score in my brain, and can pick it apart and analyse the key and harmony due to my ability to visualise the notes. If you can read a graph, you can read notation. It’s literally just a way to visually present music as a function of pitch over time. Then it’s your interpretation that turns it back into music.
I've never found standard notation to be a problem. As you said, it's been working for centuries and is pretty robust. Since it developed over time as a practical solution to practical issues, not as an abstraction, that's not surprising. As a guitarist, lutenist, and ukist, I also play from tablature on a regular basis, and for those instruments, it's terrific and I would never want to do otherwise. But because it's instrument-specific, it's not as useful overall as standard notation. Thanks for putting this together, Tantacrul.
I've been playing bass for almost 30 years. I can read tablature no problem, the strings on the sheet all match the strings of my instrument, the numbers tell me the frets. Musical notation, I assume if I constantly used it I'd eventually get used to it, but even knowing the rules behind how it operates, I often "forget" where the different notes are, and so will invariably look up a tab version.
Well, I can read a graph, but I can only read music at about a minute (or longer) per bar. I can literally WRITE notation faster than I can (sight-)read it. Hence I take issue with your "anyone can read music" statement. Perhaps, but not everyone can read it fast enough to be of any use in performance - or practice. Also, I just *can't* relate notes in notation to notes on my instrument (bass guitar); though that might be an "autism thing" (I've been diagnosed).
59:00 Proposing to call notes an octave apart with a different name is no understanding a f** about how humans experiment music, then how acoustic and music works… such a dumb proposal
I think the descriptive chess notation people really had it figured out, and that's definitely the best possible way to write music. "The viola player slides the third finger of their left hand two and a half centimeters down the D string, pressing firmly so the note rings clear," and so on and so forth, for every note in the composition. And of course we get different notations for every instrument, as all good notations do. What's not to love?
How to play "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star". First, be aware that this piece is written in the key of C major, using the six notes C, D, E, F, G, and A with a frequency range between 262 and 440 hertz. Use this information to choose a suitable fingering for your instrument. (Consult the Appendices for specific note fingering for Piano, Guitar, Violin, and Flute.) Since this piece involves a large number of repetitions of noted of the same pitch, it is important not to play the notes legato (in which two consecutive crochets could be confused with a minim), nor staccato (with excessive separation between notes), but with a moderate amount of note length sustainment. The tempo shall be moderate, with a crochet played for approximately half a second. Volume shall be moderately soft, as for a lullaby. The notes are as follows: Play C for a crochet, sung with the lyric "Twin-". Play C for a crochet, sung with the lyric "-kle". Play G for a crochet, sung with the lyric "Twin-". Play G for a crochet, sung with the lyric "-kle".. Play A for a crochet, sung with the lyric "lit-". Play A for a crochet, sung with the lyric "-tle". Play G for a minim, sung with the lyric "star". Play F for a crochet, sung with the lyric "How". Play F for a crochet, sung with the lyric "I". Play E for a crochet, sung with the lyric "won-". Play E for a crochet, sung with the lyric "der". Play D for a crochet, sung with the lyric "what". Play D for a crochet, sung with the lyric "you". Play C for a minim, sung with the lyric "are". Play G for a crochet, sung with the lyric "Up". Play G for a crochet, sung with the lyric "ab-". Play F for a crochet, sung with the lyric "-ove". Play F for a crochet, sung with the lyric "the". Play E for a crochet, sung with the lyric "world". Play E for a crochet, sung with the lyric "so". Play D for a minim, sung with the lyric "high". Play G for a crochet, sung with the lyric "Like". Play G for a crochet, sung with the lyric "a". Play F for a crochet, sung with the lyric "dia-". Play F for a crochet, sung with the lyric "mond". Play E for a crochet, sung with the lyric "in". Play E for a crochet, sung with the lyric "the". Play D for a minim, sung with the lyric "sky". Play C for a crochet, sung with the lyric "Twin-". Play C for a crochet, sung with the lyric "-kle". Play G for a crochet, sung with the lyric "Twin-". Play G for a crochet, sung with the lyric "-kle".. Play A for a crochet, sung with the lyric "lit-". Play A for a crochet, sung with the lyric "-tle". Play G for a minim, sung with the lyric "star". Play F for a crochet, sung with the lyric "How". Play F for a crochet, sung with the lyric "I". Play E for a crochet, sung with the lyric "won-". Play E for a crochet, sung with the lyric "der". Play D for a crochet, sung with the lyric "what". Play D for a crochet, sung with the lyric "you". Play C for a minim, sung with the lyric "are". This note may optionally be sustained longer than the others. The next chapter will cover the modifications needed to turn this song into "The ABCs".
@@parkernelson4909: Here's a ChatGPT-enhanced version: How to execute the auditory manifestation of the melodic composition colloquially referred to as "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star," should one find themselves bereft of the convenience of concise musical notation and instead must rely on the articulation of musical instructions in the realm of prose: Commence by acknowledging the tonal landscape within which this auditory journey unfolds, recognizing it as having been strategically situated within the domain of C major. This tonal tapestry employs a selection of six auditory entities, denoted as C, D, E, F, G, and A, whose oscillatory frequencies waver within the range of 262 to 440 hertz. It is incumbent upon the executor of this auditory endeavor to judiciously select a suitable instrumental fingering modality, with reference to the Appendices appended herewith, which best befits their chosen apparatus, be it a Piano, Guitar, Violin, Flute, or any other harmonic implement that resonates with their musical predilections. Given the recurrent recurrence of auditory entities attaining the same sonic pitch, it becomes imperative, nay, mandatory, for the musician to abstain from executing these sonorous entities in a legato fashion, where the contiguous concatenation of two crochets may, alas, lead to confusion with the more sustained minim. Simultaneously, the musician is advised against an excessive separation between the aforementioned auditory entities, a musical misdemeanor known as staccato, and instead should endeavor to imbue their rendition with a judicious moderation of note length sustainment. The chronometric tempo, or the rate at which these auditory entities traverse the temporal landscape, should oscillate within the bounds of moderation, wherein each crochet is bestowed with a temporal duration of approximately half a second. The amplitude, or volume, of this auditory exposition shall be calibrated to a moderately soft setting, akin to the dulcet resonance typically associated with a lullaby. The elucidation of the auditory entities is detailed forthwith: Execute a C note for the temporal duration of one crochet, concomitant with the vocalized syllable "Twin-". Simultaneously, execute another C note for a congruent crochet duration, aligned with the vocalized syllable "-kle". Proceed to execute a G note for a period equivalent to one crochet, harmonizing with the vocalized syllable "Twin-". In tandem, enact another G note for an equivalent crochet span, harmonizing with the vocalized syllable "-kle". Subsequently, evoke the auditory manifestation of an A note, of one crochet's duration, synchronized with the vocalized syllable "lit-". Simultaneously, evoke another A note of congruent crochet duration, concomitant with the vocalized syllable "-tle". Conclude this auditory phrase with the execution of a G note for the temporal duration of one minim, amalgamating with the vocalized syllable "star". Seamlessly transition to the ensuing segment of auditory articulation: Embark on the auditory expedition with an F note, resonating for a temporal span equivalent to one crochet, coupled with the vocalized syllable "How". Simultaneously, execute another F note for a congruent crochet duration, in harmony with the vocalized syllable "I". Progress to an E note, manifesting for a duration of one crochet, in unison with the vocalized syllable "won-". Simultaneously, evoke another E note of congruent crochet duration, coalescing with the vocalized syllable "der". Subsequently, articulate a D note for a temporal duration of one crochet, in alignment with the vocalized syllable "what". Simultaneously, evoke another D note of congruent crochet duration, synchronizing with the vocalized syllable "you". Culminate this auditory segment with the execution of a C note for the temporal duration of one minim, resonating with the vocalized syllable "are". Navigate towards the next auditory juncture with the following sonic delineations: Commence with the auditory manifestation of a G note, echoing for a duration equivalent to one crochet, in tandem with the vocalized syllable "Up". Simultaneously, execute another G note for a congruent crochet duration, coalescing with the vocalized syllable "ab-". Progress to an F note, resounding for the temporal span of one crochet, entwined with the vocalized syllable "-ove". Simultaneously, evoke another F note of congruent crochet duration, harmonizing with the vocalized syllable "the". Subsequently, articulate an E note, resonating for a duration of one crochet, aligned with the vocalized syllable "world". Simultaneously, execute another E note of congruent crochet duration, concomitant with the vocalized syllable "so". Culminate this auditory stanza with the manifestation of a D note for the temporal duration of one minim, resonating with the vocalized syllable "high". Embark on the subsequent auditory exploration with the following auditory directives: Initiate with the auditory articulation of a G note, resonating for a duration equivalent to one crochet, in harmony with the vocalized syllable "Like". Simultaneously, execute another G note for a congruent crochet duration, synchronizing with the vocalized syllable "a". Progress to an F note, manifesting for the temporal span of one crochet, aligned with the vocalized syllable "dia-". Simultaneously, evoke another F note of congruent crochet duration, amalgamating with the vocalized syllable "mond". Subsequently, articulate an E note, resonating for a duration of one crochet, in harmony with the vocalized syllable "in". Simultaneously, execute another E note of congruent crochet duration, in tandem with the vocalized syllable "the". Culminate this auditory phrasing with the manifestation of a D note for the temporal duration of one minim, entwined with the vocalized syllable "sky". Commence the auditory recapitulation of the initial auditory motif, reiterating the following auditory entities: Execute a C note for the temporal duration of one crochet, synchronized with the vocalized syllable "Twin-". Simultaneously, execute another C note for a congruent crochet duration, coalescing with the vocalized syllable "-kle". Progress to a G note, resonating for the temporal span of one crochet, entwined with the vocalized syllable "Twin-". In tandem, evoke another G note for an equivalent crochet span, amalgamating with the vocalized syllable "-kle". Subsequently, evoke the auditory manifestation of an A note, of one crochet's duration, resonating with the vocalized syllable "lit-". Simultaneously, manifest another A note of congruent crochet duration, in harmony with the vocalized syllable "-tle". Conclude this auditory recapitulation with the execution of a G note for the temporal duration of one minim, in synchrony with the vocalized syllable "star". Proceed with the recapitulation of the subsequent auditory exploration: Embark on the auditory journey with an F note, resonating for a temporal span equivalent to one crochet, in alignment with the vocalized syllable "How". Simultaneously, evoke another F note for a congruent crochet duration, entwined with the vocalized syllable "I". Progress to an E note, manifesting for the temporal span of one crochet, concomitant with the vocalized syllable "won-". In tandem, execute another E note of congruent crochet duration, amalgamating with the vocalized syllable "der". Subsequently, articulate a D note for the temporal duration of one crochet, in synchrony with the vocalized syllable "what". Simultaneously, evoke another D note of congruent crochet duration, harmonizing with the vocalized syllable "you". Culminate this auditory recapitulation with the execution of a C note for the temporal duration of one minim, in alignment with the vocalized syllable "are". It is to be noted that this particular auditory entity may, at the musician's discretion, be sustained for a temporal duration exceeding that of its preceding counterparts. The subsequent section shall elucidate the necessary alterations requisite for the transformation of this melodic composition into the auditory manifestation colloquially referred to as "The ABCs."
They're very useful for writing music onto a computer, because one can make a nice UI to work with them. I like using them to review my own practice sometimes, because they make it easier to judge what I did well and didn't. They're completely impractical to read for the purpose of performing. They have a purpose, but it certainly isn't one which seeks to replace standard western notation as a way of communicating music.
To summarize, piano roll would be labeled a write-only system by computer hardware folks. Psst, computer programmers, that means it's like Perl - a write-only programming language. 🤣
The "Alfred's basic piano course" book was a huge help learning sheet music. It starts off close to middle c and gradually moves you away. It also slowly introduces new notation. I suggest if you're struggling to learn pick it up! Once you learn it, notation makes a lot of sense.
My issue with Alfred’s is that it is so focussed on finger numbers at the beginning. I’ve had a number of students struggle once it moves beyond C position, because they’ve spent that whole time associating the notes with fingers rather than note names. If you use it in combination with a technical book like A Dozen A Day it’s pretty decent though.
As once a somewhat arrogant self taught musician, I have found that after giving time and attention to learning to read sheet music, it does make more sense than I previously imagined, and seems like the best comprise possible.
I play guitar and was trained before that on the horn. I can say that playing a set instrument is a great way to begin. There is one way to play a note. You learn it memorize how to read music and most stuff then you can play. If you cannot figure it out by ear you can get the sheet and practice it until you get the song cold. Strings are not that way. They are not "set" and thus you can make thousands of more notes. If you play electric like I do exponentially multiply those numbers. I am not limited to needing sheet to play something but when I have it or more importantly when I write it, knowing how is super important and necessary. A musician should know their craft and the better they have learned it the more they are able to write both quantity and quality. Yes, you can learn tab quickly and it is great for learning to play songs, however it does absolutely nothing for you when your writing where knowing your sheet theory does immense miracles which lead to paths you're unlikely to pursue otherwise. They call it a "Key" to the song for a reason because it is like a door key which unlocks the door to the song. If you are a practiced musician you can know the key and timing and sit in with anyone even on songs you have never heard or read sheet for. Tab does not do this for you it is numbers on stings not actual "music theory" as notation is. Plus if you know your theory well enough you can play music across any instrument be it keys, percussion, strings or winds. Is it something you do everyday? No, but you should think of what you are doing as you are playing and know why it works. If you don't, you will be stuck one day by people who do and you will not be able to keep up. You likely will not even be able to play a chord in their song or even a melodic line if it is abstract enough. The notation, wheel of 5ths, modes, why the intervals work and how to apply this knowledge is what learning notation can do for you. It is basic to learn, not hard at all and frankly necessary for anyone when they are writing. Usually in a rock band (especially the cool ones) they have at least 1 or 2 people who know their theory. If they don't you won't hear them for long they will be a one or two hit wonder or they will depend on someone else writing their music for them. You cannot teach someone how to compose with tab, it is a one way street. Notation is a network of streets literally going any direction with the map and a Garmin. That is why you need to learn it.
I love that Musescore is making some of these systems of notation convertible. Bring on the Carrillo conversion. With so many historical scores being transcribed to music xml and midi, the "entrenched" argument may not be valid for much longer. And if there's a free tool that can instantly convert music to your preferred notation... Wow. As a music teacher this makes me excited.
Thanks! Not that I am ever going to use it I now know more about what it is called and what it is about! A refreshing stop in the RUclips sea! Excellent : ) Cheers!!! Rick
53:00 As someone who speaks Esperanto, I can say it is sooooo on brand for an Esperantist to invent a simplified notation system. It embodies the philosophy of Esperanto haha
Maybe it's because I'm an elite musical aristocrat who was fortunate enough to have basic musical education in elementary school and the option of formal band education through the rest of my twelve year public education (I dropped out of band after 9th grade because they weren't playing music that interested me and had policies I couldn't fit into), but to me "two notes an octave apart have the same name" is more intuitive than naming three and only three octaves. And if you need more context than the octave you're in, we have that! "G above middle C" and the like!
😊 Yeah, we’re similar elite musical aristocrats, except the school I went to didn’t have any performing music program - we just had paper-only lessons and sometimes the teacher would play on the piano. By the time 6th grade rolled off the calendar, most kids in my year knew how notation worked, could write down solfège dictation, and we even got a quiz or two on how to draw the tenor, alto and base clefs. That was a good starting point when my progeny started their music adventures. I didn’t feel like a village idiot, just merely a town idiot :)
We literally say C1 C2 C3 C4 C5 etc. People who are arguing against standard notation in music just don't want to take the time to learn it. What we have now is the distillation of hundreds of years of experimentation on getting artists to be able to agree on how best to communicate music in a written form. And if the powers that be decide to go nuclear and detonate in the stratosphere, the EMP signal alone will utterly devastate Electronics all over the planet, so people who've only ever known digital music will basically have to start from square one again. I wish we could do away with equal temperament tuning because that's nonsense designed to cater to keyboard players.
@@thomasprislacjr.4063 Kind of a crazy thing to think about, but with modern advances in both AI (not even LLMs here, just base AI) and "ultra clean inputs" paired with digital effects we're probably already at a tech level where you could build a "filter" you could switch on that would make an equal tempered source output with Just intonation... which is f'ing wild if you think about all of the factors that can go into the context of deciding what's correct for any given note there.
@@thomasprislacjr.4063 but C1 C2 C3 is not "standard notation", is it? It's just a note name and an octave number. (Also, it is _one_ kind of naming, there are at least two)
What this video glanced over is that it's not clefs that the newbies are struggling with, but keys. To understand those ♯♯♯ and ♭♭♭ in the beginning, it requires understanding of scales, which, while important, are way too advanced topics for beginners who just want to press buttons and have fun. I myself started out using piano roll, and learned the musical notation later on, and this is literally a conversation I had with a newbie friend last year: - I want to play this piece on piano! - Okay, so, to start, there's this repeating pattern on piano starting from this key and ending with this, called an octave, and the keys in it are named do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-si, or, in English system, they are named alphabetically but out of order as C-D-E-F-G-A-B - Okay, got it - And you have black keys that represent steps up or down called sharps or flats respectively, depending on their relation to the surrounding white keys - Okay, weird, but go on - On that piece, you have have treble clef there, which means the notes F-A-C-E are in between the lines, G-B-D-F on the lines, respectively. Ignore the vertical lines for now - Okayyy.... - But you have ♭♭♭ in the beginning, which means it's in the key of E♭ that means you must swap those white keys with those black keys - Wait, what? Why? What's the logic here? - * A two hour lecture on how scales work* - Okay... but if the song is in this E♭ key, why do we still have ♯'s and ♭'s sprinkled all over? - * Two more hours rambling on augmentations and harmony* - Okay, let me try it *two days later* - Okay, I give up. I've spent HOURS on this thing, and I've only managed to get as far as a first quarter of a second bar - Hmm, let me think of something. Forget about everything I've told you before except octaves, let me transcribe it to something simpler. *15 minutes later* - Okay, so, here it goes, each row represent octave, rightmost being the topmost, the numbers represent key's number, left to right, including black keys, starting from C. An empty line to separate bars [A quickly re-invented Julian Carrillo notation] *30 minutes later* - HOLY HELL! I DID IT! YOU'RE A WIZARD!!! [Recording of them playing the full song perfectly] Those first steps are what musicians tend to forget and then act smug about it. I've noticed glimpses of it even in this video where author tries to remain as much neutral as possible on the topic e.g. on grasping the concept of numbers forming the chords, while guitarist do this all the time with the tabs. Or how tab is only useful for one instrument when all it takes is simple addition and subtraction to transcribe it to other (stringed) instrument, or the same instrument at different tuning.
It's less that he's ignoring these problems and more that he understandably believes that it's better for there to be something hard to learn but incredibly easy to understand after you learn it than something that is forever difficult to understand. He even mentions several times that certain ideas would be useful for beginners but poor for professionals.
Thank you for saying this. Piano roll might be useless to a professional performer, but it's SO useful to an amateur or absolute beginner. Tantacrul was _trying_ to be neutral, but most of the time he was judging every notation from a performer's viewpoint only. Like, sure it's funny when he says that these disrupters are musical idiots.. But honestly so am I, as an amateur who just enjoys learning a pop-song on the guitar with tabs. Ironically his comment gives the same gate-keeping impression that he was mocking at 46:45. Still, there's no actual conflict because people can and do use multiple notations all the time.
I think you could make piano a lot easier to learn if you used 4 colors + black and did the same with notes on the sheet. More colors start to get harder to tell apart, so it feels like a decent compromise. You can get some horizontal compression there (more than enough). For the black keys, keep them in the same position but use always the same symbol next to a colored note to mean "black key on the right of that color". I feel like the current way we compress the notes is terrible since it's not going all the way. If you made the scale something like A Ab B Bb C Cb, people wouldn't struggle as much. I get why we use the names we have now, but to someone learning it makes no sense at all why there's nothing between B and C but there is between C and D. Also having different names for identical notes is just asking new students to ask "WHY?". 6 lines instead of 8 would be a pretty big win to help readability imo.
With regard to guitar TAB I find it really is an addition to standard notation and not a replacement. In an instrument where there can be up to three different places to play the same note, TAB can show you where it needs to be played. This is important as each different position will have a different timbre. It can also prevent you from painting yourself into a corner fingering-wise. The main advantage I find, though, is the ability to show bends, hammer-ons, pull offs etc. I must say I dislike when TAB is not accompanied by a regular stave. I find timing much easier to read in regular notation. Also once I have learnt a piece and only read the music as a reminder while playing I find I read the regular notation almost all the time. In a similar vein, I find it a little frustrating when guitar tutorial videos only ever mention fret position and never actually name the notes.
Agree with this. In the same vein, it’s easier to read a chord diagram when not just the first fret is numbered explicitly but all of them on the diagram, and moreover the notes played are written under the strings. That might be cluttering but should really be an option when one looks at chord diagrams somewhere in a computer, for example. Redundancy is so important for us humans to read and just even perceive and process things. Bare minimum can be a good option when one is already proficient, but I think even then redundancy shouldn’t be shunned too much and for too long. Spoken/written languages are full of it, formal languages designed by us specially are usually have some redundancy too.
I always find durations and timing more difficult on TAB as most durations are only shown by note stems below the staff, this extra required eye movement can be sluggish and makes sightreading that more difficult.
*5 places for middle C on guitar, and 6 for the E above that on a 24 fret guitar. For very intricate parts a standard staff is imperfect, but by the point where that becomes an issue, tabs also become problematic, as you would essentially have to write out different fingerings based on people hold their pick, and players by then are usually proficient enough to work out what "feels" good.
Who lit that picture of you? That's a system used in "Hollywood". Full side plus kicker. 135 degrees or 225 degrees, roughly, depending on which reference is used. Great way to light. I never learned tabs. I need to look into that.
Where standardisation has been most successful is probably in engineering. Many ISO standards are so widely adopted that pretty much nobody uses anything else. There are of course some splits, especially between metric and US customary standards, but over the years there has been a lot of unification.
@@Croz89 the most baffling common inconsistency between imperial and metric standards to me has got to be the way imperial thread is denoted. Nothing about say, 10-32 UNF bears any relation to dimensions that are actually relevant to the part, there isn’t even a way to deduce that the nominal diameter is 1/4” unless you already know or look up a table. The metric equivalent M6 (or MJ6 if you will) communicates that much more clearly.
Those wanting to abolish it fail to understand that IUPAC systematic names and "trivial names" have two different purposes, intended for two different audiences. A trivial name like acetone tells most people what it is, while a systematic name like propane-2-one or 2-oxopropane manages to tell the structure and bonding situation in an acetone molecule in a single word. You don't need to know that to use acetone to remove nail polish, but in other areas easily telling the structure from a name is really useful.
The most astoundingly stupid part of Musitude to me, which you didn't mention, is that despite creating a notation which is meant to represent pitches on a computer keyboard, they don't FOLLOW THE LAYOUT OF THE KEYBOARD. How is anyone learning this supposed to gain any spatial sense of which notes are related to each other when they're essentially randomly distributed across the QWERTY keyboard layout? Absolutely insane.
The obvious flaw here is that QWERTY is not universal or international. If they acknowledged different keyboard layouts they would have to acknowledge that their entire system is useless.
huh... i just opened website, and the first thing i see is a qwerty keyboard. i literally havent watched the video except for the intro, nor have i touched the website, but maybe after this video happened the website got updated?? it has been a day since you were there :P NEVERMIND i see what you mean. it would make infinitely more sense if it was in the same style as genshin's instruments... ah, here -- example: ruclips.net/video/M7WZsVl65WA/видео.html&ab_channel=ABardfromTeyvat you only get the 7 naturals from 3 octaves, but its enough to do alot. {{QWERTYU -- ASDFGHJ -- ZXCVBNM}}
like it feels self evident, doesn't it? hell, even the fact that it only holds 3 octaves is wild to me, when 4 octaves should be easy use z-m for C2-B2, a-j for C3-B3, etc for sharps and flats, use the shift key LITERALLY ANYONE FAMILIAR WITH A QWRTY KEYBOARD KNOWS HOW TO SHIFT
We also have to take into account that musical ideals, and what is considered useful in written music, changes with culture. Whereas a european composer might indicate a violin section when to apply vibrato, which nuance to use, what effects and slur to perform, in a given piece, indian ragas for example, have a huge part of self-appropriation to give the life needed for music to exist, as if the piece by itself is a mere husk, only the scaffold for what the musician intends to express. Therefore, it is not needed to write vibrati or nuances because it is up to the musician to decide while they play which gamaka to use. On another note, gamakas would be incredibly hard to notate in standard notation, if you take the répertoire of the sitar, whose strings can bend to increase the pitch by a whole 5th, it contains various pieces in which bend play will not only be prevalent but also difficult. In japanese music, taking the shakuhachi as an example, traditional music will stick to the pentatonic scale associated with the instrument, no bends or accidentals. So that would eliminate the need for excessive staff lines, armatures, and accidentals as a whole. But a substencial part of shakuhachi is playing with the right breath. Crescendi, Diminuendi, Sforzandi, Vibrati, Tremoli, all of those would have to be written down, including overblows, slowing/speeding vibrati, vibrati range increases/decreases, how would you write all of those breath plays ? (if you want to learn more about japanese shakuhachi breath play techniques, type "breath play" into google) So depending on musical cultures and doings, the standard notation will always have too much and not enough at the same time. What is really important is to get a message across, not standardise it or find a universal solution that will work for everything, because as you increase the amount of info it can convey, you also increase complexity, and vice-versa.
One thing a lot of these systems don't take into account is the ability to NOT specify something. If you choose to represent the length of a note as a literal length then it's impossible to use a fermata. A system for a midi synthesiser needs to be a lot more hands-on about exact instructions than a system for a human with a brain.
European music used to be like that, too. If you look at a Baroque score, you'll see just notes and core rhythms, but not much else - yet it's all that missing stuff that makes the music what it is. It's only during the 18th century and forwards that composers began overnotating their music and removing freedoms from the performers; this trend, to my knowledge, is unique to (Romantic and onwards) Western music - improvisation can often be a taboo in (some) Classical music circles, because it's seen as disrespectful to the composer's vision.
@@karlpoppins It's one of the things that frustrates me if I try to play anything after the baroque period. But, my original training is in baroque music so of course that seems most natural to me.
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As a nearsighted guitarist, I've been told "That's the letter G" when trying to read chords in the handwritten font used for jazz scores. Also, thank you for showing accesible sheet music! I've been trying to help my friend who's a dyslexic drummer, and we thought the only possible solution would be playing by ear, especially because it was all he really could do in Band.
It wasn’t even the QWERTY layout. It was alphabetical. Bastard went on a whole roundabout making a musical language based on a layout people have memorized intuitively and then made it unintuitive.
Currently finishing up a dissertation on contemporary notations for improvisers that necessarily covers a lot of the same ground as you did for this vid. Needless to say I'm hooting and seal-clapping at some of these name-drops (love to hear about my man Gevaert). There's still so few people doing notation scholarship well! Thanks for your contribution 🫡
Some great comments here, raising a lot of interesting technical questions about notating all sorts of things that I never really thought much about. This is one of those. I feel like the concept of "notations for improvisation" is something that would generate a fair bit of, shall we say, "spirited discussion" in some circles regardless of how well or poorly implemented it might be. :)
Yes. My focus is pretty niche in that I'm looking (basically exclusively) at well-defined notations that denote clear parameters for improvisatory expression (similar to the way a lead sheet has the power to convey parameters for jazz improvisation) rather than the much more-common "play what this makes you feel"-style graphic scores. Extant literature on the topic is pretty poor, sadly.@@sixstringedthing
"Chromatic staff" sounds like a magic item from a D&D campaign. And "the Muto Method" sounds like something that will definitely turn its inventor into a super villain.
Bard casts MUSITUDE at Knight. Knight's shield reflects MUSITUDE back at Bard. Nothing left of Bard but a pair of smouldering booties. All is once again, well in Neverwinter.
The biggest gate to learning music is that in order to do it, you HAVE to master it. It's like video game speedrunning. You have to become so familiar with situations and scenarios and patterns that you can see through what's on screen/page in front of you and do next to no interpretation, only react. So the main hurdle is getting up to that skill level. I think that's why tablature has been the only other competitor--it's readable for the intermediate player but is less useful for the master. But otherwise it's going to be almost impossible to have a smooth experience from beginner to expert in the same notation.
You are right. There is a lot to learn. But like plain language, we start with "Dick and Dora" books (or whatever your equivalent is), and build up. Eventually you can read Scientific papers or 19th century political commentry; both have arcane words that are used in uncommon ways. You can eventually interpret poetry, which is probably harder. If you start reading, expecting to understand Stoppard or Joyce immediately, you're just going to find "reading" very confusing. So, you progress through books written for learning readers, maybe comics, books you've seen as a film. With music reading, you start with simple exercises and pieces. Play recorder in primary school, trombone in high school band. Maybe you write out lead sheets for a song you've heard on the radio, or do simple arrangements for your scratch band. The more you do, the easier it gets. But you can't do it all at the beginning.
That's fair but I feel like (having been through the public music school system & music school) notation-based musicians & by-ear are often pretty separated by genre & ethos. Sure plenty do both but each have a skill often completely ignored by the other side
@@jtn191 Yes. If you're not consuming written music, it shouldn't matter what the "readers" are doing. And, I agree, "readers" could benefit from learning to "play by ear". "Readers" have the advantage of being able to play something almost instantly, as they don't (always) have to understand what thy're playing. "Hearers" have the advantage of being able to play without someone having to transcribe the dots (whioch can be tedious and labourious). My "hearing" has been good in theatre auditions, where I'm the accompanist. Some auditionees will be under prepared, and will expect you to just "play along". So I suggest songs, and eventually we find one we both know. I'm glad for my early ear training.
Most days I'm surrounded by people who are fairly young (late teens to early 20s), they've only played their instruments for 4 - 12 years, and sight reading music is something they all do surprisingly well. They are not masters. After the first few years, reading music becomes the easiest part of being a musician by far.
As a chess and music enthusiast, can I just say that I really enjoyed the narration of that Busnardo game? The little sweat beads at the end on Black's bishop and knight were just perfect!
One other thing: Western music notation, especially well-engraved sheet music, is just gorgeous to look at. The staves and bar lines are sturdy and rectangular, and then this architecture is decorated with elliptical note heads, sinuous clefs, gracefully curving slurs and ties, and various other beautifully calligraphed symbols and stylized shapes. Old sheet music that has yellowed with age is especially attractive. When I was taking music notation class at the conservatory, the teacher made us write all of our assignments on manuscript paper with India ink and calligraphy pens. If we wrote a wrong note or if there was a blot of misplaced ink on the page, we couldn't use Liquid Paper to fix it; we had to start again with a new sheet. This was in the 1970s, when it was OK for music profs to torture their students.
Very well articulated point regarding the aesthetic and graphical design aspect! Plus I think there is a cognitive perception side to the gorgeousness: if our brains are pleased to look at it they also find it easy to read and decipher and do it fast (again I think).
I agree that completed sheet music is satisfying to look at in its own way, but I don't think it's necessarily exclusive to sheet music either. As someone who uses several software programs to produce music, I get the same satisfaction from looking at completed project files in my DAW. And looking at other people's projects is a whole different kind of fascination with learning how they work and how it differs from your own process. It's all a visual representation of information over time. The only thing that really makes sheet music different in that regard is that it's black & white and you can print it on paper easily.
I would like to thank Musitude, not for doing anything actually productive or useful, but for making you go into the bit about most people not having the ability to make it through the initial learning of music. It put into prospective that my 10 years of playing music through school and college were a fundamental part of me, and pushed me to pull out my tuba and play on it for the first time in almost 3 years since I graduated. And, damnit, I loved it. Thanks for all of your amazing videos. Can't wait to see your next one
The main problem is that far too many people treat talent like something innate without understanding talent is a product of practice. Then there's the related problem of some people giving up when they don't think they learn something fast enough due to poor dilligence, poor adaptability, poor critical-thinking/problem-solving &/or lack of experience in something they can cross-apply.
@@qwyyfluut Ability is the product of training and practice. Talent is generally a modifier to how much practice is required for a given increase in ability (it also encompases a few other more complicated bits and pieces that affect the learning process). The issue is that people muddle the two concepts together.
@@qwyyfluut Traditional teaching insists on a simple approach to difficulty: do what you're told, the way you're told, over and over. With that approach, problem solving is of limited use: the only real problem is YOU. And that's been internalized to the point that "banging on it" is nearly a moral responsibility: it's what practice SHOULD be.
I grew up learning music in Jianpu and I think I learnt it faster that way, because it shows how notes are relative to each other rather than absolute pitches. It also lets me write music a lot faster, and I still use it when I need to write down music without a blank sheet music.
This is really fascinating. I'm very grateful to you for spending the time to make this up. I'm even more grateful to you for working on MuseScore, which i am a tireless promoter of. I have a few pointless comments. 1. A friend of mine was teaching a class of 12 year old to do a morris dance for May Day one year. Morris dancing is a kind of folk dancing designed to be equally well performed drunk or sober, though these children were all sober, i suspect. His musician was a talented classically trained violinist who had memorized the very simple tune, and was also sober, but didn't know much about folk dancing. He wanted to put the tune into the dancer's ears, so he said "Play me an A." He meant play the first 8 bars of the tune, but she played a single A note. There's an example in the wild of a note name and a letter being confused. 2. When I go to rehearsals playing the Eb alto saxophone, i am sometimes given concert music. So i have to transpose down a minor third. But sometimes i am given Bb tenor sax music, which is up a major second, because the guitar and piano players think a saxophone is a saxophone, right? So i have transpose down a fourth. But then most often the singer can't sing in the range it's written anyway. So i have to transpose another interval as will. This is all sight transposition, and it's common currency for horn players. Doesn't piano roll notation make this enormously more complicated? 3. Carrillo notation seems somewhat like figured bass. Seeing a note with 6/4 below it seems a lot like the examples of Carillo notation. Since it's numbers based, like Nashville numbers, it seems like it might be key independent as well. Both NNs and FB are notations designed by and for working musicians, so they are very efficient in what the optimize for. 4. Ireally like solfege. I've often thought it would be interesting to have a notation for modulation, so that "do" is always the middle line, but there is some way of saying "do goes down a major third here". Think of the bridge to "Have you Met Miss Jones," or the A of "Giant Steps" or all of "Joy Spring". 5. You could go further, do away with the staff entirely, and just use single letters for the solfege syllables, with lines above and below for accidentals. So the natural minor scale would be "d r _m f s _l _t d", where _m, or me, is m with an underbar. I don't know how you'd do rhythm, but it couldn't be that hard. Maybe use abc notation lengths. Good luck notating Charles Ives this way, but if you mostly play from lead sheets this would be a useful simplification, maybe. The Jerry Coker book "Readin' the Changes" use something like this all a reprise of the harmony for lead sheets. I often read and play from abc notation, though not for anything complicated, but usually not sight reading and never sight transposing. This would be similar to abc.
The system you proposed is very similar to stick notation. In this you have one line instead of a staff and all the notes go on the same line with solfège underneath. If you’ve ever seen the 333 book it’s in that. We love Kodaly ear training 💀
A system with relative pitch (e.g. a centre line representing the tonic, and key signatures indicating what the tonic is) would be very convenient for sight transposing, but would probably be harder for beginners and wouldn't work very well for atonal music.
I wish I could remember if the sax I grew up playing was Bb or Eb, I know it wasn’t C at least 😅 it doesn’t really matter in my adult playing, I just wish I knew haha
I've been using standard notation for 60 years. I think I'll stick with it. Something I found useful when I started using musescore was inputting music. It really helped improve my sight reading. No foreign language is easy to learn thoroughly and neither is music. It is a foreign language. Just stick with it. AND PRACTICE EVERY DAY! Nothing else will make you better. Your video is one of the most well researched, thorough, informative and enjoyable I've seen. 😊
Something I'd like to note as both a performer and a composer is the simple fact that being able to write in the margins of sheet music is the single most powerful thing that traditional western sheet music and physical sheet music in general has going for it. For instance as a performer there are dozens of notations on any stray piece of music about how the conductor and composer want this piece to be played, sometimes, no I'd even say often, being in direct conflict with one another. And as a composer not being able to easily write in the margins or add notes is the single most limiting thing about many proposed digital solutions, for example while western notation generally sucks at communicating timbre, the margins allow me to directly tell the performer how I want this to sound, although with the advent of technology I feel like this could go much farther, possibly even attaching recordings to notations in pieces so there's even less disconnect betwixt what I imagine the piece to sound like and what the performer will end up playing. Also I feel like dedicated music tablets or accessories to that effect could be potentially revolutionary in how music is performed, if properly implemented, even if all this thing did was automatically do page turns and store scores, it would be wonderful, as long as it allowed for the same aforementioned benefits of physical sheet music, like being able to write on it. So ultimately this isn't even my thoughts on notation rather the physical-digital divide as it currently stands and could stand in the near future. Also as a quick winge, tweaking the clefs to line up with each other exactly would be hell for anyone whose clef would be altered, but would be marvelous for teaching beginners and legibility in general.
I've been looking at options for music tablets recently, and there's already some pretty amazing stuff out there. The ones that have really caught my eye are basically scaled up versions of ebook readers with touch screens and styluses that let you scribble whatever you want on the digital sheets. Some even have options for a foot pedal that turns pages for you.
disagree Varese managed to handle timbre using traditional notation with new markings- similarly is the false argument over demisemitones or in American quarter steps- it is entirely possible to write classical Indian and Persian music using extended classical notation.
Fahad Siadat has some decent notation ideas on how to represent timbre with different note head shapes. There's a key at the beginning of the piece, but it could easily become standardized if wanted. Also, I agree on the very important practice of writing on your music. I have *pride* even in my music notes. It's a huge part of the process, and really could be an entire 101 class in itself.
"The less you know about it, the more you bitch about it". I have found this to be so true regarding learning anything that has a system. Language, Math, Music... This problem of "it's just too difficult" arises from those who try it for two seconds, have questions, but don't seek answers or simply don't try to understand the system, and throw their hands up and say, "this is just too hard and doesn't make sense" and expect the system to conform to them. To which, given a different system, painstakingly designed just for them, they would do the exact same thing. Yes, reading music isn't easy in the beginning, it takes practice. It's the same with learning Mandarin or French (if they are not your first language) or some indigenous dialect. The problem is not the system, it's the unwillingness to do the work to understand the system. I struggled with reading music for years - why? Because I never applied myself to it! After applying myself to it I am now a decent sight reader and an expert functional sight reader. There is nothing wrong with the system. It works perfectly for those of us who have taken the time to learn it.
Though sometimes, the standard conventions ARE illogical, but kept out of tradition. Like in trigonometry, the the -1 in sin^{-1}(x) means a function inverse, but the 2 in sin^2(x) means an exponent.
Surprise surprise, 'the ancient' virtues include courage, humility, faith, charity, prudence, diligence, etc etc... and fortitude! 💯Rome wasn't build in a day. The actual system, or a paradigm if you will, just happens to be the most neat, convertible and compact nomenclature - a result of thousands of transnational bright minds work over the millenia. Kind regards :)
Although the same argument could theoretically be levelled at the dismissal of and complaints about some of the alternatives in this video. They may seem difficult to read at first glance, or specific elements seem arcane, but how can we be certain they would remain so if we applied ourselves to learning them for the same amount of time we applied to learning notation? Sheet music similarly seems difficult to read at first glance to the uninitiated.
@@SvenTheViking The key point being made isn't that learning music notation is easy but like any other system or area it has its own conventions that have to learned. Often those who sharply criticize a system are often unwilling to put in the effort necessary to learn it.
jonnysterling That is a good analogy with languages. Being able to functionally speak a foreign language is one thing. Being able to read and write in that foreign language is a whole other level. Music is a language of emotions. And it is pretty much universal in that respect. Anyone anywhere can be affected by musical sounds. But learning to read, and then eventually write musical notation takes much longer and more dedication to learn the language at that level.
Outstanding video, as always. I'm fully expecting that after Braille and Jianpu notation compatibility in MuseScore we will get the ability to convert our scores into Farbige noten.
3:00 Why didn't the white player move the queen to G4 instead of moving the bishop? The black king is under direct attack that can't be blocked, the queen can't be taken, and the bishop prevents the king from moving up or right to safety. The line of attack of the bishop can be blocked (or the bishop taken), but that's of no use. I might be missing something, or the white player decided to mess with the opponent just for fun?
Queen controls e8 from h5. you want to prevent the king from escaping to e8 which is why it is lured to the center with Bd6+. Now we control all of the royal squares from behind the king with Qe8+ rather than from the far away g4 square further smothering the kings escape squares and clearing the way for d5#
@@PimpleJThomas unfortunately thats wrong. if Qg4+ or Qh3+, you relinquish the e8 square and blacks king can safely retreat there. i confirmed with an engine that Be6+ is the only move that forces mate and doesnt immediately lose whites advantage
if you dont have Disruptor Brain, making a personal-use notation system is a great way to understand the tradeoffs at play (especially if you're already a musician and know some theory). i made my own to suit my needs based on sacred harp shape notes, which i use for jotting down melodies while im working on songs. i very deliberately had to decide what it would and would not be useful for. lots of Disruptors and Reformers, i think, have not considered that their uses and needs are not the same as everyone's, and they'd probably be pretty happy simply using their system for their own personal notes were it not for ego getting ahead of them.
I think it's very interesting that you mentioned that most students don't start with sheet music and instead are put off by their unfamiliarity with an instrument; I was put off by both as a child. Without naming names I went to one of the worst schools in the UK which failed multiple Ofsted reports. Somehow, we still had a music curriculum, and for some reason they used very old sheet music to teach with. It was both immensely frustrating and disappointing as a young boy to be given a quick and dirty intro to sheet music, and then be expected to just read and play it normally. Most lessons just devolved into our tutor focusing on the two girls who were both able to do this, and just completely ignoring the rest of us. As lessons got more complex and my skills remained underdeveloped, both unable to understand what I was supposed to play and also how to play it, I just gave up. Any passion I'd once had for music as a subject left me as I "realized" that I was just too stupid to "get it", that I was never meant to play piano. I proceeded to spend one and a half years just kind of dicking around, an experience I'm sure many can relate to when it comes to public music education in the UK. I am somewhat apprehensive to share this story as I recognize that learning music in a public school in year 7/8 isn't really the kind of musical education you're getting at (tutoring), but I shared it regardless because of the notation thing. Ultimately the reason I gave up was multifacteted and notation wasn't the only reason, but I still felt like sharing my story which by the sound of it is very uncommon. If you read this far then thanks for your time. Please leave with the funny mental note of sitting a 12 year old in front of a piano (an instrument he's never touched) and giving him twinkle twinkle little star sheet music (something he's never seen before) and telling him to play it perfectly. At the time it was very confusing but in retrospect it's very amusing in a sort of sadistic way I suppose.
Wow, you really had a rough go about music. A shame you have never been able to learn since. I was basically pushed to learn music (when i wasn’t really into it) as a kid which garnered a distaste for playing music in me. I stopped pretty early. It took until i was 20 (just a few years ago) for me to try to learn and I just kinda gave up on the music theory aspect of it as all I could remember were the utmost basics. The thing that got me into learning was video game music. Because of its roots in 8 bit tracks, a lot of iconic themes have very distinct and memorable melodies that you can just brute force your way into playing. With enough failures, you eventually get something that sounds similar to the thing you were trying to do. I’m not going to say it isn’t frustrating, because it is: it took me two years to learn a single song. But man did i get better. And that entire process of repetitive failure has kinda numbed me to failure, which like, massively paid off? I basically taught myself to improvise? I’m learning more and more, albeit incredibly slowly. And while I can read notation, it takes so long for me that I generally forgo it. I use piano rolls on youtube to teach me the piece and I engrave it into my memory as deeply as I can. So like, idk, get any fear of failure, of sounding bad out of your system. Literally. Play as shittily as you can, it’s literally how i gathered the motivation to play. If it sounds good, enjoy it. If it sounds bad, enjoy it. But most importantly, engage in it if you feel like you want to. Don’t want to? That’s fine. But if you hum along to songs, or try to match the rhythm of music you hear, hey, swing with that.
We were expected to read fluently way too early in my experience as well. I had to write the names of the notes above them for a very long time. Edit: I went on to study music composition in college though. This aspect of things made me feel bad for taking so long to adapt, but I knew I wasn't the only one, and I knew I'd eventually get it.
Hearing someone struggle learning music theory because of someone else’s inability to properly teach basic fundamentals and building blocks is always disheartening, and I’m sorry that was your story. I never had the privilege of taking a music education through courses or tutoring, and in hindsight it wasn’t emphasized nearly enough (I personally believe basic music theory should be a mandatory curriculum at an early stage, as it carries so much cultural weight throughout history). I spent years training my ear with guitar shapes and scales and eventually came back to music theory as an aid to my musical development, and Holy Cow everything quickly came together. The turning point for me was the Circle of Fifths. Finally understanding how to identify key signatures, as well as how and why the key of D has 2 sharps in its major scale, how Sharps ascend in 3rds and descend in 4ths as you go clockwise, and how Flats descend in 3rds and ascend in 4ths as you go counterclockwise, how utilizing all of these concepts made understanding how modes work so much easier, and the list goes on. I still consider myself an intermediate guitar player by “accepted” standards, but having that musical vocabulary is so incredibly invaluable, it makes me wish I’d have taught it to myself when I was still in elementary.
One main reason that TAB is so popular is that you can write it out easily in a simple text file without the need for any complex music-setting software. And it's mainly used for popular music where the tradition is that you learn the songs by listening and there is no specific expectation that you play every note as written down by a composer. The TAB is just a help to give you a idea how to play a song, but the rest is up to you. "It's rock and roll, you can do what you want".
Tabs work great for guitar. But he is right, they are holding you back to progress musically. You learn to reproduce a piece but you don’t really know what you are doing. Ear training for intervalls and chords, sing what you want to play and play what you sing, improvising to backing tracks, technical exercises are much more important. When I learn a new song I’ll still use tabs because I’m lazy. Would be much better to pick up a song by ear though.
@@TheHesseJames and as much as I find tab useful, I can’t look at tablature and hear in my head. With “standard” music notation, we can look at it and hear what is going on visually
@@TheHesseJames i can read conventional notation from playing the piano and singing. I also know some basic theory. Using tab for bass guitar was a concious choice. It was something new and I wanted to try it out. So far I haven't felt it has held me back. Now that I'm proficient in bass tab I can play a song on the piano using tab for my left hand and the melody in conventional notation ifor my right hand. Once I had learnt all the notes on the fretboard I just found myself doing this without much trouble.
@@calicoskybandI use the combined notation and tab view in Guitar Pro, basically using the tab as an extended fingering cheat sheet. I can audiate tab pretty much as well as notation though (unless it’s in a funky tuning).
On Clefs around 44:00, something you might find interesting is that in Spanish clefs are named after notes: Treble is called "Clave de Sol" = "G Clef", Bass is "Clave de Fa" = "F Clef", Alto is "Clave de Do" = "C Clef", and they are centered around the note it references to. So you can easily know that the pointy bit of "G Clef" is pointing to the G note, the two dots on "F Clef" are pointing to F and the pointy bit of the "C Clef" is pointing to C.
Julian Carrillo's system is making me think about numpad notation members of fighting game communities use, it's wild how it's that same type of "hard to interpret at first but really elegant once you grasp how it works"
Some additional info about the Jianpu notation system you've mentioned in the video, which is still very popular in China (which you also mentioned already). While it can be refered as "Numbered Musical Notation", Jianpu (简谱), the first character of this word 简(jian) actually stands for "simple" or "simplified" here, so the name's actually meaning is "simple notation" or "simplified notation". It's common to see using Jianpu to write down the vocal line (e.g. lyric) of a curtain song or the melody line of a monophonic instrument, but it's more very common to see Jianpu is used together with guitar TAB or with a standard notation. It's not really a replacement for the current standard music notation, and it's also not intended to be a replacement for the standard notation but to work together with standard notation or TAB very well. So it's still a pretty useful notation system and thus widely used in (at least) China. Especially when writing sheet music for pop songs. Anyway, great video as always! 👏
jianpu is great for quickly transcribing melodies, since you don't have to draw staves, just numbers, lines, a dots. I sing in a choir where the director often teaches folk songs and expects us to learn by ear, jianpu comes in handy! And as you said, useful for monophonic instruments. Every hulusi book I've had were purely in jianpu. It doesn't matter which key any instrument is in, everyone can use the same score without transposing.
When I was gigging in Taiwan I learned Jianpu for some performances. My favorite part of using it is that it's easy to transpose, since the numbers are just scale degrees. So, an advantage it had over standard notation was once the singer told us what key they wanted the song in, we didn't have to rewrite anything.
As someone who took a music class in middle school that was all about reading notes, aced that class, and then proceeded to never get into playing any instruments, I can attest to the fact that reading the notes was not the issue. Instruments are difficult and I just didn't have the patience to work through that.
As somone who can play several instruments and also learned in school how notation works, I always hated it. It never felt intuitive or easy to read. As an adult I tried several times to get better at it, but always gave up. I also always felt that learning instruments, or even merely playing them by notation just made it harder. There is a reason most guitar players can't even read notes.
As someone he was misquoting on that matter, I can attest to the fact that he totally made it up that I stated reading notation was the most difficult part. I did no such thing. Straw men are easy to defeat.
@@Shinkajo It's supposed to be hard. you have to put in the time and not give up. This has worked since the middle ages and suddenly people find it too hard?
@@curious011lol dumb. Isomorphic key layouts are superior. There's no reason to feel good about learning a badly made system. Certainly no reason to make a toxic holier than thou comment.
@@zoned7609 In music we're _humbler_ than thou, not holier. If you practice harder than anybody, you win the Humility Cup. Then you can be as toxic as you please and still get cred for "telling it like it is."
GREAT VIDEO. So good, you inspired me to sign up for Nebula via your link. I was fortunate enough to learn to read music in school as a child. I love standard notation, in fact, I may be one of the only people who programs MIDI tracks with it, instead of a piano roll. But it has a few quirks that I'd love to see fixed. Here's where I ended up, after watching the whole video in one sitting: Use the chromatic staff. The intervals will become second nature, don't worry. Replace sharp and flat markings by making the bottom of each note a square or a diamond if it's an accidental, round if it's natural. Way more space for clarity. Yes, a chromatic staff makes it redundant, but it lets traditional readers adapt faster. (I also love the idea of the note's bottom having its letter on there, that was cool as a teaching tool). Replace clef symbols with a number for the octave represented. Logical improvements without the disruptor B.S.
I've been building my own music notation for conworlding reasons. It's pretty amazing how tightly packed staff notation is and you don't notice until you try rolling your own.
This. There is so much information that can be encoded in a single measure of staff notation. Plus annotation; e.g., fingerings - which can be difficult or impossible to indicate in many proposed alternatives to traditional notation. Some of this power is because of the amount of refinement over the last 300-400 years. But with that refinement already done, it's going to be hard for any alternative to have the power of traditional notation.
A few things (I think) Tantacrul missed: 1) traditional western music notation works remarkably well for communicating transposable, tonal musics. When comparing to something 12-tone based like Carrillo's system, you realized that traditional notation lends itself well to quick transpositions in tonal music; you can read the pitch/interval relationships rather than absolute pitch. I think Carrillo's system might actually be beneficial in non-tonal and complex contexts but traditional notation is simpler in 90+% of the music people consume. When I teach beginning choral musicians note reading, I actually don't use pitch names for a couple years. It's exclusively Solfege and based in a system of reading patterns (as you might read words vs. letters). If they know where "Do" is on the staff, then they can read patterns around it. "Ode to Joy" will always start on "Mi" regardless of how high or low your starting pitch is. 2) the "Joy Barrier" that our Musitude friends talked about are less about notation and more about how we teach and are taught to learn music. Just like we don't expect babies to have to read letters and words before they start to speak, we shouldn't start with notation to learn to play music (thank you Pestalozzi for being the foundation of progressive music education). Indeed there are countless incredible musicians out there that don't formally read a notation system. Music is fundamentally an aural art form, not a visual art form. As a music educator of both beginning instrumental and vocal musicians I try to begin with playing by ear, and then connect those sounds to symbols. By having students perform musical patterns by ear before seeing them, I'm actually able to get them to being fluent readers faster (teaching reading in 6/8 has never been easier!). Beginner's technical abilities (especially with vocalists) is almost always more advanced than their visual literacy. If anyone has ever looked at the transcription of a pop musician's vocals, you'd probably know what I mean. Countless people can sing along with Taylor Swift after listening, but if you asked them to sightread a transcription without knowing it beforehand... it'd be messy. If we tie that back to learning a language- most people can speak more fluently than they can write in their mothertongue. 3) Traditional western music notation is *probably* held back by the intricate system of how music is communicated (with letter names, etc.). In otherwords, it's one small part of a complex world of western music that is slowly developed over time for various needs, etc. If we want to meaningfully create a more accessible system, it would probably mean that we would need to redesign everything regarding music literacy as we know it- and that's just not going to happen. Just like how the English language will never and can never be changed to include a standardized system of letter-combinations to pronunciations. When Tantacrul discussed the issue between Musitude's pitch naming system in relationship between the A-G system, that I think is a biased comparison (as a matter-a-fact way, not in a "bad" biased way), as it assumes that other systems have be be rooted in our frame of reference of western music. Sure, A and A' are the same note an octave a part, but *why?* Just because Pythagoras cut a string in half and decided 1:2 was the ratio of an octave, and 2:3 was a fifth, etc.? It's a very specific worldview that is based on physical characteristics about how sound is produced, but who is to say that there wasn't a different way foundations of music literacy could have been developed in history that might have resulted in a differen system of notation?
Interesting read. I got into sound/midi synthesis with no musical background, and I'd like to share my physical/mathematical view on it. I arrived at something like Carrillo's system BECAUSE it is so easy to relate to other keys. You can just consider 0 to 12 an offset from your key (and potentially also allow negative numbers). I find it quite annoying that in western notation you can't just offset neither the notes by name, nor visually. Also at the risk of saying something you (or others) already know - I found it quite fascinating that a lot of choices of notes / octaves are not invented, but have mathematical reason - regarding your last paragraph. An octave = 2:1 is a very natural thing: The waveform repeats exactly after 2 oscillations of the higher frequency note, it's the shortest possible common oscillation of 2 frequencies. From the perspective of the lower note, the higher one is even nothing more than added timbre / altering the shape of the oscillation - as the combined wave repeats with the same frequency regardless of this added overtone. So they are essentially somewhat the same tone - it makes a lot of sense to have the same name, and for an octave to appear as a fundamental concept. And you can follow this idea of a short common oscillation period to find other frequencies that have a special relationship to each other, and this more or less leads to the system of notes we use: Dividing an octave into 12 is a good match, because you get a few good common oscillations between notes - with 7 half-tones 2^(7/12) = 1.498 for 3:2, and 5 half-tones 2^(5/12) = 1.33 for 4:3, and 4 half tones 2^(4/12) = 1.26 for almost 5:4, and 3 half tones 2^(3/12) = 1.189, for almost 6:5. - a fair amount of the short common oscillations. It doesn't match them perfectly but 12 is still a really good divisor of an octave for that reason - assuming you want fixed notes/frequencies in the first place. For me personally, the numbers 0, 3, 5, 7 now convey more of a musical idea to me than named notes, surprisingly. One more benefit is that relationships like 7 = 12 - 5, so 7 being 5 half tones away from the higher octave again, really pop. It might not be better for practical purposes, but it is somewhat natural (to me).
"you realized that traditional notation lends itself well to quick transpositions in tonal music; you can read the pitch/interval relationships rather than absolute pitch." -- unfortunately, this just isn't correct at all because of B->C and E->F only being a semitone.
So stoked to hear that the reason I can't learn piano is because the notation that I've been reading for 12 years is too confusing! I'm sure all my problems will be solved when I switch to something more intuitive. But seriously, did no one stop to consider people who already know how to play one instrument but can't learn another? It completely disproves their whole point that notation is the main problem. Also, I'm surprised that people consider piano roll notation to be more intuitive. I don't even use it for composing. I hate trynna figure out how to write more complex syncopated rhythms when I can barely tell how long the note is gonna be before I hit play.
This is exactly what all the beginners would think after watching this video - they aren't good because of the notation. I'd say this wasn't the conclusion you were meant to reach...
I agree! I really wish I could just use regular sheet music notation in those programs because (especially as a non-pianist) the piano roll notation is just so ugly and hard to read.
A mammoth presentation . Your coverage of other baffling systems makes the current system look refreshingly simple. A good compromise and easy to read at speed on any instrument . . I will stop whinging forthwith . Good job.
You did WISE to put in that black screen at 1:03:00. Gave me just enough time to stare, process what I just heard, pause, and fall to the floor flailing and laughing like a madman.
When I tried learning the Guzheng (21-stringed traditional Chinese zither), we used 1 through 7 (plus sharps/flats). 1 was the root and octaves were indicated with dot(s) above/below the number, relative to middle C The cool thing about this is that it's irrespective of the key, so you can play the same melody automatically transposed wherever you want. edit: 15:40, 1:11:19 you mentioned it in the vid 😂. Jianpu 簡譜, that's exactly what we used
Fun parallel: the Chapman Stick works in the same fashion-because there are no open strings and every interval between strings is the same for each hand, you basically learn a small number of hand shapes and fingering patterns and then transpose them up or down the fretboard or across from string to string.
Disclaimers: I only skimmed the video, because I've seen a lot of these over the last year or two. But my two (halfway-informed) cents (and obviously the author knows a lot about the subject, considering Musescore): Notionation in general definitely should not die, because the most efficient way of communicating about music is in a text-like format. But modern staff notation also isn't universal, because some instruments require just too much that isn't available (try learning the guqin through a modern book using staff notation! it's much easier to just memorize a few Chinese characters and use the right notation). But no matter what nifty ideas anyone comes up with, getting them adopted is a whole 'nother issue (same reason people still use Windows when all they really need is MS Office, except with hundreds of years of gradual standardization instead of a few decades). So rather than "notation must die" (I know, brings in the clicks) I might say "staff music must be open to larger reforms and improvements, with input from ethnomusicologists, HID/UX experts, and modern genre composers." But that wouldn't fit in a RUclips video title.
So much of what you said feels so intuitive already to me as a musician. It's insane how much obvious stuff gets missed by people who want t0 pretend they know what they're talking about. Notating music is for the performer. You'd think one of the most successful video game developers would have a better understanding of user interface...
Super true. If you want to play Mary Had a Little Lamb, any notation method will do. If you want to play LITERALLY NEARLY ANYTHING HUMANS CAN THINK OF, our current notation methods are great. Not perfect, but pretty freaking great.
@@reallyanotheruser7290 No they purposefully try to design stimulating but inconveniant UI to exploit your dopamine cycles. Every piece of media you see nowadays is optimized to waste as much time as allowed without giving any substance.
This video makes me grateful to live in a time where I have access to a system which, while not perfect, has been refined incrementally over centuries to allow me and so many others to learn, share, and teach completely new and previously unheard music. Music notation is a gift which, once you learn how to speak the language, unlocks worlds of possibility. Music in my opinion is not something simply to be consumed, but to participate in - and a specific, concrete record of instructions on how to perform a piece is so invaluable. Combine that with the accessibility of the digital age and we are truly blessed to be able to share so much varied and wonderful creative art with people all over the world. Thanks Tantacrul for a fascinating and informative video!
Another argument against chromatic staff could be that if your piece of music is reasonably stable from a tonality pov, flats/sharps will be used very incidentally (generating minimal discomfort) whereas in a chromatic staff, half the space will not be used at all (inefficient) since the chromatic deviations are fairly rare.
That was my first thought. Most music is pretty diatonic and inventing a whole notation system just to accommodate chromaticism that's fairly infrequent seems inefficient. Like, there's a reason sharps and flats in the middle of a bar are called accidentals! They're not the norm!
@@linusorri Might be, at root, but given how much music is produced without knowledge of the notation system, I don't think it's as influential that way as you might think. Plus, diatonicity came before the notation system, temporally - just listen to that Gregorian chant.
@@linusorri That is ridiculous because it is well proven that humans enjoy diatonic music (aka music with a central tone, aka key signature). Pretty much NO ONE enjoys non-tonal music or fully chromatic music: which is why piano roll/DAW roll is a dumb solution to the needs of music.
@@linusorri I'm pretty sure this is one bit of history that isn't a "the chicken or the egg" problem. The music definitely came before the systems of notation that were invented to describe it, although I take the point about standards playing a big part in defining how systems are subsequently used and how they continue to develop. I'd argue the OP's core point though. Most Western/European music is diatonic but there's a hell of a lot of music in the world that is neither. In some cultures a chromatic staff could be quite useful; assuming they didn't already have some other native form of notation for their music. But on the other hand, perhaps a pentatonic staff would be most useful in cultures that heavily use those scales and oh look... we've now got three different standards! :)
Thank you for creating such an amazing video based on a topic which I have been considering seriously for so many decades. When I interviewed legendary jazz drummer and clinician John Riley as part of my Master's thesis, I expressed certain views about the limitations of our Western notation system, he simply replied with: "Does it help?". Off course I responded in the affirmative, and it really moved me to consider more deeply the kind of quite critical disposition I had about our notation system. I think certain people are wired differently and unfortunately in my case for whatever reason it has meant that though I understand music notation, how it functions, and can write and read it, I have a total inability to sight read. I can't make the connection or interpretation required to read music in real time while playing at the same time. It is a kind of left to right brain thing or obstacle that I don't seem to be able to overcome. I marvel at other drummers that can read in this way. It has impacted my music career quite profoundly, because I know that being the musician that I am I could have gotten so many gigs (whether live or session) had I been able to overcome this inability to sight read and therefore would have moved so far ahead in the industry than I have been able to date. In fact one of my lecturers pointed this out to me when I was doing my bachelors in college, telling me that if I really wanted to get ahead which I should, due to my musical ability, I needed to become a proficient sight reader, that was twenty years ago. I remember as a teenager when I first started taking drum lessons and began learning to read, it took me a little while to realize that where a note happens in time is based on the length of the note that preceded it. That the note symbol itself did not define or dictate where the note was in time. Initially I thought that single eighth notes always started on the "and", it took a while for it to register that any note symbol can be anywhere in time and that the whole structure of the notation system as it relates to rhythm is based on note lengths, and therefore where the note sounds is dependent on the length of the note which came before it ad infinitum. Well what is first or comes first in a piece of music, what is primary, pitch or rhythm? That is really interesting to consider and depending on the answer, it could define the direction that any notation system heads in. Off course the fact that our notation system seems to have come into being in order to facilitate the dissemination of choral chant, it is obvious in that context that note pitch and length would be a primary consideration, and since the rhythmic structure of Gregorian chant is not dense, it is completely logical that the notation system started out not considering whether rhythm or pitch and its relative length should be taken as the primary context for developing a notation system. In fact at the time there was no way of anticipating that music would evolve in such a way that rhythm would become so important in our Western pantheon. If we look at other cultures, like India for instances, their approach in the context of an oral tradition of pedagogy treated the rhythmic and melodic components that make up music with equal importance, as did the African traditions, but not in the West. So as a young drummer concerned with rhythm, I did not initially register and I guess my first drum teacher did not take the time to explain to me, or realized I had not understood how the notation system functioned. So what about answering my question above, what is primary in a music score pitch or rhythm? I strongly lean towards rhythm, because prior to any pitch being assigned to any notes in a musical work, those notes arise in time and create a rhythm, even if no formalised pitch is assigned to them, a rhythm is created first and foremost, it exist prior to pitch, melody or harmony, it is foundational and that rhythm will exist irrespective of the note length, since if we clap out the rhythm all notes will fundamentally be of equal lengths, defined by the very quick attack and decay of each note, the attack being the place where the note arises in the time line. So if rhythm exist prior to pitch in musical works (though one could argue a handclap has a pitch, but even than it would be just one pitch of pretty much equal length), would it not make sense to have a notation system in which the symbols used define where the note is in time, before it defines the pitch and the length of the note. This adjustment using dedicated symbols could easily be made using our current notation system by changing the meaning and orientation to the note symbols we already use, and in doing so, in my view would make the reading of music so much simpler, because with one glance at any bar of music one would know immediately where the notes are in time, and using such dedicated symbols would mean the need for rest symbols could be eradicated by 95%. Here is another issue considering the kind of contradictions within our notation system and music theory and how they interrelate or are interdependent. Let's think about time signatures, which are also based on note lengths, looking at the most common time signature in contemporary Western music 4/4 time, that signature means four notes in a bar with each note having the value of a quarter note, so what is the value of a quarter note? Well that is a dependent measurement that only achieves definition or comes into being once a tempo has been decided upon. What is tempo? Tempo is the arising and creation of consistent manufactured time created within an infinite silent space, based on the speed of repetitive consistent pulses arising in equal measured distance from one another thereby creating a "feeling" of time, based on repetition. Is there perfect time? Can time even be perfect? What is the source from which it arises? Is the feeling of time a human creation, merely conceived in our human limited universe of perception, based on the uniqueness of the mechanisms of our human nervous systems, or does it exist objectively? Therefore, do non humans experience pulses and time similarly to humans beings? When a cock crows does it experience its crowing in a rhythmically and melodically identifiable repeatable way, as a human being does? Getting back to our humble quarter note it becomes obvious that the quarter note has no inherent definable existence, it is a dependent conceptual construct, which needs to be underpinned by a variety of other constructs such as pulse and rhythm, which makes a pretty strong argument that note length is an overlay on structures that must already be in existence, interpreted and felt for a quarter note to have any meaning, and for it to become a conduit for musical communication. In that sense the way we conceive of time signatures or more precisely the conceptual symbols we use to be communicative about what they are, are completely untrue or at least quite ambiguous, since there is no actual difference if we were to clap the pulse in any time signature, with cycles of four pulse for example such as 4/4, 4/8, 4/12, 4/16, 4/20, ect, irrespective of the tempo, if clapped they will all sound the same, and even with a melodic instrument that can sustain notes. There it is so many unanswered questions and ambiguity exist in our notation system, yet it works. It is a representational communication about music, not music itself which is so mysterious, because for one obvious thing, music is a series of event moving in linear time, but music itself is actually experienced as a totally. So of course music being such a mystery, any symbolic representation is bound to be limited. However, I think it could be simplified by changing the foundation orientation on which it is based. Keep its symbols, just re-interpret them such that the note symbols themselves communicate explicitly where they start on the timeline without being dependent on the previous note symbol, and negotiate the symbolic communication of how long the note is afterwards, this could be done by having the head of the note coloured in or not to define its length. Maybe I am just a complainer because I have difficulty making it work for me, while millions of others have had no problem making it work for them, and it would be an almost impossible experiment to create in order to determine which system most people find easier, so I guess I will never know, but my intuition tells me that using dedicated symbols for where a note exists in time relative to the pulse would be easier to read than the system we have in place currently.
Literally one if the best comments I have ever read on RUclips, bro you're a legend thanks for starting the conversation with evidence, facts and even valid questions, may you forever play, think and share the joy with the world 🎉🎧
@@Nadanubia Thanks so much, that is very generous of you to say, I am glad you enjoyed my response which was easy for me, since this topic has been part of my musical process and consideration for such a lond period of time, thanks again Alan.
@@Thequornsdrummingworld There are 16 or more places where a note might come in, not counting triplets and stuff. It would get very messy very fast putting a time marker on every note. Let the previous notes be your guide.
Congratulations for making this video. For my part, I think a music notation system’s reason to be is to support the musical ear. This is why standard notation still exists because it does just that. By looking at such a score, with some small amount of training and experience, one starts hearing the music.
Jazz lead sheet is really interesting to me. Having a flexible notation is really cool because the performer interprets not only how the notes are played but which note are played, as long as they provide a generally similar function. Generally there is the harmony, (the chords or changes) and the melody. First off, the melody of autumn leaves, played like it is written is quite easy and not rhythmically complex. But as part of the jazz tradition, players interpret the melody and change the rhythm, articulation and even potentially the notes, adding ornamentation and variation. So the autumn leaves melody is basically played differently by everyone but is still easily recognizable as one thing: autumn leaves. Take as an example Chet baker’s version or the miles Davis quintet’s version or bill evans version, it’s clear to an informed listener it’s the same song although the experience of each recording is very different and so the listener can listen to the “same song” 20 times in a row and get a different experience each time. Secondly, the chords are seen as a general recommendation and using substitutions in moderation is encouraged to keep the music alive and to hear an individual’s expression. As an example, II-V-I is a series of chords that describe tension and resolution through movement. So, as long as you embody the tension that builds in the V chords and release it (or not) in the tonic, you can basically do whatever you want when accompanying (comping) this type of notation can be very objective and leave less space for interpretation, or it can be a very general suggestion. When a C7#11 chord is written, the notes aren’t prescribed, a sound or tonality is. That is, of a dominant chord with a #11 as tension, a player, depending on the melody can add a b9 or a 13 if they want. It’s pretty cool
that's true! even in most big band settings, the entire rhythm section is just playing off of husks of their parts, they generally see rhythms, they see some chords, and the rest is improv'd from there! Comping is super interesting, as it means literally every performance ever of a piece will be different, not even to mention solos, which are literally just based off of chords on your paper and listening down to the bass.
Figured bass allowed for much the same sort of improvisation, it was popular in the baroque period. Jazz cats are constantly reinventing the wheel and thinking they got there first.
@@rjlchristie I never said anything about jazz cats reinventing the wheel. I'm very aware of figured bass as well as the tradition of improvising from so many composers. Bach, Mozart, Barrios, Chopin and many more would improvise great pieces. It's unfortunate that you would place that character onto me, in fact I have reached level 9 in classical guitar at the royal conservatory. Modest achievement I know, but still, I do also have a great passion for classical and romantic era classical music. I simply wanted to raise a point the video hadn't mentioned with no claim of superiority. Anyways, it's true that figured bass allows for much of these kinds of improvised elements. Thank you for reminding me!
As a professional classical pianist/opera conductor, my biggest complaint with standard notation is that it puts us in rhythmic and stylistic boxes. We get that trained into us from the beginning as children because of the visual nature of the notes on the page. The Lego brick notation causes many of us classical musicians to play rigidly and without organic fluidity. For example, in Italian opera there is much rubato and variation of tempi that all comes from the text. Puccini tried to notate it but unless you speak and understand Italian, you won't really do the rubato convincingly. We classical musicians are trained as "I see 8th note, I play strict 8th note"...pianists and symphonies are notorious about that. Sure, it's an 8th note, but there are various types of 8th notes, depending on the context. I've learned much about the space between notes as well as horizontal movement from my jazz and pop/contemporary commercial music colleagues. What they do can't be successfully notated in the present system without creating a huge Jackson Pollack of markings on the page. Just goes to show that knowing the style and traditions of the music are more important than the limited info in the notation. It's like Google Maps, you get the driving instructions, but you still have to get in the car and drive it with all the subtle variations of speed.
Learning how to use jazz modal theory to improv around the underlying chord progression (or just general structure) of a piece, and then letting yourself experiment with rhythmic and tonal/interval patterns is a great way to break out of that box. As you get better, you can stretch the period of time before you resolve the break from the time signature longer and longer while maintaining a coherent and pleasing run. I'm sure you know this, but this is how I've helped some undeniable virtuosos I've met out of the constraints you've described. I used to be intimidated when some of them would be excited to play with me, because of the vast discrepancy between their chops and mine- but I eventually saw that I had something I could share with them that could unleash a whole new level of expression for them. (I am a fully self/taught pianist, starting by ear- who eventually learned that I had been slowly re-discovering jazz modal theory on my own.) There's nothing more rewarding than taking a competent classical pianist, voicing the chords for the 12-bar blues in a fun way, then telling them to just _do shit_ sticking to the pentatonic blues scale for the chords root, and watching their eyes *immediately* light up as they discover an ability they never knew they had.
But is this an issue with notation? Rubato is stylistic and deeply personal; that's why we have conductors (I mean, what else are they good for? :-) You could make the same argument about alphabets--they don't give us any information about the affect for a Shakespeare sonnet or soliloquy, but they certainly give us the building blocks, and directors and actors take it from there. And in that sense it's kind of neat that there wasn't a notation whereby Shakespeare could tell us exactly what he had in mind; then we would simply be strictly playing his 8th notes.
@@KR-ll4dj Doesn't the Conductor often resort to singing to illustrate an interpretation? I agree that in Opera especially part of one's eye must be kept on the Conductor.
I'd say Guitar music exemplifies this more than any other instrument. You can play the same piece, even a solo, 20+ different ways and positions. Making real time sight reading almost impossible. Unless it's a basic Chord chart. TAB was one of the best innovations for solving this problem.
Fantastic presentation. As a self taught guitarist who later went on to do a degree in music (as a mature student) specializing in composition, counterpoint and analysis, I did grapple with learning guitar tab and later standard notation. I think both these systems are great once the time and effort is put into learning them. The Tab system for guitar solves a problem which doesn't arise on piano, which is the multiple choices the player has to play the same note. For example the note E above middle C on a piano (not forgetting that guitar notation is transposed down an octave) could be played on any one of 5 strings on a standard classical guitar. As for the 5 line staff we use today, it is designed to fit the diatonic scale in a similar way to a piano keyboard layout. I think that is something which is overlooked by non musician technicians. To use a full chromatic staff to play tonal music is wasteful of space and musically redundant as it provides a space for all the notes which don't belong to the key and thus are unlikely to be used. I am now subscribed to your channel and look forward to watching your other videos. Ps. I come from Dublin. Judging by your accent, I am assuming you do too.
There is common use of a Roman numeral above the staff to indicate fret 'position' in many classical guitar scores. E.g , III means the 3rd fret position (first finger at the 3rd fret). Other indications are small numerals for fretting fingers and p, i, m and a for r.h. or plucking fingers. They're used sparingly in a lot of cases, but are just as effective as tablature with a little experience, plus all the other benefits of standard notation.
We have a similar thing in brass insturments we call alternative fingerings. For example on a Euphonium (which is in the key of Bb) I can play our middle F either on the 2nd partial open (no valves down), or on the third partial with 1st and 3rd valve (or 4th valve) down. As you can sort of think of our partials as individual strings on a guitar that just operate in inverse (you pluck a string it makes a tone, you want the tone higher you decrease the length of the string with your finger... on a brass instrument it is the opposite, you buzz on a partial, and if you want to make the tone lower you increase the length of the air column by depressing a valve)
drumming is more about the count. Yes you have to know what to hit but if you hit the wrong thing and still are in time not a dealbreaker. Also, most people do not know you have to tune your kit. If you don't it will sound like crap. This is one of the many ways traditional theory will assist you. Seriously, even drummers need to know it, not as much as guitarists but yeah you better know the basics if you drum! Ever see someone with mad skills sit behind a kit and it is in time but sounds horrible? That is likely an un-tuned kit.
When I was a 12 years old flute student, I had a chinese friend who made me interested in dizi, the traditional chinese flute, so I ordered it from china and thaught myself to play it (it's actually quite similar to the flute). I found many chinese tunes written in jianpu online so I also learned that, and I have to say it's very straight forward for reading simple melodies
A few more observations from a fellow music history/theory nerd: - Did you describe guitar tablature as a recent innovation? It developed alongside standard notation in its own right - there are lute tablature scores from the Renaissance (and possibly earlier - my background is more keyboard-based so I’m unsure when the earliest tablature records appear). Especially in Spain. - The 5-line staff with clef became standardised because the distance between the note one ledger-line below the staff through to one ledger-line above encompasses the standard vocal range for each type of voice once you chuck in the appropriate clef (C4 - A5 for Treble; D3 - B4 for Alto; B2 - G4 for Tenor; E2 - C4 for Bass). If there are fewer lines there are more ledger lines needed; more lines just get more confusing, especially with multiple parts on the same page. 5 is the sweet spot for melodies within a human vocal range. - Figured bass notation, lead sheets, or lyric sheets with chord symbols could also get honourable mentions here. All of them have quirks that are intuitive to some and completely weird to others. - I am not a fan of the idea of going completely digital, personally. THAT idea does end up risking elitism/gatekeeping while access to technology remains uneven. It’s certainly a useful tool in the way you’ve described it, but shouldn’t be the end-goal, imo. Nothing will ever top the 1:1 human dynamic of the teacher/pupil relationship when it comes to sharing musical knowledge.
Guqin notation (in China) has been evolving for around 1500 years, and is a form of tablature. That's the oldest that I know of, though in the western world, the organ (!) has the earliest known tablature, from 1300. And absolutely agreed about not going full digital. For the same reason, the idea of color as part of notation would never catch on - I can't count the amount of times I handwrote out a bit of music before a show, or printed things out on a black & white printer, or pulled up a music PDF on an eBook reader. Music needs to be accessible in any form.
At least guitar tablature is easy enough to learn. Keyboard tablature is a mess to the point where we still don't have full agreement on how to realize it in modern notation.
Small note about the "mouth pictogram" idea at 40:24, the Korean Hangul system is almost exactly this, just simplified slightly to be able to be written. Featural writing systems are uncommon, but are not purely pet projects or shorthand systems unusable for the general populous.
yeah one of my favourite featural things is in characters like ㅋ, ㅌ, ㅊ, ㅍ in particular bc when you get that "it's like ㄱ, ㄷ, ㅈ, and ㅂ, but with an extra line to represent more air for a fricative" it's fucking mindblowing I love it sm
I think Hangul really is the best of both worlds: it's based off of "mouth shapes" which could make it easier to learn but each is also abstract enough that you can read it easily when more familiar with it
The reason why Hangul makes so much since is that it is a constructed writing system. Instead of evolving naturally it was designed and to my knowledge it is the only constructed writing system that is widely used.
Hangul works well for Korean and not so great for English. Because of the way Korean consonants change in the middle of words. We could probably adjust it in some way. And from what I gather it is the literal counter example to his statement. It broadened access to reading and writing since the more it was used, the less you have to learn thousands of Chinese characters. Still since it's creation, Korean has changed and the my teachers lacked the ability to hear the difference between 에 and 애. If you like Hangul, try Hiragana and Katakana in Japanese. There is some overlap in accents, but also shapes that look very similar and are not that related.
Thanks a lot for watching. This video took around 8 months to produce and involved a reasonable amount of production costs. If you would like to help me finance my future videos and get a sneak look at how I put them together, please consider becoming a patron. www.patreon.com/Tantacrul. Alternatively, you can support me by signing up to view non-youtube content on Nebula: go.nebula.tv/tantacrul
I'm also a founding member of a really cool Discord server too. Come check it out!
Discord: t.co/a3oYi1Rbnc?amp=1
That's the letter G!
oh no! now you triggered my "i know that melody at 3:31 but i can't remember from where"-neurosis! :-D please help!
My viewership is exclusive to RUclips. Any videos not published on RUclips are never seen here.
@@BCADws Curb your Enthusiasm Theme
Alright, I might watch your Nebula content, but hear me out: What if we represented music using visual representations of the sine waves that cause the sounds meant to be played? The reader can not only immediately understand the instrument being used to perform the music, but also the exact tone, loudness and duration. It is objective too, as everyone listens to sine waves the same. Please, make a video where you talk about this outright amazing system that no one has ever thought of before.
Problem: There are 15 different standards in the XYZ industry.
Proposed Solution: Create a standard that unifies all standards in the XYZ industry.
Result: There are now 16 different standards in the XYZ industry.
Edit: xkcd 927
Actually 17, because 30% of the XYZ industry interprets the standard in a way that is incompatible with the other 70%.
xkcd is never wrong 😂
i love xkcd 927
Doom source ports in a nutshell.
I feel this cynical take but remember: shit can work out. TCP/IP is pretty solid, UTF8 works pretty well which is even more astounding. MP3 and h264 are not my preferred formats but we've reached a state in the world where every FlowerpowerAliWishBang factory manages to produces capable decoders.
Standards are worth pushing for even if they're imperfect.
tantacrul is nuts. i clicked on this video interested about hearing what he has to say about notation and ended up getting genuinely invested in a random chess game from 1590
I thought I'd break every rule in the book by failing to summarise the purpose of the video in 1 minute. Just really wanted to tempt the RUclips gods.
@@Tantacrul i may be biased as a fan of your work but the slight detour did succeed in drawing me in haha!
@@Tantacrul You're a real disruptor of the video essay genre!
@@Tantacrul Totally worth it for the punch line.
I became so engrossed in that chess game that I forgot what the vodeo subject was suppose to be about.
As a chess player who knows nothing about music, I was very impressed by your summary of the history of chess notation. Well done!
We chess players are living in a notation utopia.
@@XalphYT Yeah, the current version looks compact and nice, but there’s two versions (ex. Algebraic e4 and UCI e2e5)
@@XalphYT Right, nobody’s whinging about the notation any more. That only distracts from the looseness of the rules that decide draws and victories.
@@stevenhthe21st literally the only difference there is whether or not you want to allow inferring things or not; the shorter algebraic notation encodes all of the moves with no ambiguity, but when parsing with a computer, it requires more coding to make the logical deductions necessary, whereas always noting the start and end location removes that requirement
@@technoturnovers7072 And then there's the numerical notation with one-byte row and columns, without the piece name. Functionally equivalent to UCI it is supposed.
I got jumpscared around the 9 minute mark bc by that point I'd completely forgotten this was meant to be a music-related video
“… this is a god damned UTOPIA!” is one of my favourite moments in RUclips.
@@amorpaz1 **cue the madness**
(yes, all just for tantacurl to vent)
For the "That's the letter G": If there is a really badly printed like orchestral sheet or something and the conductor wants to go from a rehearsal mark (the letter in a square), the G may look like another letter eg C so someone near to them may say "That's the letter G".
solved
Hahaha. NICE
Also: explaining the origin of the treble clef I guess? That's the letter G, highly stylized.
Dang, after I wrote up my comment with a whole scene describing this exact thing, I found this comment.
G and C used to be the same letter - that's why they look so similar to each other!
@@padraicfanning7055 LIES! Your two Dads won't even let you play with yourself ALONE!
Juggling went through a standardization of notation 20-30 years ago. It has been interesting seeing how the rise of siteswaps as the main way to describe juggling has shaped the growth of the art. The patterns people juggle most tend to be in line with the patterns easiest to describe in siteswaps. Jugglers value uniqueness and individuality so many people are intentionally pushing other areas of development, but those jugglers all still tend to have a strong background in the now standard style of juggling patterns.
oh my goodness... i want to learn all about juggling notation now :)
@@stellarsoular IIRC Numberphile did a couple videos about it a while ago, if you want a basic introduction to it.
@@Minihood31770 thanks, will check it out!
Clearly jugglers need to enumerate all their moves to represent as different MIDI CC control inputs and then, now that it's just MIDI, display it in piano roll notation.
You can even make juggling synthesizers!
@@stellarsoular it's very interesting. Some excellent mathematicians and physicists had a hand in designing it. Look up "siteswaps"
You did a good job of covering Medieval notation without making a 2 hour long video about how cool Medieval music is
It helps that he can wrap that section up with "Go watch Early Music Sources if you want to know more" 😜
I’ll make that video some day 😊
I would've been fine with that ngl
Actually, he didn't touch on modal notation, pre-mensural, which is extremely interesting & bizarre. It conveys rhythm but not through note shapes, rather each piece is in a rhythmic mode which sets the basic rhythm, and various conventions indicate where you deviate from it.
I think there's a fun video or maybe even video series to be had from bringing Medieval music to a wider/younger audience via a mix of period-correct examples and the modern-day magic of Bardcore.
The fact that you spent the first 9 1/2 minutes of this music notation video talking about chess (in great detail), all as a means of building up to an insane punchline is why this is my favourite RUclips channel.
Small tidbit that I can contribute from my area of expertise (psychology): around 1:08 you're questioning the chunkability of numbers - that's actually well researched! The example that came to mind for me was a study done on horse racing enthusiasts that were able to memorise stupendously long number sequences by chunking them into horse racing format (I don't exactly remember the system, but it was something like date, race number, horse number, finishing position, which would be around 12 digits per chunk). So I think it'd be perfectly viable to chunk the necessary single-digit amount of numbers that form a chord, given sufficient practice
I’m not sure that the study demonstrates an analogous measure of “chunkability”. I’m the case of music, successful chunking is connected to the physical action of real time playing rather than recall of the passage.
@@fivemoreminutespleas chunking is a working memory function though, not one of lon-term memory, so I reckon that instant recognition of a set of numbers as a chord chunk would still be possible
I wish I could release videos, read the comments, go back in time and release the video again
Thanks for this fascinating example!
@@Tantacrul I've just arrived and am bouncing around in the video--did you talk about _continuo_ at all in here? Here, the numbers sometimes function analogically (like a pictographic representation,) and sometimes symbolically. Accompanying, say, a single violinist, I (a harpsichordist) have to pay attention to their line and recognize which numbers are simply redundant (i.e., what the violin is playing,) and what I'm responsible for producing. But if I'm just "comping" along with the orchestra, they work just like a chord symbol on a fake sheet: for instance, when I see the little six-five (standard notation for a first-inversion seventh,) my hand is instantly ready to assume one of three positions: thumb, middle, and pinky spread apart; thumb and index adjacent together with the pinky far away; middle and ring adjacent with the thumb a slight distance away, with the specific notes extrapolated partly from the the bass note and partly from the key signature/accidentals, but this is because I spent time drilling these and other shapes under my professor's watchful eye. (Incidentally, this really helped with theory!)
@@Tantacrul happy to cosplay a sort of peer reviewer for you!
"Who mistake their ignorance for a kind of fresh-eyed clarity" is such a good line
Yes. That was a PERFECTLY CRAFTED line!
Dunning Kruger effect.
Quoting a sentance from an hour long without a video without a timestamp is an insane power move
It would be if it was true, and in many cases it may be. But it's also true that proficiency in a system can blind a person to the idea that it could ever be improved, or simplified for those that don't want to use it to become professionals.
It's funny because tentacruel had a previous video where he acted like he knew composition better than the beatles.
something else worth bearing in mind about colour-based notation systems is that it makes it a lot more difficult to quickly jot something down on paper
You're messing with his delusions. Stop that! /s
Color-blind people can't use it, also.
it's also just impractical to to distribute it physically because of the level of scrutiny required for correct reproduction of the prints. Using only a single type of ink in normal printing processes is just simpler. Color-based notation is only really feasible in a digital space.
yeah, he mentions this in the video
@@angelainamarie9656
No, you just need one of these 8 colored pencil cores :D
Jian Pu is quite useful for my work, as I have to transcribe lots of pop songs, standards etc. I could write down the melody pretty faithfully using numbers and symbols during the first or second time listening to the songs, then I could quickly translate the Jian Pu to music notation. I learned Jian Pu when I was playing in the Chinese orchestra
Also, 59:40, if I wanted to hand my friend, who we assume is called Geoff, a written piece of notation for him to learn on his own time i would obviously first wrap it in a protective casing, potentially made of paper. Then, to clarify my intention with this package that i am handing him i would say
"This is the letter, G."
How on earth can you be the project manager for multiple music writing programs and still have time to make these brilliant videos?!?! I'm impressed
Thats why he releses um once or twice a year i suppose
I love the topics, and the aproach its bloody amazing
Engageing through and through
Have a good day
All you need is DRIVE!
bro is singlehandedly driving the whole music industry forward
Because this video is the result of his research into the topics for the purpose of integrating them into MuseScore. Essentially, we get to see what's eating at his brain. The big drag isn't the commentary, though I'm sure it takes time to write the script. What really drags on production time is the incredible production values in visuals, composition, music, etc. I'm sure Tantacrul could pump out lecture style discussions on a blazing fast time scale relatively, but the audience retention would fall through the floor.
"In my experience, the best way to get something done is to give it to someone who is busy" - Vetinari, _Going Postal_
Wow, despite being utterly bizarre and impractical as a system of notation, Farbige Noten is an incredibly striking piece of modern art. I could look at those illustrations all day.
Same. It's a wonder. I'm really curious how exactly it was made. How did Huth afford to publish it with that level of detail and that range of colour back in the 19th century?
Did he commission an artist to create all the wonderful illustrations? Hard to know. There's very little info on him.
I wonder if someone with synesthesia could play this notation naturally.
@@Zmok That's a fascinating idea! Assuming they are able to learn the system well enough to use it, I suspect that might be bothered by the system's built in color code not matching the ones they already envisioned for different pitches, barring exceptional coincidence.
@@Zmok Not to diagnose the dead, but I wouldn't be surprised if Huth had synesthesia in the first place.
Imagine jotting down a musical idea using this system, though 😶🌫️
43:00. This confusion of clefs is why even after 7 years in school I couldn't intuitively read the bass clef, and here I am decades later and can still read the treble clef but not the bass clef.
You see this in fighting games constantly. We used to use more descriptive language, often inspired by the control decks of arcade cabinets, which led to goofy terminology like "towards forward" (hold towards the opponent and hit medium kick). There's abbreviations for special move motions like QCF (quarter circle forward) or do (dragon punch, a z-motion) but these days the 2d fighter community has mostly come around on numpad notation where the joystick is mapped to the positions of a numpad. To this day you get constant notation arguments because there's a million resources out there with their own unique way of marking things. And heaven help you if you read an old GameFAQs guide because they probably have their own awful method.
I like doing shit like “Qfc > hk+lp” which is just quarter forward circle into heavy kick and light punch. It’s like q is quarter, circle is a direction, f is forward, b is back, uf is up forward and ub is up back. And then you just have l for light and k for kick, etc. maybe it confuses other people but it’s way better to me than that like 263 a stuff because I don’t use fight sticks lol
@@MothFableone benefit to the numpad notation is that it's langauge agnostic. QCF doesn't hold much meaning to say, an italian or arabic player, who might have a completely different phrase that means Quarter Circle Forward. My opinion is that numpad notation is much more sustainable and generalizable in the long run.
@@MothFable the numpad notation works for any of the regular control schemes though, it's just indicating directions. So unless you're using something rather exotic to do your qfc's it'll map all the same to your joystick or dpad or whatever
L + Ratio + 632146P + Potemkin Buster
numpad notation is so much easier to read and immediately understand it’s unreal here’s a bnb from 2002um
cr.Ax1~2, st.B(2), hcf+P (> qcf+K)
2A 2A 5B(2) 41236P 236K
I've yet to ever meet any musician who has ever said "Ya know what? I really regret learning all that theory and all that notation and sight reading! It's holding me back!".
Well said.
I've never met any string theorist who has ever said "Ya know what? I really regret learning all that theory ...! It's really holding me back!"
Well, until they did.
@@KT-dj4iy Haha well get back to me when a musician says it. Music is cool and all, but it's not theoretical physics
@@ckorp666you are silly if you don't respect the work of scientists and astronomy
@@aloedg3191string theory isn't exactly respected by physicists either haha
I am dyslexic. Nonetheless, I am a published novelist (mild dyslexics often find ways to overcome their disability). I am an amateur musician who plays by ear. I watched your video because I would like to understand standard notation, but can't. In my mind, the notes actually shift their positions on both the horizontal and vertical axes, making reading very difficult. However, I appreciate your comments on ways to make the notation easier for dyslexics to read. If I was still young (I'm 71), I would have been very interested in using some of your suggestions. Even if I wouldn't be able to sight read, it would (I believe) have allowed me to achieve a better grasp of musical theory. Thanks for the lesson.
I too am dyslexic, and I spent many years as a child learning to read music and play piano.
If I was given the choice, I would have quit many times. I hated reading music, it was torture. But I did enjoy playing music, and I did well by reading slowly at first, but quickly memorizing. I also developed a skill for playing "by ear"
I didn't know I was dyslexic at the time, so I often felt like a failure for finding it so hard to read music. I understood in theory how the clefs and notes worked... but I couldn't immediately "see" what a note was. For someone else, it would be obvious that it is on the 4th line of the staff. I would have to count the lines to find that out. Unless it was something simple like the middle C... it took time for me to figure out what it was. And my brain just couldn't store what key it was in... If the note had a sharp sign beside it, sure that made sense. But if the sharp sign was back by the clef... I can't trace that to the line I'm currently at.
@@aliquida7132 Your challenges that you described exactly match mine. It's reassuring to know it wasn't just me. It shows our love of music, that despite being dyslexic, we persist. Keep on playing!
Thank you for confirming that sight reading dyslexia is a real thing. I'm the same age as you and have been playing keyboards since age 9. Though I know all chords and just about all their variations and can play the blues in every key, I never progressed beyond hunt and peck in sight reading - despite working with multiple teachers and putting in many hundreds of hours trying. (Weirdly, I am not dyslexic in reading written words.) I have played some baisc piano peices via sight reading, but only by figuring out the notes, practicing each piece until I'm sick to death of it, and then playing it by ear anyway - but never correctly and by using the written notes as an occasional guide. How anyone can read treble and bass clefs simultaniously boggles my mind.
@@sonicboomer8617 You might be mildly dyslexic in your reading as well. I discovered that I see words as pictures. I have to force myself to look at the letters. If the internal letters are out of order, I can easily read it. When I do proofreading for spelling, I read backwards. This forces my mind to look at the spelling.
"In my mind, the notes actually shift their positions on both the horizontal and vertical axes,"
BINGO!
The vertical axis is the pitch of the notes - how low or high they are. The horizontal axis is how long the notes last, i.e. how many beats. In professionally-printed sheet music, the notes are spaced horizontally according to how long in time they last.
There's also a third dimension - how loud or soft the notes are, indicated by companion notation.
I've never heard of music dyslexia - it sounds like a dyslexic actor having difficulty reading a script.
this video has reaffirmed in me that i've never been so happy to be competent at sight reading 3 different instruments and keep going with it.
Martin, once again you have knocked it out of the park. An hour of captivating entertainment for musical novices and experts alike. As a fellow tech person/musician hybrid, you give us all something to look up to. (…also audibly laughed at the Epic guy’s piano roll idea; I’m glad that was not a goal of Bandcamp during their tenure in charge.)
Thank you very much. I'm honoured.
I note that Fortnite now includes some in-game music production features, in an update that landed today, the same day as this video essay. Coincidence? You be the judge.
@@Tantacrul This is irrelevant to this comment, but please, please tell me there is somewhere I can see those scans of Farbige Noten. Those illustrations are incredible.
Imagine you are back in high school. You're sitting in music class, next to the foreign exchange student you are hosting. They understand musical notation, as it transcends language barrier, but they soon get confused by the name of the song. They point to it and ask what that character is. You look them dead in the eye and say, " That is the letter G."
Reminds me of a sort of similar story. We had an exchange student in my bad class, I forget where he was from but they used solfege notation. Sometimes our band direction would help him out by saying things like, "This is in the key of do-sharp", which always made me do a double take.
The big problem for me in current common usage (that means, there is no point having a go at me - it's just common) is that solege can also be movable do, which, is a really cool system as well. My wife uses do dieze si bemoll so i'm used to both systems but A B C D E F G comes quicker, and bemoll is an extra syllable, so 'E flat' rolls off the tongue slightly quicker
This comment took me a solid hour to understand
Reading this before finishing the video and then understanding when I finally got to the relevant part was a roller coaster
I like the implication that, with the knowledge that they're only confused about the single character (at least according to our perspective) of uppercase G, and assuming that the rest of the name of the song is longer than just "G" (or that they understand and can read things such as a tempo, forte, etc given that they didn't express confusion with the music and musical notation itself), they just somehow never came across the uppercase letter G in their studies. It makes the hypothetical a lot more entertaining to think that after all the time they probably spent learning the language, it just somehow never came up
Only tentacrul can take 10 minutes to finally get to the point of an hour long video
I literally forgot the video was about musical notation till he started talking about the perspective of musicians.
Tantacrul is really good at telling a story.
Yeah but you'll know a shit ton more you never ever hoped for when you saw the title.
@@DanksixTrue I've mastered chess in the time it's taken to watch this video.
Clearly you haven't watched a Quinton Reviews video :B
And it's stil very interesting. When he stopped talking about chess I looked at the progress bar and was like "WOW 10 MINUTES ALREADY"
I don't play an instrument, have never tried, and am terrified of notation. BUT THIS WAS AWESOME. Thanks for all the work you put into making this video and explaining things so well. I'm interested in linguistics, con-langs, and how language (spoken and written) evolve. This is surprisingly right up that alley. Many thanks for the ideas and fresh perspective
omg fellow conlanger and amateur linguist here
i kept þinking about þis-reforms are often necessary because language/music evolve. BUT most people (‘)mistaking þeir ignorance for fresheyed perspective(’) ain’t know what þe actual problems are
native english speakers are like ‘wow lololololol silent Es amirite ain’t english a doozy‽’
but
⋯
no þat ain’t why english is hard. english is hard because ‘know, now, knowledge, house, you, blood, wood, food, pour, poor, door, and tour’ (see the ‘oo[r]’s, ‘ou[r]’s, and ‘ou’s)
people say ‘þere are more exceptions þan rules in english’ but all languages have exceptions-anecdotally, i’ve found french and german to have similar amounts of exceptions-no, english just has too many, contradictory rules
we’re written as if we were 300 *other* languages
I feel like the VR/AR piano playing stuff is mostly just a way to get someone to just start playing the instrument, like a complete beginner, rather than an actual serious notation
it just shows you what to press and when, I feel like it could build a bunch of confidence for someone just starting out and get them hooked on learning the instrument properly
Yes. Gameifying instruments for beginners is a great tool.
Yeah, I played a lock of rocksmith and synthesia, then learned guitar/piano away from those games, now I find i'll use either written tab (guitar) or sheet music (piano), and those games are actually distracting/cumbersome, even just to follow along and learn a song.
i remember my first ever piano teacher letting me trace my hand and putting a number on each finger of it 😭 i was like 5, and tho i have bad memory, i never forgot that
I tried Piano Vision for my quest 3, but I don't see much use for it. Since I mostly play pop / rock stuff, I usually think in variations of chords. This app however doesn't give you any clue WHY you have to press these specific keys...
Didn't work for my stepson, despite having about 40 guitars and basses (plus a few keyboards and a violin) knocking around the house.
This is a really great video, and as a rhythm gamer it made me happy to see you bring up guitar hero as I've thought a lot about the connections between real music notations and the sorts of notations that are made for rhythm games. I think there's a lot more that could be said about how rhythm games do "notation". Not as an alternative to standard notation, god no, but as something interesting in its own right.
I've played a lot of Taiko no Tatsujin (a Japanese arcade game about playing a taiko drum) and i find the notation to be really cool. Even though it's a note-scrolling game it's closer to standard notation than tablature, in my experience. Every note is a circle, and the pitch of the note is indicated by colour instead of vertical position - red for the face of the drum, blue for rim. What brings this closer to standard notation in my mind is that the scroll speed is standardised so that one bar always takes up the same space on the screen (ignoring scroll speed effects, it is a game after all). But this means that you learn to read the timing of notes based on their relative spacing - a taiko player can, at a glance, see that some notes are played in 16ths, or 12th note tuplets, or what have you.
I'm talking about this because when you talked about how notation is read in chunks, like language, that's exactly how taiko players read our notation. We read patterns of 2-7 notes, and sort of "calculate" the rhythms and pitches, and store them to be played later. I never got good enough at music notation to sightread it, but I think learning how to read taiko really helped me appreciate why musicians talk about why standard notation is better than tablature, because they can read groups of notes in a chunk by their *shape*. I find I do the same thing in Taiko, reading notes as a chunk by their shape - though, perhaps in a sillier context. But the ability that this gives some Taiko players in sightreading complex and fast songs can be honestly kind of incomprehensible.
Anyway, this rhythmic information encoded in the format means that even though most rhythm games will tell you to "hit the note when it reaches this point on the screen", experienced players aren't *actually* doing that - instead we're reading ahead, figuring out the type and timing of different notes by chunking, feeling the rhythm in our mind and sort of "storing" it to be played later. Most rhythm gamers actually tend to look at the centre of the note field or even the other side of the field from where the notes get played.
So ultimately I think there can be more to rhythm games' styles of notation than meets the eye here. Don't get me wrong - I am NOT suggesting scrolling notes as an alternative to sheet music, the criticism you levied to guitar hero is absolutely valid here, especially because rhythm games are about being 100% accurate to some predetermined rhythm and music is, well, more artistic than that (and of course there are many other reasons to use standard notation but this comment is overly long as it is). However, I do think there's a lot about the way that rhythm gamers read notes that's similar to the way musicians read sheet music. It's interesting! I find it amazing how us humans are able to look at these complex, abstract encodings, and in real time turn them into movements that make real music. Or in the case of rhythm gamers, make a score go up. We're a strange bunch. Anyway, I hope anyone found this interesting.
Also I didn't mention this in the comment but the coloured notes system reminded me of Taiko but I agree with tantacrul's skepticism of it, even though i technically do read a "coloured note system". Two colours is easy enough (any change in colour is just read as "go to the other note lol" but the whole scale? Probably too much
Stepmania player here. I agree that "reading ahead" is absolutely necessary when moving up to intermediate difficulty. Learning an instrument also grew my understanding of how to step in tuples. While I will never be competitive, I still impress layfolk by hitting 8-footers while keeping the scroll rate locked to 216bpm. (Because A=432 meme, and yes we are a weird bunch.)
I've played a lot of Project Diva and definitely learned to "read" the music and a lot of it is muscle memory. It also spaces notes depending on duration and when I got it on Switch I found I had to go back to the Play Station symbols because the different letters confused it too much even though the colours were the same. (Then you tell yourself that playing games like these will help you with proper music reading and rhythm when 99% is just simple pop beats ahaha.)
As a drummer, Rock Band/Guitar Hero is great for visualising patterns and rhythms that may come up elsewhere.
Pause to comment on chromatic staves: It's not only pianos that treat "black key" notes differently. The fingering layouts for woodwind instruments, for example, are often simplest for the key of C and then become more complicated as the number of sharps or flats in the key signature increases. This means that when reading the traditional five-line staff system with sharp and flat symbols, the natural notes are simpler to finger and the sharps and flats are often played with additional keys that modify the natural notes, so an accidental is like a flag that says "hey player, you're going to be adding an additional key to your 'default' fingering". It turns out to be fairly intuitive in that way. My brain recoils at the thought of trying to read a notation system that does away with sharps and flats on a clarinet.
I imagine you would get that same intuition on a chromatic scale. "Here comes a 6th line note, better lube up the joints".
In practice, none of these sorts of changes are likely to occur with already established musicians. It would be like learning a whole new language just to say the same thing over again. The amount of knowledge and practice that would need to be tossed simply because someone else says "it's better" simply wouldn't be worth it for most individuals. New musicians don't have that same calculus and thus are more capable of trying out new styles. This is where Tantacrul's final argument comes into play as digital scoring allows for the presentation to be whatever the new reader wants it to be without sacrificing readability from existing players.
Ye, as a singer this sounds okay. As a flautist I would cry if I had to read even MORE ledger lines.
This is really interesting as a brass player. Strictly speaking some notes are a bit more awkward than others but generally they're all the about the same. We generally only have 3 buttons and in the high range often only use two of them.
As a trumpet and trombone player, most of these systems seem so NOT useful and much MORE difficult.
@@WaluigiisthekingASmith
I'm trumpet, trombone, and piano. Trombone doesn't even have buttons. Yet these alternatives definitely look like they'd only complicate things, even for brass.
I remember returning to piano after a few years of not touching it, and trying to learn songs from Synthesia videos on RUclips. It went alright. That was, until I found some sheet music for a piece I wanted to learn, decided to print it out, and WOW there was a huge difference. It was like coming back home after being away for a long time.
Yeah, I have a similar feeling about some tablatures for bass and guitar. Sometimes I buy sheet music from a publisher know as sheetmusichappens, and they insist in using a hybrid system (rhythm from tradicional notation combined with tab numbers instead of regular notes). I can’t read this kind of thing! I always need to transcribe everything for the tradicional notation system. I can read traditional notation very well and also tabs isolated (when I know the music), but both of them combined is a no go for me!
Learning Piano Roll takes a while to learn properly.
Especially if your starting with it.
Coming back to sheet music after a long time is always a trip. I find my hands run “ahead” of my eyes, and I keep stopping to second-guess myself only to find I subconsciously saw the patterns just right. Very interesting given how that went unused for over a decade in my case!
@@sbeveloaf1120 "Especially if you.... suck at it."
FTFY
It is really important to note that jianpu is used by professional Chinese orchestral musicians (e.g. erhu, yangqin), sometimes to the point that they struggle more with stave notation. My yangqin (dulcimer) teacher can still read stave notation, but jianpu works better in her mind (and for me as well when playing Chinese music) due to the change of scale/pattern you have to play on the instrument; and with different keys of dizi (flute), it's easier to remember a fingering=number as they work for scale degrees, rather than remembering every possible note each fingering could mean on a different key of dizi. There are whole Chinese orchestral scores written in jianpu, which can sometimes make harmonic analysis much easier as everything is written in scale degrees.
There's this concept called "bimusicality" where one can swap between different methods of thinking and playing depending on what culture or style they're playing, which i think ties in incredibly well with discussions on notation. E.g. I read stave music when it's more in a European tonal understanding or on western instruments, but I will read jianpu when it is more traditional Chinese music or on Chinese instruments.
Fascinating! Thanks for sharing your experience. It makes sense that different types of notation with different strengths and weaknesses might tie more strongly into different musical traditions.
See, as a private music teacher who will figure out students’ favourite songs by ear to help them play music they already love, I am a MASSIVE fan of music notation. It’s only ever been a tool to aid memory and analysis and the fact that we can recreate music composed centuries ago shows how robust it is. So often I’ll spend an entire term teaching a kid a song to memorise through repetition that they could have learnt in a few weeks if they put the effort in to figure out how to read a score. Plus, when I figure out their favourite song in a matter of minutes they’re all like “How did you do that?!” and I just point out that I create a virtual score in my brain, and can pick it apart and analyse the key and harmony due to my ability to visualise the notes.
If you can read a graph, you can read notation. It’s literally just a way to visually present music as a function of pitch over time. Then it’s your interpretation that turns it back into music.
Well Put! You spoke for me.
I've never found standard notation to be a problem. As you said, it's been working for centuries and is pretty robust. Since it developed over time as a practical solution to practical issues, not as an abstraction, that's not surprising.
As a guitarist, lutenist, and ukist, I also play from tablature on a regular basis, and for those instruments, it's terrific and I would never want to do otherwise. But because it's instrument-specific, it's not as useful overall as standard notation.
Thanks for putting this together, Tantacrul.
I've been playing bass for almost 30 years. I can read tablature no problem, the strings on the sheet all match the strings of my instrument, the numbers tell me the frets.
Musical notation, I assume if I constantly used it I'd eventually get used to it, but even knowing the rules behind how it operates, I often "forget" where the different notes are, and so will invariably look up a tab version.
Well, I can read a graph, but I can only read music at about a minute (or longer) per bar. I can literally WRITE notation faster than I can (sight-)read it. Hence I take issue with your "anyone can read music" statement. Perhaps, but not everyone can read it fast enough to be of any use in performance - or practice.
Also, I just *can't* relate notes in notation to notes on my instrument (bass guitar); though that might be an "autism thing" (I've been diagnosed).
and the fact we can recreate music composed centuries ago in several interpretations and play it differently speaks of what? how inrobust it is?
59:00 Proposing to call notes an octave apart with a different name is no understanding a f** about how humans experiment music, then how acoustic and music works… such a dumb proposal
I think the descriptive chess notation people really had it figured out, and that's definitely the best possible way to write music.
"The viola player slides the third finger of their left hand two and a half centimeters down the D string, pressing firmly so the note rings clear," and so on and so forth, for every note in the composition. And of course we get different notations for every instrument, as all good notations do. What's not to love?
How to play "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star".
First, be aware that this piece is written in the key of C major, using the six notes C, D, E, F, G, and A with a frequency range between 262 and 440 hertz. Use this information to choose a suitable fingering for your instrument. (Consult the Appendices for specific note fingering for Piano, Guitar, Violin, and Flute.)
Since this piece involves a large number of repetitions of noted of the same pitch, it is important not to play the notes legato (in which two consecutive crochets could be confused with a minim), nor staccato (with excessive separation between notes), but with a moderate amount of note length sustainment. The tempo shall be moderate, with a crochet played for approximately half a second. Volume shall be moderately soft, as for a lullaby.
The notes are as follows:
Play C for a crochet, sung with the lyric "Twin-".
Play C for a crochet, sung with the lyric "-kle".
Play G for a crochet, sung with the lyric "Twin-".
Play G for a crochet, sung with the lyric "-kle"..
Play A for a crochet, sung with the lyric "lit-".
Play A for a crochet, sung with the lyric "-tle".
Play G for a minim, sung with the lyric "star".
Play F for a crochet, sung with the lyric "How".
Play F for a crochet, sung with the lyric "I".
Play E for a crochet, sung with the lyric "won-".
Play E for a crochet, sung with the lyric "der".
Play D for a crochet, sung with the lyric "what".
Play D for a crochet, sung with the lyric "you".
Play C for a minim, sung with the lyric "are".
Play G for a crochet, sung with the lyric "Up".
Play G for a crochet, sung with the lyric "ab-".
Play F for a crochet, sung with the lyric "-ove".
Play F for a crochet, sung with the lyric "the".
Play E for a crochet, sung with the lyric "world".
Play E for a crochet, sung with the lyric "so".
Play D for a minim, sung with the lyric "high".
Play G for a crochet, sung with the lyric "Like".
Play G for a crochet, sung with the lyric "a".
Play F for a crochet, sung with the lyric "dia-".
Play F for a crochet, sung with the lyric "mond".
Play E for a crochet, sung with the lyric "in".
Play E for a crochet, sung with the lyric "the".
Play D for a minim, sung with the lyric "sky".
Play C for a crochet, sung with the lyric "Twin-".
Play C for a crochet, sung with the lyric "-kle".
Play G for a crochet, sung with the lyric "Twin-".
Play G for a crochet, sung with the lyric "-kle"..
Play A for a crochet, sung with the lyric "lit-".
Play A for a crochet, sung with the lyric "-tle".
Play G for a minim, sung with the lyric "star".
Play F for a crochet, sung with the lyric "How".
Play F for a crochet, sung with the lyric "I".
Play E for a crochet, sung with the lyric "won-".
Play E for a crochet, sung with the lyric "der".
Play D for a crochet, sung with the lyric "what".
Play D for a crochet, sung with the lyric "you".
Play C for a minim, sung with the lyric "are". This note may optionally be sustained longer than the others.
The next chapter will cover the modifications needed to turn this song into "The ABCs".
And don't forget: "The viola player moves the bow across the string for precisely 0.287 seconds"!
@danielbishop1863 you put way too much effort into that
@@parkernelson4909: Here's a ChatGPT-enhanced version:
How to execute the auditory manifestation of the melodic composition colloquially referred to as "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star," should one find themselves bereft of the convenience of concise musical notation and instead must rely on the articulation of musical instructions in the realm of prose:
Commence by acknowledging the tonal landscape within which this auditory journey unfolds, recognizing it as having been strategically situated within the domain of C major. This tonal tapestry employs a selection of six auditory entities, denoted as C, D, E, F, G, and A, whose oscillatory frequencies waver within the range of 262 to 440 hertz. It is incumbent upon the executor of this auditory endeavor to judiciously select a suitable instrumental fingering modality, with reference to the Appendices appended herewith, which best befits their chosen apparatus, be it a Piano, Guitar, Violin, Flute, or any other harmonic implement that resonates with their musical predilections.
Given the recurrent recurrence of auditory entities attaining the same sonic pitch, it becomes imperative, nay, mandatory, for the musician to abstain from executing these sonorous entities in a legato fashion, where the contiguous concatenation of two crochets may, alas, lead to confusion with the more sustained minim. Simultaneously, the musician is advised against an excessive separation between the aforementioned auditory entities, a musical misdemeanor known as staccato, and instead should endeavor to imbue their rendition with a judicious moderation of note length sustainment. The chronometric tempo, or the rate at which these auditory entities traverse the temporal landscape, should oscillate within the bounds of moderation, wherein each crochet is bestowed with a temporal duration of approximately half a second. The amplitude, or volume, of this auditory exposition shall be calibrated to a moderately soft setting, akin to the dulcet resonance typically associated with a lullaby.
The elucidation of the auditory entities is detailed forthwith:
Execute a C note for the temporal duration of one crochet, concomitant with the vocalized syllable "Twin-".
Simultaneously, execute another C note for a congruent crochet duration, aligned with the vocalized syllable "-kle".
Proceed to execute a G note for a period equivalent to one crochet, harmonizing with the vocalized syllable "Twin-".
In tandem, enact another G note for an equivalent crochet span, harmonizing with the vocalized syllable "-kle".
Subsequently, evoke the auditory manifestation of an A note, of one crochet's duration, synchronized with the vocalized syllable "lit-".
Simultaneously, evoke another A note of congruent crochet duration, concomitant with the vocalized syllable "-tle".
Conclude this auditory phrase with the execution of a G note for the temporal duration of one minim, amalgamating with the vocalized syllable "star".
Seamlessly transition to the ensuing segment of auditory articulation:
Embark on the auditory expedition with an F note, resonating for a temporal span equivalent to one crochet, coupled with the vocalized syllable "How".
Simultaneously, execute another F note for a congruent crochet duration, in harmony with the vocalized syllable "I".
Progress to an E note, manifesting for a duration of one crochet, in unison with the vocalized syllable "won-".
Simultaneously, evoke another E note of congruent crochet duration, coalescing with the vocalized syllable "der".
Subsequently, articulate a D note for a temporal duration of one crochet, in alignment with the vocalized syllable "what".
Simultaneously, evoke another D note of congruent crochet duration, synchronizing with the vocalized syllable "you".
Culminate this auditory segment with the execution of a C note for the temporal duration of one minim, resonating with the vocalized syllable "are".
Navigate towards the next auditory juncture with the following sonic delineations:
Commence with the auditory manifestation of a G note, echoing for a duration equivalent to one crochet, in tandem with the vocalized syllable "Up".
Simultaneously, execute another G note for a congruent crochet duration, coalescing with the vocalized syllable "ab-".
Progress to an F note, resounding for the temporal span of one crochet, entwined with the vocalized syllable "-ove".
Simultaneously, evoke another F note of congruent crochet duration, harmonizing with the vocalized syllable "the".
Subsequently, articulate an E note, resonating for a duration of one crochet, aligned with the vocalized syllable "world".
Simultaneously, execute another E note of congruent crochet duration, concomitant with the vocalized syllable "so".
Culminate this auditory stanza with the manifestation of a D note for the temporal duration of one minim, resonating with the vocalized syllable "high".
Embark on the subsequent auditory exploration with the following auditory directives:
Initiate with the auditory articulation of a G note, resonating for a duration equivalent to one crochet, in harmony with the vocalized syllable "Like".
Simultaneously, execute another G note for a congruent crochet duration, synchronizing with the vocalized syllable "a".
Progress to an F note, manifesting for the temporal span of one crochet, aligned with the vocalized syllable "dia-".
Simultaneously, evoke another F note of congruent crochet duration, amalgamating with the vocalized syllable "mond".
Subsequently, articulate an E note, resonating for a duration of one crochet, in harmony with the vocalized syllable "in".
Simultaneously, execute another E note of congruent crochet duration, in tandem with the vocalized syllable "the".
Culminate this auditory phrasing with the manifestation of a D note for the temporal duration of one minim, entwined with the vocalized syllable "sky".
Commence the auditory recapitulation of the initial auditory motif, reiterating the following auditory entities:
Execute a C note for the temporal duration of one crochet, synchronized with the vocalized syllable "Twin-".
Simultaneously, execute another C note for a congruent crochet duration, coalescing with the vocalized syllable "-kle".
Progress to a G note, resonating for the temporal span of one crochet, entwined with the vocalized syllable "Twin-".
In tandem, evoke another G note for an equivalent crochet span, amalgamating with the vocalized syllable "-kle".
Subsequently, evoke the auditory manifestation of an A note, of one crochet's duration, resonating with the vocalized syllable "lit-".
Simultaneously, manifest another A note of congruent crochet duration, in harmony with the vocalized syllable "-tle".
Conclude this auditory recapitulation with the execution of a G note for the temporal duration of one minim, in synchrony with the vocalized syllable "star".
Proceed with the recapitulation of the subsequent auditory exploration:
Embark on the auditory journey with an F note, resonating for a temporal span equivalent to one crochet, in alignment with the vocalized syllable "How".
Simultaneously, evoke another F note for a congruent crochet duration, entwined with the vocalized syllable "I".
Progress to an E note, manifesting for the temporal span of one crochet, concomitant with the vocalized syllable "won-".
In tandem, execute another E note of congruent crochet duration, amalgamating with the vocalized syllable "der".
Subsequently, articulate a D note for the temporal duration of one crochet, in synchrony with the vocalized syllable "what".
Simultaneously, evoke another D note of congruent crochet duration, harmonizing with the vocalized syllable "you".
Culminate this auditory recapitulation with the execution of a C note for the temporal duration of one minim, in alignment with the vocalized syllable "are". It is to be noted that this particular auditory entity may, at the musician's discretion, be sustained for a temporal duration exceeding that of its preceding counterparts.
The subsequent section shall elucidate the necessary alterations requisite for the transformation of this melodic composition into the auditory manifestation colloquially referred to as "The ABCs."
@@parkernelson4909he really didn't. 20mins max
Nice! Just yesterday I was thinking "I hope there will be a new Tentacrul video soon" and here it is.
Please think that more often. Thank you!
Me too, I started rewatching some of his videos yesterday and here he is!
I've been getting randomly recommended videos. Perhaps the video was uploaded but not published and it makes the algo reco older vids of the channel
@@MysteriousMusician33 me too
Me too! Literally yesterday, wondered "Hmm, has Tantacrul uploaded anything recently that I missed?", looked at his channel page, saw he hadn't.
I think piano rolls are interesting visualization tools when listening to music, but I would never use one to perform off of!
Piano roll is nice for composing on a computer screen, but not for reading back the music.
Piano rolls got invented over a century ago, so it's revealing they haven't caught on for notation...
They're very useful for writing music onto a computer, because one can make a nice UI to work with them. I like using them to review my own practice sometimes, because they make it easier to judge what I did well and didn't. They're completely impractical to read for the purpose of performing. They have a purpose, but it certainly isn't one which seeks to replace standard western notation as a way of communicating music.
To summarize, piano roll would be labeled a write-only system by computer hardware folks.
Psst, computer programmers, that means it's like Perl - a write-only programming language. 🤣
@@wyw876, my perspective is that piano rolls are good for machines to read, but not for humans.
Less than ten minutes in and this is one of the best videos I’ve seen. Liked and subscribed. 30 minutes in and it’s only gotten better.
The "Alfred's basic piano course" book was a huge help learning sheet music. It starts off close to middle c and gradually moves you away. It also slowly introduces new notation. I suggest if you're struggling to learn pick it up!
Once you learn it, notation makes a lot of sense.
do you have a free copy? Can I have one please.
+1 for Alfred’s. best no bullshit piano course
Thanks
My issue with Alfred’s is that it is so focussed on finger numbers at the beginning. I’ve had a number of students struggle once it moves beyond C position, because they’ve spent that whole time associating the notes with fingers rather than note names. If you use it in combination with a technical book like A Dozen A Day it’s pretty decent though.
Alfred's Premier Piano Course does a better job of helping students learn notation
As once a somewhat arrogant self taught musician, I have found that after giving time and attention to learning to read sheet music, it does make more sense than I previously imagined, and seems like the best comprise possible.
Yep, pretty much the alternative to standard notation is really have some special notation for each different instrument class.
I play guitar and was trained before that on the horn. I can say that playing a set instrument is a great way to begin. There is one way to play a note. You learn it memorize how to read music and most stuff then you can play. If you cannot figure it out by ear you can get the sheet and practice it until you get the song cold. Strings are not that way. They are not "set" and thus you can make thousands of more notes. If you play electric like I do exponentially multiply those numbers. I am not limited to needing sheet to play something but when I have it or more importantly when I write it, knowing how is super important and necessary. A musician should know their craft and the better they have learned it the more they are able to write both quantity and quality. Yes, you can learn tab quickly and it is great for learning to play songs, however it does absolutely nothing for you when your writing where knowing your sheet theory does immense miracles which lead to paths you're unlikely to pursue otherwise. They call it a "Key" to the song for a reason because it is like a door key which unlocks the door to the song. If you are a practiced musician you can know the key and timing and sit in with anyone even on songs you have never heard or read sheet for. Tab does not do this for you it is numbers on stings not actual "music theory" as notation is. Plus if you know your theory well enough you can play music across any instrument be it keys, percussion, strings or winds. Is it something you do everyday? No, but you should think of what you are doing as you are playing and know why it works. If you don't, you will be stuck one day by people who do and you will not be able to keep up. You likely will not even be able to play a chord in their song or even a melodic line if it is abstract enough. The notation, wheel of 5ths, modes, why the intervals work and how to apply this knowledge is what learning notation can do for you. It is basic to learn, not hard at all and frankly necessary for anyone when they are writing. Usually in a rock band (especially the cool ones) they have at least 1 or 2 people who know their theory. If they don't you won't hear them for long they will be a one or two hit wonder or they will depend on someone else writing their music for them. You cannot teach someone how to compose with tab, it is a one way street. Notation is a network of streets literally going any direction with the map and a Garmin. That is why you need to learn it.
I love that Musescore is making some of these systems of notation convertible. Bring on the Carrillo conversion. With so many historical scores being transcribed to music xml and midi, the "entrenched" argument may not be valid for much longer. And if there's a free tool that can instantly convert music to your preferred notation... Wow. As a music teacher this makes me excited.
Sign me up for that Carrillo conversion!
But Carillo actually doesn't work no? What if you have a C4 with a D4?
@@omniscientomnipresent5500 If I understand your question correctly, you just write 2 on the main line with a 0 below it.
Thanks! Not that I am ever going to use it I now know more about what it is called and what it is about! A refreshing stop in the RUclips sea! Excellent : ) Cheers!!! Rick
Thank you very much! Appreciate it.
53:00 As someone who speaks Esperanto, I can say it is sooooo on brand for an Esperantist to invent a simplified notation system. It embodies the philosophy of Esperanto haha
Maybe it's because I'm an elite musical aristocrat who was fortunate enough to have basic musical education in elementary school and the option of formal band education through the rest of my twelve year public education (I dropped out of band after 9th grade because they weren't playing music that interested me and had policies I couldn't fit into), but to me "two notes an octave apart have the same name" is more intuitive than naming three and only three octaves. And if you need more context than the octave you're in, we have that! "G above middle C" and the like!
😊 Yeah, we’re similar elite musical aristocrats, except the school I went to didn’t have any performing music program - we just had paper-only lessons and sometimes the teacher would play on the piano. By the time 6th grade rolled off the calendar, most kids in my year knew how notation worked, could write down solfège dictation, and we even got a quiz or two on how to draw the tenor, alto and base clefs. That was a good starting point when my progeny started their music adventures. I didn’t feel like a village idiot, just merely a town idiot :)
We literally say C1 C2 C3 C4 C5 etc. People who are arguing against standard notation in music just don't want to take the time to learn it. What we have now is the distillation of hundreds of years of experimentation on getting artists to be able to agree on how best to communicate music in a written form. And if the powers that be decide to go nuclear and detonate in the stratosphere, the EMP signal alone will utterly devastate Electronics all over the planet, so people who've only ever known digital music will basically have to start from square one again.
I wish we could do away with equal temperament tuning because that's nonsense designed to cater to keyboard players.
@@thomasprislacjr.4063 Kind of a crazy thing to think about, but with modern advances in both AI (not even LLMs here, just base AI) and "ultra clean inputs" paired with digital effects we're probably already at a tech level where you could build a "filter" you could switch on that would make an equal tempered source output with Just intonation... which is f'ing wild if you think about all of the factors that can go into the context of deciding what's correct for any given note there.
@@thomasprislacjr.4063 but C1 C2 C3 is not "standard notation", is it? It's just a note name and an octave number. (Also, it is _one_ kind of naming, there are at least two)
But but playing in all keys without needing the ability to play tiny intervals is cool.@@thomasprislacjr.4063
What this video glanced over is that it's not clefs that the newbies are struggling with, but keys. To understand those ♯♯♯ and ♭♭♭ in the beginning, it requires understanding of scales, which, while important, are way too advanced topics for beginners who just want to press buttons and have fun.
I myself started out using piano roll, and learned the musical notation later on, and this is literally a conversation I had with a newbie friend last year:
- I want to play this piece on piano!
- Okay, so, to start, there's this repeating pattern on piano starting from this key and ending with this, called an octave, and the keys in it are named do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-si, or, in English system, they are named alphabetically but out of order as C-D-E-F-G-A-B
- Okay, got it
- And you have black keys that represent steps up or down called sharps or flats respectively, depending on their relation to the surrounding white keys
- Okay, weird, but go on
- On that piece, you have have treble clef there, which means the notes F-A-C-E are in between the lines, G-B-D-F on the lines, respectively. Ignore the vertical lines for now
- Okayyy....
- But you have ♭♭♭ in the beginning, which means it's in the key of E♭ that means you must swap those white keys with those black keys
- Wait, what? Why? What's the logic here?
- * A two hour lecture on how scales work*
- Okay... but if the song is in this E♭ key, why do we still have ♯'s and ♭'s sprinkled all over?
- * Two more hours rambling on augmentations and harmony*
- Okay, let me try it
*two days later*
- Okay, I give up. I've spent HOURS on this thing, and I've only managed to get as far as a first quarter of a second bar
- Hmm, let me think of something. Forget about everything I've told you before except octaves, let me transcribe it to something simpler.
*15 minutes later*
- Okay, so, here it goes, each row represent octave, rightmost being the topmost, the numbers represent key's number, left to right, including black keys, starting from C. An empty line to separate bars
[A quickly re-invented Julian Carrillo notation]
*30 minutes later*
- HOLY HELL! I DID IT! YOU'RE A WIZARD!!!
[Recording of them playing the full song perfectly]
Those first steps are what musicians tend to forget and then act smug about it. I've noticed glimpses of it even in this video where author tries to remain as much neutral as possible on the topic e.g. on grasping the concept of numbers forming the chords, while guitarist do this all the time with the tabs. Or how tab is only useful for one instrument when all it takes is simple addition and subtraction to transcribe it to other (stringed) instrument, or the same instrument at different tuning.
It's less that he's ignoring these problems and more that he understandably believes that it's better for there to be something hard to learn but incredibly easy to understand after you learn it than something that is forever difficult to understand. He even mentions several times that certain ideas would be useful for beginners but poor for professionals.
This! A thousand times this! I've been reading music for decades and I still struggle with keys and key signatures.
I really wish keys had been discussed in the video, as in my mind they're the hardest part about reading music.
Thank you for saying this. Piano roll might be useless to a professional performer, but it's SO useful to an amateur or absolute beginner.
Tantacrul was _trying_ to be neutral, but most of the time he was judging every notation from a performer's viewpoint only.
Like, sure it's funny when he says that these disrupters are musical idiots.. But honestly so am I, as an amateur who just enjoys learning a pop-song on the guitar with tabs. Ironically his comment gives the same gate-keeping impression that he was mocking at 46:45.
Still, there's no actual conflict because people can and do use multiple notations all the time.
I think you could make piano a lot easier to learn if you used 4 colors + black and did the same with notes on the sheet. More colors start to get harder to tell apart, so it feels like a decent compromise. You can get some horizontal compression there (more than enough). For the black keys, keep them in the same position but use always the same symbol next to a colored note to mean "black key on the right of that color".
I feel like the current way we compress the notes is terrible since it's not going all the way. If you made the scale something like A Ab B Bb C Cb, people wouldn't struggle as much. I get why we use the names we have now, but to someone learning it makes no sense at all why there's nothing between B and C but there is between C and D. Also having different names for identical notes is just asking new students to ask "WHY?". 6 lines instead of 8 would be a pretty big win to help readability imo.
Musician explaining how the treble clef is shaped and why it sits where it does on the staff: "That's the letter 'G'." 😁
With regard to guitar TAB I find it really is an addition to standard notation and not a replacement. In an instrument where there can be up to three different places to play the same note, TAB can show you where it needs to be played. This is important as each different position will have a different timbre. It can also prevent you from painting yourself into a corner fingering-wise.
The main advantage I find, though, is the ability to show bends, hammer-ons, pull offs etc.
I must say I dislike when TAB is not accompanied by a regular stave. I find timing much easier to read in regular notation. Also once I have learnt a piece and only read the music as a reminder while playing I find I read the regular notation almost all the time. In a similar vein, I find it a little frustrating when guitar tutorial videos only ever mention fret position and never actually name the notes.
Agree with this. In the same vein, it’s easier to read a chord diagram when not just the first fret is numbered explicitly but all of them on the diagram, and moreover the notes played are written under the strings. That might be cluttering but should really be an option when one looks at chord diagrams somewhere in a computer, for example. Redundancy is so important for us humans to read and just even perceive and process things. Bare minimum can be a good option when one is already proficient, but I think even then redundancy shouldn’t be shunned too much and for too long. Spoken/written languages are full of it, formal languages designed by us specially are usually have some redundancy too.
Agreed with the last. It's probably one of the more frustrating aspects of learning through Tim Henson's (to be fair, free) videos.
I always find durations and timing more difficult on TAB as most durations are only shown by note stems below the staff, this extra required eye movement can be sluggish and makes sightreading that more difficult.
*5 places for middle C on guitar, and 6 for the E above that on a 24 fret guitar. For very intricate parts a standard staff is imperfect, but by the point where that becomes an issue, tabs also become problematic, as you would essentially have to write out different fingerings based on people hold their pick, and players by then are usually proficient enough to work out what "feels" good.
Who lit that picture of you? That's a system used in "Hollywood". Full side plus kicker. 135 degrees or 225 degrees, roughly, depending on which reference is used. Great way to light.
I never learned tabs. I need to look into that.
I’d say us chemists have it pretty good with IUPAC, it has its shortfalls but nobody is out there trying to abolish it but instead supplement it.
Where standardisation has been most successful is probably in engineering. Many ISO standards are so widely adopted that pretty much nobody uses anything else. There are of course some splits, especially between metric and US customary standards, but over the years there has been a lot of unification.
@@Croz89 the most baffling common inconsistency between imperial and metric standards to me has got to be the way imperial thread is denoted. Nothing about say, 10-32 UNF bears any relation to dimensions that are actually relevant to the part, there isn’t even a way to deduce that the nominal diameter is 1/4” unless you already know or look up a table.
The metric equivalent M6 (or MJ6 if you will) communicates that much more clearly.
Those wanting to abolish it fail to understand that IUPAC systematic names and "trivial names" have two different purposes, intended for two different audiences. A trivial name like acetone tells most people what it is, while a systematic name like propane-2-one or 2-oxopropane manages to tell the structure and bonding situation in an acetone molecule in a single word. You don't need to know that to use acetone to remove nail polish, but in other areas easily telling the structure from a name is really useful.
The most astoundingly stupid part of Musitude to me, which you didn't mention, is that despite creating a notation which is meant to represent pitches on a computer keyboard, they don't FOLLOW THE LAYOUT OF THE KEYBOARD. How is anyone learning this supposed to gain any spatial sense of which notes are related to each other when they're essentially randomly distributed across the QWERTY keyboard layout? Absolutely insane.
This!!!
The obvious flaw here is that QWERTY is not universal or international. If they acknowledged different keyboard layouts they would have to acknowledge that their entire system is useless.
@@althejazzman _"If they acknowledged different keyboard layouts they would have to acknowledge that their entire system is useless."_ and useless.
huh... i just opened website, and the first thing i see is a qwerty keyboard.
i literally havent watched the video except for the intro, nor have i touched the website, but maybe after this video happened the website got updated??
it has been a day since you were there :P
NEVERMIND i see what you mean.
it would make infinitely more sense if it was in the same style as genshin's instruments...
ah, here -- example:
ruclips.net/video/M7WZsVl65WA/видео.html&ab_channel=ABardfromTeyvat
you only get the 7 naturals from 3 octaves, but its enough to do alot.
{{QWERTYU -- ASDFGHJ -- ZXCVBNM}}
like it feels self evident, doesn't it?
hell, even the fact that it only holds 3 octaves is wild to me, when 4 octaves should be easy
use z-m for C2-B2, a-j for C3-B3, etc
for sharps and flats, use the shift key
LITERALLY ANYONE FAMILIAR WITH A QWRTY KEYBOARD KNOWS HOW TO SHIFT
I am OBSESSED with this title card. The vitriol for notation is practically gushing out of my headphones and screen i love it
We also have to take into account that musical ideals, and what is considered useful in written music, changes with culture.
Whereas a european composer might indicate a violin section when to apply vibrato, which nuance to use, what effects and slur to perform, in a given piece, indian ragas for example, have a huge part of self-appropriation to give the life needed for music to exist, as if the piece by itself is a mere husk, only the scaffold for what the musician intends to express. Therefore, it is not needed to write vibrati or nuances because it is up to the musician to decide while they play which gamaka to use. On another note, gamakas would be incredibly hard to notate in standard notation, if you take the répertoire of the sitar, whose strings can bend to increase the pitch by a whole 5th, it contains various pieces in which bend play will not only be prevalent but also difficult.
In japanese music, taking the shakuhachi as an example, traditional music will stick to the pentatonic scale associated with the instrument, no bends or accidentals. So that would eliminate the need for excessive staff lines, armatures, and accidentals as a whole. But a substencial part of shakuhachi is playing with the right breath. Crescendi, Diminuendi, Sforzandi, Vibrati, Tremoli, all of those would have to be written down, including overblows, slowing/speeding vibrati, vibrati range increases/decreases, how would you write all of those breath plays ? (if you want to learn more about japanese shakuhachi breath play techniques, type "breath play" into google)
So depending on musical cultures and doings, the standard notation will always have too much and not enough at the same time. What is really important is to get a message across, not standardise it or find a universal solution that will work for everything, because as you increase the amount of info it can convey, you also increase complexity, and vice-versa.
One thing a lot of these systems don't take into account is the ability to NOT specify something. If you choose to represent the length of a note as a literal length then it's impossible to use a fermata. A system for a midi synthesiser needs to be a lot more hands-on about exact instructions than a system for a human with a brain.
>google “breath play”
Funniest shit I’ve seen all day.
European music used to be like that, too. If you look at a Baroque score, you'll see just notes and core rhythms, but not much else - yet it's all that missing stuff that makes the music what it is. It's only during the 18th century and forwards that composers began overnotating their music and removing freedoms from the performers; this trend, to my knowledge, is unique to (Romantic and onwards) Western music - improvisation can often be a taboo in (some) Classical music circles, because it's seen as disrespectful to the composer's vision.
@@karlpoppins It's one of the things that frustrates me if I try to play anything after the baroque period. But, my original training is in baroque music so of course that seems most natural to me.
@@naikigutierrez4279In 1989, A Japanese Professor who teaches in the University of Tokyo named, Rantaro Futanari, found a loophole in the Japanese Economy. Prof. Futanari found a way to legally counterfeit money without any repercussions. Prof. Futanari still does this and is a well known billionaire. Want to found out how he does it? Just search for, "Futanari Inflation" in Google Images.
I'm a non musician who just watched a documentary lasting for over an hour on a system that I do not understand.
You sir, are very good at presenting!
It's not too late to learn!
as a chess player and musician I thought I'd clicked the wrong video
Frr
fr, i was like why the heck is he talking about chess for 10mins XD@@hendrixinfinity3992
@@hendrixinfinity3992ha same
As a nearsighted guitarist, I've been told "That's the letter G" when trying to read chords in the handwritten font used for jazz scores.
Also, thank you for showing accesible sheet music! I've been trying to help my friend who's a dyslexic drummer, and we thought the only possible solution would be playing by ear, especially because it was all he really could do in Band.
Thanks, Tantacrul… Finding your YT site made my day; I’ve become a fan, looking forward to study your other videos❤
'people would find sheet music much easier to understand if it was like the qwerty keyboard' is a level of 'terminally online' previously unheard of
No u
@@calebdahlheimer1471
Nah, he'd lose _that_ contest...
SO REAL
It wasn’t even the QWERTY layout. It was alphabetical. Bastard went on a whole roundabout making a musical language based on a layout people have memorized intuitively and then made it unintuitive.
Brilliant! I love it.
Currently finishing up a dissertation on contemporary notations for improvisers that necessarily covers a lot of the same ground as you did for this vid. Needless to say I'm hooting and seal-clapping at some of these name-drops (love to hear about my man Gevaert). There's still so few people doing notation scholarship well! Thanks for your contribution 🫡
Some great comments here, raising a lot of interesting technical questions about notating all sorts of things that I never really thought much about. This is one of those.
I feel like the concept of "notations for improvisation" is something that would generate a fair bit of, shall we say, "spirited discussion" in some circles regardless of how well or poorly implemented it might be. :)
Yes. My focus is pretty niche in that I'm looking (basically exclusively) at well-defined notations that denote clear parameters for improvisatory expression (similar to the way a lead sheet has the power to convey parameters for jazz improvisation) rather than the much more-common "play what this makes you feel"-style graphic scores. Extant literature on the topic is pretty poor, sadly.@@sixstringedthing
@@IsaacOtto sounds very interesting, I'd love to read your dissertation once its published, maybe you could drop a link here?
@@IsaacOtto Once done, it would be great if I could have a peek? If so, could you send it to info.tantacrul@gmail.com ?
@@IsaacOtto it would be cool to squeeze in a Tantacrul citation somewhere in there 😆
"Chromatic staff" sounds like a magic item from a D&D campaign. And "the Muto Method" sounds like something that will definitely turn its inventor into a super villain.
Hahaha, super villain. It is just a truncated Klavarscribo.
Bard casts MUSITUDE at Knight.
Knight's shield reflects MUSITUDE back at Bard.
Nothing left of Bard but a pair of smouldering booties.
All is once again, well in Neverwinter.
How to make seven parallel lines less visually confusing:
draw the third and fifth one, dotted!
Pretty sure I had a chromatic staff in Diablo 2.
This was an incredible watch. I was totally entrenched the entire video, thank you!
The biggest gate to learning music is that in order to do it, you HAVE to master it. It's like video game speedrunning. You have to become so familiar with situations and scenarios and patterns that you can see through what's on screen/page in front of you and do next to no interpretation, only react. So the main hurdle is getting up to that skill level. I think that's why tablature has been the only other competitor--it's readable for the intermediate player but is less useful for the master. But otherwise it's going to be almost impossible to have a smooth experience from beginner to expert in the same notation.
You are right. There is a lot to learn. But like plain language, we start with "Dick and Dora" books (or whatever your equivalent is), and build up. Eventually you can read Scientific papers or 19th century political commentry; both have arcane words that are used in uncommon ways. You can eventually interpret poetry, which is probably harder. If you start reading, expecting to understand Stoppard or Joyce immediately, you're just going to find "reading" very confusing. So, you progress through books written for learning readers, maybe comics, books you've seen as a film.
With music reading, you start with simple exercises and pieces. Play recorder in primary school, trombone in high school band. Maybe you write out lead sheets for a song you've heard on the radio, or do simple arrangements for your scratch band. The more you do, the easier it gets. But you can't do it all at the beginning.
That's fair but I feel like (having been through the public music school system & music school) notation-based musicians & by-ear are often pretty separated by genre & ethos. Sure plenty do both but each have a skill often completely ignored by the other side
@@jtn191 Yes. If you're not consuming written music, it shouldn't matter what the "readers" are doing. And, I agree, "readers" could benefit from learning to "play by ear".
"Readers" have the advantage of being able to play something almost instantly, as they don't (always) have to understand what thy're playing. "Hearers" have the advantage of being able to play without someone having to transcribe the dots (whioch can be tedious and labourious).
My "hearing" has been good in theatre auditions, where I'm the accompanist. Some auditionees will be under prepared, and will expect you to just "play along". So I suggest songs, and eventually we find one we both know. I'm glad for my early ear training.
Most days I'm surrounded by people who are fairly young (late teens to early 20s), they've only played their instruments for 4 - 12 years, and sight reading music is something they all do surprisingly well. They are not masters. After the first few years, reading music becomes the easiest part of being a musician by far.
Literally all you need is FL Studio trial and basic music theory to start, what are you on about? You have to try and learn to be a "master"
As a chess and music enthusiast, can I just say that I really enjoyed the narration of that Busnardo game? The little sweat beads at the end on Black's bishop and knight were just perfect!
One other thing: Western music notation, especially well-engraved sheet music, is just gorgeous to look at. The staves and bar lines are sturdy and rectangular, and then this architecture is decorated with elliptical note heads, sinuous clefs, gracefully curving slurs and ties, and various other beautifully calligraphed symbols and stylized shapes. Old sheet music that has yellowed with age is especially attractive.
When I was taking music notation class at the conservatory, the teacher made us write all of our assignments on manuscript paper with India ink and calligraphy pens. If we wrote a wrong note or if there was a blot of misplaced ink on the page, we couldn't use Liquid Paper to fix it; we had to start again with a new sheet. This was in the 1970s, when it was OK for music profs to torture their students.
Very well articulated point regarding the aesthetic and graphical design aspect!
Plus I think there is a cognitive perception side to the gorgeousness: if our brains are pleased to look at it they also find it easy to read and decipher and do it fast (again I think).
Wow that was the most poetic description of the beauty of sheet music I've ever heard and I completely understand your sentiment. 👍
I think this guy wants to fuck a piece of paper...
I agree that completed sheet music is satisfying to look at in its own way, but I don't think it's necessarily exclusive to sheet music either. As someone who uses several software programs to produce music, I get the same satisfaction from looking at completed project files in my DAW. And looking at other people's projects is a whole different kind of fascination with learning how they work and how it differs from your own process. It's all a visual representation of information over time. The only thing that really makes sheet music different in that regard is that it's black & white and you can print it on paper easily.
why call it “western music notation”? is there any “asian music notation”?
Okay, I honestly forgot I was watching a video on musical notation by the time the intro was finished. Bravo!
I would like to thank Musitude, not for doing anything actually productive or useful, but for making you go into the bit about most people not having the ability to make it through the initial learning of music. It put into prospective that my 10 years of playing music through school and college were a fundamental part of me, and pushed me to pull out my tuba and play on it for the first time in almost 3 years since I graduated. And, damnit, I loved it. Thanks for all of your amazing videos. Can't wait to see your next one
The main problem is that far too many people treat talent like something innate without understanding talent is a product of practice.
Then there's the related problem of some people giving up when they don't think they learn something fast enough due to poor dilligence, poor adaptability, poor critical-thinking/problem-solving &/or lack of experience in something they can cross-apply.
@@qwyyfluut Ability is the product of training and practice.
Talent is generally a modifier to how much practice is required for a given increase in ability (it also encompases a few other more complicated bits and pieces that affect the learning process).
The issue is that people muddle the two concepts together.
@@qwyyfluut
Talent IS innate.
Skill is what is learned.
Everyone has the ability.
@@qwyyfluut Traditional teaching insists on a simple approach to difficulty: do what you're told, the way you're told, over and over. With that approach, problem solving is of limited use: the only real problem is YOU. And that's been internalized to the point that "banging on it" is nearly a moral responsibility: it's what practice SHOULD be.
I grew up learning music in Jianpu and I think I learnt it faster that way, because it shows how notes are relative to each other rather than absolute pitches. It also lets me write music a lot faster, and I still use it when I need to write down music without a blank sheet music.
This is really fascinating. I'm very grateful to you for spending the time to make this up. I'm even more grateful to you for working on MuseScore, which i am a tireless promoter of. I have a few pointless comments.
1. A friend of mine was teaching a class of 12 year old to do a morris dance for May Day one year. Morris dancing is a kind of folk dancing designed to be equally well performed drunk or sober, though these children were all sober, i suspect. His musician was a talented classically trained violinist who had memorized the very simple tune, and was also sober, but didn't know much about folk dancing. He wanted to put the tune into the dancer's ears, so he said "Play me an A." He meant play the first 8 bars of the tune, but she played a single A note. There's an example in the wild of a note name and a letter being confused.
2. When I go to rehearsals playing the Eb alto saxophone, i am sometimes given concert music. So i have to transpose down a minor third. But sometimes i am given Bb tenor sax music, which is up a major second, because the guitar and piano players think a saxophone is a saxophone, right? So i have transpose down a fourth. But then most often the singer can't sing in the range it's written anyway. So i have to transpose another interval as will. This is all sight transposition, and it's common currency for horn players. Doesn't piano roll notation make this enormously more complicated?
3. Carrillo notation seems somewhat like figured bass. Seeing a note with 6/4 below it seems a lot like the examples of Carillo notation. Since it's numbers based, like Nashville numbers, it seems like it might be key independent as well. Both NNs and FB are notations designed by and for working musicians, so they are very efficient in what the optimize for.
4. Ireally like solfege. I've often thought it would be interesting to have a notation for modulation, so that "do" is always the middle line, but there is some way of saying "do goes down a major third here". Think of the bridge to "Have you Met Miss Jones," or the A of "Giant Steps" or all of "Joy Spring".
5. You could go further, do away with the staff entirely, and just use single letters for the solfege syllables, with lines above and below for accidentals. So the natural minor scale would be "d r _m f s _l _t d", where _m, or me, is m with an underbar. I don't know how you'd do rhythm, but it couldn't be that hard. Maybe use abc notation lengths. Good luck notating Charles Ives this way, but if you mostly play from lead sheets this would be a useful simplification, maybe. The Jerry Coker book "Readin' the Changes" use something like this all a reprise of the harmony for lead sheets. I often read and play from abc notation, though not for anything complicated, but usually not sight reading and never sight transposing. This would be similar to abc.
Rally enjoyed this comment. Thank you very much!
The system you proposed is very similar to stick notation. In this you have one line instead of a staff and all the notes go on the same line with solfège underneath. If you’ve ever seen the 333 book it’s in that. We love Kodaly ear training 💀
A system with relative pitch (e.g. a centre line representing the tonic, and key signatures indicating what the tonic is) would be very convenient for sight transposing, but would probably be harder for beginners and wouldn't work very well for atonal music.
I wish I could remember if the sax I grew up playing was Bb or Eb, I know it wasn’t C at least 😅 it doesn’t really matter in my adult playing, I just wish I knew haha
I've been using standard notation for 60 years. I think I'll stick with it. Something I found useful when I started using musescore was inputting music. It really helped improve my sight reading.
No foreign language is easy to learn thoroughly and neither is music. It is a foreign language. Just stick with it. AND PRACTICE EVERY DAY! Nothing else will make you better.
Your video is one of the most well researched, thorough, informative and enjoyable I've seen. 😊
Something I'd like to note as both a performer and a composer is the simple fact that being able to write in the margins of sheet music is the single most powerful thing that traditional western sheet music and physical sheet music in general has going for it. For instance as a performer there are dozens of notations on any stray piece of music about how the conductor and composer want this piece to be played, sometimes, no I'd even say often, being in direct conflict with one another. And as a composer not being able to easily write in the margins or add notes is the single most limiting thing about many proposed digital solutions, for example while western notation generally sucks at communicating timbre, the margins allow me to directly tell the performer how I want this to sound, although with the advent of technology I feel like this could go much farther, possibly even attaching recordings to notations in pieces so there's even less disconnect betwixt what I imagine the piece to sound like and what the performer will end up playing. Also I feel like dedicated music tablets or accessories to that effect could be potentially revolutionary in how music is performed, if properly implemented, even if all this thing did was automatically do page turns and store scores, it would be wonderful, as long as it allowed for the same aforementioned benefits of physical sheet music, like being able to write on it. So ultimately this isn't even my thoughts on notation rather the physical-digital divide as it currently stands and could stand in the near future. Also as a quick winge, tweaking the clefs to line up with each other exactly would be hell for anyone whose clef would be altered, but would be marvelous for teaching beginners and legibility in general.
I've been looking at options for music tablets recently, and there's already some pretty amazing stuff out there. The ones that have really caught my eye are basically scaled up versions of ebook readers with touch screens and styluses that let you scribble whatever you want on the digital sheets. Some even have options for a foot pedal that turns pages for you.
@@Analog_Bot Like 4 people in my orchestra of 60 just have a big tablet with a foot pedal, done.
I just use an Ipad with a pencil to take notes on it and a pedal to change pages
disagree Varese managed to handle timbre using traditional notation with new markings- similarly is the false argument over demisemitones or in American quarter steps- it is entirely possible to write classical Indian and Persian music using extended classical notation.
Fahad Siadat has some decent notation ideas on how to represent timbre with different note head shapes. There's a key at the beginning of the piece, but it could easily become standardized if wanted.
Also, I agree on the very important practice of writing on your music. I have *pride* even in my music notes. It's a huge part of the process, and really could be an entire 101 class in itself.
"The less you know about it, the more you bitch about it". I have found this to be so true regarding learning anything that has a system. Language, Math, Music... This problem of "it's just too difficult" arises from those who try it for two seconds, have questions, but don't seek answers or simply don't try to understand the system, and throw their hands up and say, "this is just too hard and doesn't make sense" and expect the system to conform to them. To which, given a different system, painstakingly designed just for them, they would do the exact same thing. Yes, reading music isn't easy in the beginning, it takes practice. It's the same with learning Mandarin or French (if they are not your first language) or some indigenous dialect. The problem is not the system, it's the unwillingness to do the work to understand the system. I struggled with reading music for years - why? Because I never applied myself to it! After applying myself to it I am now a decent sight reader and an expert functional sight reader. There is nothing wrong with the system. It works perfectly for those of us who have taken the time to learn it.
Though sometimes, the standard conventions ARE illogical, but kept out of tradition. Like in trigonometry, the the -1 in sin^{-1}(x) means a function inverse, but the 2 in sin^2(x) means an exponent.
Surprise surprise, 'the ancient' virtues include courage, humility, faith, charity, prudence, diligence, etc etc... and fortitude! 💯Rome wasn't build in a day. The actual system, or a paradigm if you will, just happens to be the most neat, convertible and compact nomenclature - a result of thousands of transnational bright minds work over the millenia. Kind regards :)
Although the same argument could theoretically be levelled at the dismissal of and complaints about some of the alternatives in this video. They may seem difficult to read at first glance, or specific elements seem arcane, but how can we be certain they would remain so if we applied ourselves to learning them for the same amount of time we applied to learning notation? Sheet music similarly seems difficult to read at first glance to the uninitiated.
@@SvenTheViking The key point being made isn't that learning music notation is easy but like any other system or area it has its own conventions that have to learned. Often those who sharply criticize a system are often unwilling to put in the effort necessary to learn it.
jonnysterling That is a good analogy with languages. Being able to functionally speak a foreign language is one thing. Being able to read and write in that foreign language is a whole other level.
Music is a language of emotions. And it is pretty much universal in that respect. Anyone anywhere can be affected by musical sounds. But learning to read, and then eventually write musical notation takes much longer and more dedication to learn the language at that level.
Outstanding video, as always. I'm fully expecting that after Braille and Jianpu notation compatibility in MuseScore we will get the ability to convert our scores into Farbige noten.
Music will sound so much better read on HDR screens :-)
yeah, i also left thinking "someone will definitely make a farbiger noten plugin now"
And it needs to follow that handwriting on paper style of the original patent
3:00 Why didn't the white player move the queen to G4 instead of moving the bishop? The black king is under direct attack that can't be blocked, the queen can't be taken, and the bishop prevents the king from moving up or right to safety. The line of attack of the bishop can be blocked (or the bishop taken), but that's of no use. I might be missing something, or the white player decided to mess with the opponent just for fun?
Queen controls e8 from h5. you want to prevent the king from escaping to e8 which is why it is lured to the center with Bd6+. Now we control all of the royal squares from behind the king with Qe8+ rather than from the far away g4 square further smothering the kings escape squares and clearing the way for d5#
I agree, Queen to G4 or H3 would both have been quicker checkmate scenarios than Bishop to E6 and the following moves to checkmate
@@PimpleJThomas unfortunately thats wrong. if Qg4+ or Qh3+, you relinquish the e8 square and blacks king can safely retreat there. i confirmed with an engine that Be6+ is the only move that forces mate and doesnt immediately lose whites advantage
@@yurilia7384 true that, checks out
if you dont have Disruptor Brain, making a personal-use notation system is a great way to understand the tradeoffs at play (especially if you're already a musician and know some theory). i made my own to suit my needs based on sacred harp shape notes, which i use for jotting down melodies while im working on songs. i very deliberately had to decide what it would and would not be useful for. lots of Disruptors and Reformers, i think, have not considered that their uses and needs are not the same as everyone's, and they'd probably be pretty happy simply using their system for their own personal notes were it not for ego getting ahead of them.
Making one for conlang and conworld use is also a quick way to decide what your civilisation really values.
I think it's very interesting that you mentioned that most students don't start with sheet music and instead are put off by their unfamiliarity with an instrument; I was put off by both as a child. Without naming names I went to one of the worst schools in the UK which failed multiple Ofsted reports. Somehow, we still had a music curriculum, and for some reason they used very old sheet music to teach with.
It was both immensely frustrating and disappointing as a young boy to be given a quick and dirty intro to sheet music, and then be expected to just read and play it normally. Most lessons just devolved into our tutor focusing on the two girls who were both able to do this, and just completely ignoring the rest of us. As lessons got more complex and my skills remained underdeveloped, both unable to understand what I was supposed to play and also how to play it, I just gave up. Any passion I'd once had for music as a subject left me as I "realized" that I was just too stupid to "get it", that I was never meant to play piano. I proceeded to spend one and a half years just kind of dicking around, an experience I'm sure many can relate to when it comes to public music education in the UK.
I am somewhat apprehensive to share this story as I recognize that learning music in a public school in year 7/8 isn't really the kind of musical education you're getting at (tutoring), but I shared it regardless because of the notation thing. Ultimately the reason I gave up was multifacteted and notation wasn't the only reason, but I still felt like sharing my story which by the sound of it is very uncommon.
If you read this far then thanks for your time. Please leave with the funny mental note of sitting a 12 year old in front of a piano (an instrument he's never touched) and giving him twinkle twinkle little star sheet music (something he's never seen before) and telling him to play it perfectly. At the time it was very confusing but in retrospect it's very amusing in a sort of sadistic way I suppose.
What music do you play?
@@musical_lolu4811 I'm sorry to break your heart Musical Lolu, but I play no instruments.
Wow, you really had a rough go about music. A shame you have never been able to learn since.
I was basically pushed to learn music (when i wasn’t really into it) as a kid which garnered a distaste for playing music in me. I stopped pretty early. It took until i was 20 (just a few years ago) for me to try to learn and I just kinda gave up on the music theory aspect of it as all I could remember were the utmost basics. The thing that got me into learning was video game music. Because of its roots in 8 bit tracks, a lot of iconic themes have very distinct and memorable melodies that you can just brute force your way into playing. With enough failures, you eventually get something that sounds similar to the thing you were trying to do.
I’m not going to say it isn’t frustrating, because it is: it took me two years to learn a single song. But man did i get better. And that entire process of repetitive failure has kinda numbed me to failure, which like, massively paid off? I basically taught myself to improvise? I’m learning more and more, albeit incredibly slowly. And while I can read notation, it takes so long for me that I generally forgo it. I use piano rolls on youtube to teach me the piece and I engrave it into my memory as deeply as I can.
So like, idk, get any fear of failure, of sounding bad out of your system. Literally. Play as shittily as you can, it’s literally how i gathered the motivation to play. If it sounds good, enjoy it. If it sounds bad, enjoy it.
But most importantly, engage in it if you feel like you want to. Don’t want to? That’s fine. But if you hum along to songs, or try to match the rhythm of music you hear, hey, swing with that.
We were expected to read fluently way too early in my experience as well. I had to write the names of the notes above them for a very long time.
Edit: I went on to study music composition in college though. This aspect of things made me feel bad for taking so long to adapt, but I knew I wasn't the only one, and I knew I'd eventually get it.
Hearing someone struggle learning music theory because of someone else’s inability to properly teach basic fundamentals and building blocks is always disheartening, and I’m sorry that was your story.
I never had the privilege of taking a music education through courses or tutoring, and in hindsight it wasn’t emphasized nearly enough (I personally believe basic music theory should be a mandatory curriculum at an early stage, as it carries so much cultural weight throughout history). I spent years training my ear with guitar shapes and scales and eventually came back to music theory as an aid to my musical development, and Holy Cow everything quickly came together.
The turning point for me was the Circle of Fifths. Finally understanding how to identify key signatures, as well as how and why the key of D has 2 sharps in its major scale, how Sharps ascend in 3rds and descend in 4ths as you go clockwise, and how Flats descend in 3rds and ascend in 4ths as you go counterclockwise, how utilizing all of these concepts made understanding how modes work so much easier, and the list goes on.
I still consider myself an intermediate guitar player by “accepted” standards, but having that musical vocabulary is so incredibly invaluable, it makes me wish I’d have taught it to myself when I was still in elementary.
One main reason that TAB is so popular is that you can write it out easily in a simple text file without the need for any complex music-setting software. And it's mainly used for popular music where the tradition is that you learn the songs by listening and there is no specific expectation that you play every note as written down by a composer. The TAB is just a help to give you a idea how to play a song, but the rest is up to you. "It's rock and roll, you can do what you want".
And tab works pretty well for guitar. It doesn't work as well for other instruments. But you should check out John Dowland's table scores, very cool!
Tabs work great for guitar. But he is right, they are holding you back to progress musically. You learn to reproduce a piece but you don’t really know what you are doing.
Ear training for intervalls and chords, sing what you want to play and play what you sing, improvising to backing tracks, technical exercises are much more important.
When I learn a new song I’ll still use tabs because I’m lazy. Would be much better to pick up a song by ear though.
@@TheHesseJames and as much as I find tab useful, I can’t look at tablature and hear in my head. With “standard” music notation, we can look at it and hear what is going on visually
@@TheHesseJames i can read conventional notation from playing the piano and singing. I also know some basic theory. Using tab for bass guitar was a concious choice. It was something new and I wanted to try it out. So far I haven't felt it has held me back. Now that I'm proficient in bass tab I can play a song on the piano using tab for my left hand and the melody in conventional notation ifor my right hand. Once I had learnt all the notes on the fretboard I just found myself doing this without much trouble.
@@calicoskybandI use the combined notation and tab view in Guitar Pro, basically using the tab as an extended fingering cheat sheet. I can audiate tab pretty much as well as notation though (unless it’s in a funky tuning).
On Clefs around 44:00, something you might find interesting is that in Spanish clefs are named after notes: Treble is called "Clave de Sol" = "G Clef", Bass is "Clave de Fa" = "F Clef", Alto is "Clave de Do" = "C Clef", and they are centered around the note it references to. So you can easily know that the pointy bit of "G Clef" is pointing to the G note, the two dots on "F Clef" are pointing to F and the pointy bit of the "C Clef" is pointing to C.
This happens in English too - but it is less common. When I was in elementary school (USA), we learned that "Treble Clef" was also "G Clef".
In Brazil too
Julian Carrillo's system is making me think about numpad notation members of fighting game communities use, it's wild how it's that same type of "hard to interpret at first but really elegant once you grasp how it works"
Some additional info about the Jianpu notation system you've mentioned in the video, which is still very popular in China (which you also mentioned already). While it can be refered as "Numbered Musical Notation", Jianpu (简谱), the first character of this word 简(jian) actually stands for "simple" or "simplified" here, so the name's actually meaning is "simple notation" or "simplified notation". It's common to see using Jianpu to write down the vocal line (e.g. lyric) of a curtain song or the melody line of a monophonic instrument, but it's more very common to see Jianpu is used together with guitar TAB or with a standard notation. It's not really a replacement for the current standard music notation, and it's also not intended to be a replacement for the standard notation but to work together with standard notation or TAB very well. So it's still a pretty useful notation system and thus widely used in (at least) China. Especially when writing sheet music for pop songs.
Anyway, great video as always! 👏
jianpu is great for quickly transcribing melodies, since you don't have to draw staves, just numbers, lines, a dots. I sing in a choir where the director often teaches folk songs and expects us to learn by ear, jianpu comes in handy! And as you said, useful for monophonic instruments. Every hulusi book I've had were purely in jianpu. It doesn't matter which key any instrument is in, everyone can use the same score without transposing.
Very popular in Indonesia too. Taught in schools. Much easier and is the one for the 90%.
When I was gigging in Taiwan I learned Jianpu for some performances. My favorite part of using it is that it's easy to transpose, since the numbers are just scale degrees. So, an advantage it had over standard notation was once the singer told us what key they wanted the song in, we didn't have to rewrite anything.
As someone who took a music class in middle school that was all about reading notes, aced that class, and then proceeded to never get into playing any instruments, I can attest to the fact that reading the notes was not the issue. Instruments are difficult and I just didn't have the patience to work through that.
As somone who can play several instruments and also learned in school how notation works, I always hated it. It never felt intuitive or easy to read. As an adult I tried several times to get better at it, but always gave up. I also always felt that learning instruments, or even merely playing them by notation just made it harder.
There is a reason most guitar players can't even read notes.
As someone he was misquoting on that matter, I can attest to the fact that he totally made it up that I stated reading notation was the most difficult part. I did no such thing.
Straw men are easy to defeat.
@@Shinkajo It's supposed to be hard. you have to put in the time and not give up. This has worked since the middle ages and suddenly people find it too hard?
@@curious011lol dumb.
Isomorphic key layouts are superior. There's no reason to feel good about learning a badly made system.
Certainly no reason to make a toxic holier than thou comment.
@@zoned7609 In music we're _humbler_ than thou, not holier.
If you practice harder than anybody, you win the Humility Cup. Then you can be as toxic as you please and still get cred for "telling it like it is."
GREAT VIDEO. So good, you inspired me to sign up for Nebula via your link. I was fortunate enough to learn to read music in school as a child. I love standard notation, in fact, I may be one of the only people who programs MIDI tracks with it, instead of a piano roll. But it has a few quirks that I'd love to see fixed. Here's where I ended up, after watching the whole video in one sitting: Use the chromatic staff. The intervals will become second nature, don't worry. Replace sharp and flat markings by making the bottom of each note a square or a diamond if it's an accidental, round if it's natural. Way more space for clarity. Yes, a chromatic staff makes it redundant, but it lets traditional readers adapt faster. (I also love the idea of the note's bottom having its letter on there, that was cool as a teaching tool). Replace clef symbols with a number for the octave represented. Logical improvements without the disruptor B.S.
I've been building my own music notation for conworlding reasons.
It's pretty amazing how tightly packed staff notation is and you don't notice until you try rolling your own.
This. There is so much information that can be encoded in a single measure of staff notation. Plus annotation; e.g., fingerings - which can be difficult or impossible to indicate in many proposed alternatives to traditional notation. Some of this power is because of the amount of refinement over the last 300-400 years. But with that refinement already done, it's going to be hard for any alternative to have the power of traditional notation.
A few things (I think) Tantacrul missed: 1) traditional western music notation works remarkably well for communicating transposable, tonal musics. When comparing to something 12-tone based like Carrillo's system, you realized that traditional notation lends itself well to quick transpositions in tonal music; you can read the pitch/interval relationships rather than absolute pitch. I think Carrillo's system might actually be beneficial in non-tonal and complex contexts but traditional notation is simpler in 90+% of the music people consume. When I teach beginning choral musicians note reading, I actually don't use pitch names for a couple years. It's exclusively Solfege and based in a system of reading patterns (as you might read words vs. letters). If they know where "Do" is on the staff, then they can read patterns around it. "Ode to Joy" will always start on "Mi" regardless of how high or low your starting pitch is. 2) the "Joy Barrier" that our Musitude friends talked about are less about notation and more about how we teach and are taught to learn music. Just like we don't expect babies to have to read letters and words before they start to speak, we shouldn't start with notation to learn to play music (thank you Pestalozzi for being the foundation of progressive music education). Indeed there are countless incredible musicians out there that don't formally read a notation system. Music is fundamentally an aural art form, not a visual art form. As a music educator of both beginning instrumental and vocal musicians I try to begin with playing by ear, and then connect those sounds to symbols. By having students perform musical patterns by ear before seeing them, I'm actually able to get them to being fluent readers faster (teaching reading in 6/8 has never been easier!). Beginner's technical abilities (especially with vocalists) is almost always more advanced than their visual literacy. If anyone has ever looked at the transcription of a pop musician's vocals, you'd probably know what I mean. Countless people can sing along with Taylor Swift after listening, but if you asked them to sightread a transcription without knowing it beforehand... it'd be messy. If we tie that back to learning a language- most people can speak more fluently than they can write in their mothertongue. 3) Traditional western music notation is *probably* held back by the intricate system of how music is communicated (with letter names, etc.). In otherwords, it's one small part of a complex world of western music that is slowly developed over time for various needs, etc. If we want to meaningfully create a more accessible system, it would probably mean that we would need to redesign everything regarding music literacy as we know it- and that's just not going to happen. Just like how the English language will never and can never be changed to include a standardized system of letter-combinations to pronunciations. When Tantacrul discussed the issue between Musitude's pitch naming system in relationship between the A-G system, that I think is a biased comparison (as a matter-a-fact way, not in a "bad" biased way), as it assumes that other systems have be be rooted in our frame of reference of western music. Sure, A and A' are the same note an octave a part, but *why?* Just because Pythagoras cut a string in half and decided 1:2 was the ratio of an octave, and 2:3 was a fifth, etc.? It's a very specific worldview that is based on physical characteristics about how sound is produced, but who is to say that there wasn't a different way foundations of music literacy could have been developed in history that might have resulted in a differen system of notation?
Interesting read.
I got into sound/midi synthesis with no musical background, and I'd like to share my physical/mathematical view on it.
I arrived at something like Carrillo's system BECAUSE it is so easy to relate to other keys. You can just consider 0 to 12 an offset from your key (and potentially also allow negative numbers). I find it quite annoying that in western notation you can't just offset neither the notes by name, nor visually.
Also at the risk of saying something you (or others) already know - I found it quite fascinating that a lot of choices of notes / octaves are not invented, but have mathematical reason - regarding your last paragraph.
An octave = 2:1 is a very natural thing: The waveform repeats exactly after 2 oscillations of the higher frequency note, it's the shortest possible common oscillation of 2 frequencies. From the perspective of the lower note, the higher one is even nothing more than added timbre / altering the shape of the oscillation - as the combined wave repeats with the same frequency regardless of this added overtone. So they are essentially somewhat the same tone - it makes a lot of sense to have the same name, and for an octave to appear as a fundamental concept.
And you can follow this idea of a short common oscillation period to find other frequencies that have a special relationship to each other, and this more or less leads to the system of notes we use:
Dividing an octave into 12 is a good match, because you get a few good common oscillations between notes - with 7 half-tones 2^(7/12) = 1.498 for 3:2, and 5 half-tones 2^(5/12) = 1.33 for 4:3, and 4 half tones 2^(4/12) = 1.26 for almost 5:4, and 3 half tones 2^(3/12) = 1.189, for almost 6:5. - a fair amount of the short common oscillations. It doesn't match them perfectly but 12 is still a really good divisor of an octave for that reason - assuming you want fixed notes/frequencies in the first place.
For me personally, the numbers 0, 3, 5, 7 now convey more of a musical idea to me than named notes, surprisingly. One more benefit is that relationships like 7 = 12 - 5, so 7 being 5 half tones away from the higher octave again, really pop. It might not be better for practical purposes, but it is somewhat natural (to me).
Ta. Interesting take
"you realized that traditional notation lends itself well to quick transpositions in tonal music; you can read the pitch/interval relationships rather than absolute pitch." -- unfortunately, this just isn't correct at all because of B->C and E->F only being a semitone.
So stoked to hear that the reason I can't learn piano is because the notation that I've been reading for 12 years is too confusing! I'm sure all my problems will be solved when I switch to something more intuitive. But seriously, did no one stop to consider people who already know how to play one instrument but can't learn another? It completely disproves their whole point that notation is the main problem.
Also, I'm surprised that people consider piano roll notation to be more intuitive. I don't even use it for composing. I hate trynna figure out how to write more complex syncopated rhythms when I can barely tell how long the note is gonna be before I hit play.
This is exactly what all the beginners would think after watching this video - they aren't good because of the notation. I'd say this wasn't the conclusion you were meant to reach...
@@timothygremlin9737 bro… I was being sarcastic.
I agree! I really wish I could just use regular sheet music notation in those programs because (especially as a non-pianist) the piano roll notation is just so ugly and hard to read.
A mammoth presentation . Your coverage of other baffling systems makes the current system look refreshingly simple. A good compromise and easy to read at speed on any instrument . . I will stop whinging forthwith . Good job.
You did WISE to put in that black screen at 1:03:00. Gave me just enough time to stare, process what I just heard, pause, and fall to the floor flailing and laughing like a madman.
The cruelty of tantalizing me with an hour long video I can't watch right now is overwhelming
Cruelty. Tantalizing. I see what you did there.
Do you really need to go to work though?
"TANTAlizing CRUELty" hmmmmm
When I tried learning the Guzheng (21-stringed traditional Chinese zither), we used 1 through 7 (plus sharps/flats). 1 was the root and octaves were indicated with dot(s) above/below the number, relative to middle C
The cool thing about this is that it's irrespective of the key, so you can play the same melody automatically transposed wherever you want.
edit: 15:40, 1:11:19
you mentioned it in the vid 😂. Jianpu 簡譜, that's exactly what we used
Fun parallel: the Chapman Stick works in the same fashion-because there are no open strings and every interval between strings is the same for each hand, you basically learn a small number of hand shapes and fingering patterns and then transpose them up or down the fretboard or across from string to string.
100% agree. Using scale degrees on monophonic instruments is by far the best and easiest way to learn music by ear.
Disclaimers: I only skimmed the video, because I've seen a lot of these over the last year or two. But my two (halfway-informed) cents (and obviously the author knows a lot about the subject, considering Musescore):
Notionation in general definitely should not die, because the most efficient way of communicating about music is in a text-like format. But modern staff notation also isn't universal, because some instruments require just too much that isn't available (try learning the guqin through a modern book using staff notation! it's much easier to just memorize a few Chinese characters and use the right notation). But no matter what nifty ideas anyone comes up with, getting them adopted is a whole 'nother issue (same reason people still use Windows when all they really need is MS Office, except with hundreds of years of gradual standardization instead of a few decades). So rather than "notation must die" (I know, brings in the clicks) I might say "staff music must be open to larger reforms and improvements, with input from ethnomusicologists, HID/UX experts, and modern genre composers." But that wouldn't fit in a RUclips video title.
So much of what you said feels so intuitive already to me as a musician. It's insane how much obvious stuff gets missed by people who want t0 pretend they know what they're talking about. Notating music is for the performer. You'd think one of the most successful video game developers would have a better understanding of user interface...
lol if game devs knew how to design UI the industry wouldn't be as bad as it is right now
most studios publish mediocre games anyway
Super true. If you want to play Mary Had a Little Lamb, any notation method will do. If you want to play LITERALLY NEARLY ANYTHING HUMANS CAN THINK OF, our current notation methods are great. Not perfect, but pretty freaking great.
@@boyman7823 my guess is that they want and could to do better ui, but run into a combination of time contrains and engine limitations.
@@reallyanotheruser7290 No they purposefully try to design stimulating but inconveniant UI to exploit your dopamine cycles. Every piece of media you see nowadays is optimized to waste as much time as allowed without giving any substance.
This video makes me grateful to live in a time where I have access to a system which, while not perfect, has been refined incrementally over centuries to allow me and so many others to learn, share, and teach completely new and previously unheard music. Music notation is a gift which, once you learn how to speak the language, unlocks worlds of possibility. Music in my opinion is not something simply to be consumed, but to participate in - and a specific, concrete record of instructions on how to perform a piece is so invaluable. Combine that with the accessibility of the digital age and we are truly blessed to be able to share so much varied and wonderful creative art with people all over the world. Thanks Tantacrul for a fascinating and informative video!
Another argument against chromatic staff could be that if your piece of music is reasonably stable from a tonality pov, flats/sharps will be used very incidentally (generating minimal discomfort) whereas in a chromatic staff, half the space will not be used at all (inefficient) since the chromatic deviations are fairly rare.
That was my first thought. Most music is pretty diatonic and inventing a whole notation system just to accommodate chromaticism that's fairly infrequent seems inefficient. Like, there's a reason sharps and flats in the middle of a bar are called accidentals! They're not the norm!
What if part of the reason most music is diatonic is because the notation system assumes diatonic music is the standard?
@@linusorri Might be, at root, but given how much music is produced without knowledge of the notation system, I don't think it's as influential that way as you might think. Plus, diatonicity came before the notation system, temporally - just listen to that Gregorian chant.
@@linusorri That is ridiculous because it is well proven that humans enjoy diatonic music (aka music with a central tone, aka key signature). Pretty much NO ONE enjoys non-tonal music or fully chromatic music: which is why piano roll/DAW roll is a dumb solution to the needs of music.
@@linusorri I'm pretty sure this is one bit of history that isn't a "the chicken or the egg" problem. The music definitely came before the systems of notation that were invented to describe it, although I take the point about standards playing a big part in defining how systems are subsequently used and how they continue to develop.
I'd argue the OP's core point though. Most Western/European music is diatonic but there's a hell of a lot of music in the world that is neither. In some cultures a chromatic staff could be quite useful; assuming they didn't already have some other native form of notation for their music. But on the other hand, perhaps a pentatonic staff would be most useful in cultures that heavily use those scales and oh look... we've now got three different standards! :)
Thank you for creating such an amazing video based on a topic which I have been considering seriously for so many decades.
When I interviewed legendary jazz drummer and clinician John Riley as part of my Master's thesis, I expressed certain views about the limitations of our Western notation system, he simply replied with: "Does it help?". Off course I responded in the affirmative, and it really moved me to consider more deeply the kind of quite critical disposition I had about our notation system. I think certain people are wired differently and unfortunately in my case for whatever reason it has meant that though I understand music notation, how it functions, and can write and read it, I have a total inability to sight read. I can't make the connection or interpretation required to read music in real time while playing at the same time. It is a kind of left to right brain thing or obstacle that I don't seem to be able to overcome. I marvel at other drummers that can read in this way.
It has impacted my music career quite profoundly, because I know that being the musician that I am I could have gotten so many gigs (whether live or session) had I been able to overcome this inability to sight read and therefore would have moved so far ahead in the industry than I have been able to date. In fact one of my lecturers pointed this out to me when I was doing my bachelors in college, telling me that if I really wanted to get ahead which I should, due to my musical ability, I needed to become a proficient sight reader, that was twenty years ago.
I remember as a teenager when I first started taking drum lessons and began learning to read, it took me a little while to realize that where a note happens in time is based on the length of the note that preceded it. That the note symbol itself did not define or dictate where the note was in time. Initially I thought that single eighth notes always started on the "and", it took a while for it to register that any note symbol can be anywhere in time and that the whole structure of the notation system as it relates to rhythm is based on note lengths, and therefore where the note sounds is dependent on the length of the note which came before it ad infinitum.
Well what is first or comes first in a piece of music, what is primary, pitch or rhythm? That is really interesting to consider and depending on the answer, it could define the direction that any notation system heads in. Off course the fact that our notation system seems to have come into being in order to facilitate the dissemination of choral chant, it is obvious in that context that note pitch and length would be a primary consideration, and since the rhythmic structure of Gregorian chant is not dense, it is completely logical that the notation system started out not considering whether rhythm or pitch and its relative length should be taken as the primary context for developing a notation system. In fact at the time there was no way of anticipating that music would evolve in such a way that rhythm would become so important in our Western pantheon. If we look at other cultures, like India for instances, their approach in the context of an oral tradition of pedagogy treated the rhythmic and melodic components that make up music with equal importance, as did the African traditions, but not in the West.
So as a young drummer concerned with rhythm, I did not initially register and I guess my first drum teacher did not take the time to explain to me, or realized I had not understood how the notation system functioned. So what about answering my question above, what is primary in a music score pitch or rhythm? I strongly lean towards rhythm, because prior to any pitch being assigned to any notes in a musical work, those notes arise in time and create a rhythm, even if no formalised pitch is assigned to them, a rhythm is created first and foremost, it exist prior to pitch, melody or harmony, it is foundational and that rhythm will exist irrespective of the note length, since if we clap out the rhythm all notes will fundamentally be of equal lengths, defined by the very quick attack and decay of each note, the attack being the place where the note arises in the time line.
So if rhythm exist prior to pitch in musical works (though one could argue a handclap has a pitch, but even than it would be just one pitch of pretty much equal length), would it not make sense to have a notation system in which the symbols used define where the note is in time, before it defines the pitch and the length of the note. This adjustment using dedicated symbols could easily be made using our current notation system by changing the meaning and orientation to the note symbols we already use, and in doing so, in my view would make the reading of music so much simpler, because with one glance at any bar of music one would know immediately where the notes are in time, and using such dedicated symbols would mean the need for rest symbols could be eradicated by 95%.
Here is another issue considering the kind of contradictions within our notation system and music theory and how they interrelate or are interdependent. Let's think about time signatures, which are also based on note lengths, looking at the most common time signature in contemporary Western music 4/4 time, that signature means four notes in a bar with each note having the value of a quarter note, so what is the value of a quarter note?
Well that is a dependent measurement that only achieves definition or comes into being once a tempo has been decided upon. What is tempo? Tempo is the arising and creation of consistent manufactured time created within an infinite silent space, based on the speed of repetitive consistent pulses arising in equal measured distance from one another thereby creating a "feeling" of time, based on repetition. Is there perfect time? Can time even be perfect? What is the source from which it arises? Is the feeling of time a human creation, merely conceived in our human limited universe of perception, based on the uniqueness of the mechanisms of our human nervous systems, or does it exist objectively? Therefore, do non humans experience pulses and time similarly to humans beings? When a cock crows does it experience its crowing in a rhythmically and melodically identifiable repeatable way, as a human being does?
Getting back to our humble quarter note it becomes obvious that the quarter note has no inherent definable existence, it is a dependent conceptual construct, which needs to be underpinned by a variety of other constructs such as pulse and rhythm, which makes a pretty strong argument that note length is an overlay on structures that must already be in existence, interpreted and felt for a quarter note to have any meaning, and for it to become a conduit for musical communication. In that sense the way we conceive of time signatures or more precisely the conceptual symbols we use to be communicative about what they are, are completely untrue or at least quite ambiguous, since there is no actual difference if we were to clap the pulse in any time signature, with cycles of four pulse for example such as 4/4, 4/8, 4/12, 4/16, 4/20, ect, irrespective of the tempo, if clapped they will all sound the same, and even with a melodic instrument that can sustain notes.
There it is so many unanswered questions and ambiguity exist in our notation system, yet it works. It is a representational communication about music, not music itself which is so mysterious, because for one obvious thing, music is a series of event moving in linear time, but music itself is actually experienced as a totally. So of course music being such a mystery, any symbolic representation is bound to be limited. However, I think it could be simplified by changing the foundation orientation on which it is based. Keep its symbols, just re-interpret them such that the note symbols themselves communicate explicitly where they start on the timeline without being dependent on the previous note symbol, and negotiate the symbolic communication of how long the note is afterwards, this could be done by having the head of the note coloured in or not to define its length.
Maybe I am just a complainer because I have difficulty making it work for me, while millions of others have had no problem making it work for them, and it would be an almost impossible experiment to create in order to determine which system most people find easier, so I guess I will never know, but my intuition tells me that using dedicated symbols for where a note exists in time relative to the pulse would be easier to read than the system we have in place currently.
Literally one if the best comments I have ever read on RUclips, bro you're a legend thanks for starting the conversation with evidence, facts and even valid questions, may you forever play, think and share the joy with the world 🎉🎧
@@Nadanubia Thanks so much, that is very generous of you to say, I am glad you enjoyed my response which was easy for me, since this topic has been part of my musical process and consideration for such a lond period of time, thanks again Alan.
@@Thequornsdrummingworld There are 16 or more places where a note might come in, not counting triplets and stuff. It would get very messy very fast putting a time marker on every note. Let the previous notes be your guide.
14:00 "... who mistake their ignorance for fresh-eyed clarity" Needs to be on permeant display, basically everywhere.
I forgot this video was about music 5 minutes in.
Congratulations for making this video. For my part, I think a music notation system’s reason to be is to support the musical ear. This is why standard notation still exists because it does just that. By looking at such a score, with some small amount of training and experience, one starts hearing the music.
@59:41 I came to think of one scenario:
"So which rehearsal mark in the score was the crazy atonal part?"
"That's the letter G."
Jazz lead sheet is really interesting to me. Having a flexible notation is really cool because the performer interprets not only how the notes are played but which note are played, as long as they provide a generally similar function. Generally there is the harmony, (the chords or changes) and the melody.
First off, the melody of autumn leaves, played like it is written is quite easy and not rhythmically complex. But as part of the jazz tradition, players interpret the melody and change the rhythm, articulation and even potentially the notes, adding ornamentation and variation. So the autumn leaves melody is basically played differently by everyone but is still easily recognizable as one thing: autumn leaves.
Take as an example Chet baker’s version or the miles Davis quintet’s version or bill evans version, it’s clear to an informed listener it’s the same song although the experience of each recording is very different and so the listener can listen to the “same song” 20 times in a row and get a different experience each time.
Secondly, the chords are seen as a general recommendation and using substitutions in moderation is encouraged to keep the music alive and to hear an individual’s expression.
As an example, II-V-I is a series of chords that describe tension and resolution through movement. So, as long as you embody the tension that builds in the V chords and release it (or not) in the tonic, you can basically do whatever you want when accompanying (comping) this type of notation can be very objective and leave less space for interpretation, or it can be a very general suggestion.
When a C7#11 chord is written, the notes aren’t prescribed, a sound or tonality is. That is, of a dominant chord with a #11 as tension, a player, depending on the melody can add a b9 or a 13 if they want. It’s pretty cool
that's true! even in most big band settings, the entire rhythm section is just playing off of husks of their parts, they generally see rhythms, they see some chords, and the rest is improv'd from there! Comping is super interesting, as it means literally every performance ever of a piece will be different, not even to mention solos, which are literally just based off of chords on your paper and listening down to the bass.
Figured bass allowed for much the same sort of improvisation, it was popular in the baroque period. Jazz cats are constantly reinventing the wheel and thinking they got there first.
@@rjlchristie I never said anything about jazz cats reinventing the wheel. I'm very aware of figured bass as well as the tradition of improvising from so many composers. Bach, Mozart, Barrios, Chopin and many more would improvise great pieces. It's unfortunate that you would place that character onto me, in fact I have reached level 9 in classical guitar at the royal conservatory. Modest achievement I know, but still, I do also have a great passion for classical and romantic era classical music. I simply wanted to raise a point the video hadn't mentioned with no claim of superiority. Anyways, it's true that figured bass allows for much of these kinds of improvised elements. Thank you for reminding me!
As a professional classical pianist/opera conductor, my biggest complaint with standard notation is that it puts us in rhythmic and stylistic boxes. We get that trained into us from the beginning as children because of the visual nature of the notes on the page. The Lego brick notation causes many of us classical musicians to play rigidly and without organic fluidity. For example, in Italian opera there is much rubato and variation of tempi that all comes from the text. Puccini tried to notate it but unless you speak and understand Italian, you won't really do the rubato convincingly. We classical musicians are trained as "I see 8th note, I play strict 8th note"...pianists and symphonies are notorious about that. Sure, it's an 8th note, but there are various types of 8th notes, depending on the context. I've learned much about the space between notes as well as horizontal movement from my jazz and pop/contemporary commercial music colleagues. What they do can't be successfully notated in the present system without creating a huge Jackson Pollack of markings on the page. Just goes to show that knowing the style and traditions of the music are more important than the limited info in the notation. It's like Google Maps, you get the driving instructions, but you still have to get in the car and drive it with all the subtle variations of speed.
Learning how to use jazz modal theory to improv around the underlying chord progression (or just general structure) of a piece, and then letting yourself experiment with rhythmic and tonal/interval patterns is a great way to break out of that box. As you get better, you can stretch the period of time before you resolve the break from the time signature longer and longer while maintaining a coherent and pleasing run.
I'm sure you know this, but this is how I've helped some undeniable virtuosos I've met out of the constraints you've described. I used to be intimidated when some of them would be excited to play with me, because of the vast discrepancy between their chops and mine- but I eventually saw that I had something I could share with them that could unleash a whole new level of expression for them. (I am a fully self/taught pianist, starting by ear- who eventually learned that I had been slowly re-discovering jazz modal theory on my own.)
There's nothing more rewarding than taking a competent classical pianist, voicing the chords for the 12-bar blues in a fun way, then telling them to just _do shit_ sticking to the pentatonic blues scale for the chords root, and watching their eyes *immediately* light up as they discover an ability they never knew they had.
But is this an issue with notation? Rubato is stylistic and deeply personal; that's why we have conductors (I mean, what else are they good for? :-) You could make the same argument about alphabets--they don't give us any information about the affect for a Shakespeare sonnet or soliloquy, but they certainly give us the building blocks, and directors and actors take it from there. And in that sense it's kind of neat that there wasn't a notation whereby Shakespeare could tell us exactly what he had in mind; then we would simply be strictly playing his 8th notes.
Strict time is the ONLY way you're gonna get 12+ people to play together a piece they didn't even write or maybe even like or get.
@@KR-ll4dj Doesn't the Conductor often resort to singing to illustrate an interpretation? I agree that in Opera especially part of one's eye must be kept on the Conductor.
I'd say Guitar music exemplifies this more than any other instrument. You can play the same piece, even a solo, 20+ different ways and positions. Making real time sight reading almost impossible. Unless it's a basic Chord chart. TAB was one of the best innovations for solving this problem.
Fantastic presentation. As a self taught guitarist who later went on to do a degree in music (as a mature student) specializing in composition, counterpoint and analysis, I did grapple with learning guitar tab and later standard notation. I think both these systems are great once the time and effort is put into learning them. The Tab system for guitar solves a problem which doesn't arise on piano, which is the multiple choices the player has to play the same note. For example the note E above middle C on a piano (not forgetting that guitar notation is transposed down an octave) could be played on any one of 5 strings on a standard classical guitar. As for the 5 line staff we use today, it is designed to fit the diatonic scale in a similar way to a piano keyboard layout. I think that is something which is overlooked by non musician technicians. To use a full chromatic
staff to play tonal music is wasteful of space and musically redundant as it provides a space for all the notes which don't belong to the key and thus are unlikely to be used. I am now subscribed to your channel and look forward to watching your other videos. Ps. I come from Dublin. Judging by your accent, I am assuming you do too.
There is common use of a Roman numeral above the staff to indicate fret 'position' in many classical guitar scores. E.g , III means the 3rd fret position (first finger at the 3rd fret). Other indications are small numerals for fretting fingers and p, i, m and a for r.h. or plucking fingers. They're used sparingly in a lot of cases, but are just as effective as tablature with a little experience, plus all the other benefits of standard notation.
We have a similar thing in brass insturments we call alternative fingerings. For example on a Euphonium (which is in the key of Bb) I can play our middle F either on the 2nd partial open (no valves down), or on the third partial with 1st and 3rd valve (or 4th valve) down. As you can sort of think of our partials as individual strings on a guitar that just operate in inverse (you pluck a string it makes a tone, you want the tone higher you decrease the length of the string with your finger... on a brass instrument it is the opposite, you buzz on a partial, and if you want to make the tone lower you increase the length of the air column by depressing a valve)
@@SRHMusic012 Yes just more information to process.
drumming is more about the count. Yes you have to know what to hit but if you hit the wrong thing and still are in time not a dealbreaker. Also, most people do not know you have to tune your kit. If you don't it will sound like crap. This is one of the many ways traditional theory will assist you. Seriously, even drummers need to know it, not as much as guitarists but yeah you better know the basics if you drum! Ever see someone with mad skills sit behind a kit and it is in time but sounds horrible? That is likely an un-tuned kit.
I dont think I have ever seen such awesome intro to a video anywhere, ever.
When I was a 12 years old flute student, I had a chinese friend who made me interested in dizi, the traditional chinese flute, so I ordered it from china and thaught myself to play it (it's actually quite similar to the flute). I found many chinese tunes written in jianpu online so I also learned that, and I have to say it's very straight forward for reading simple melodies
A few more observations from a fellow music history/theory nerd:
- Did you describe guitar tablature as a recent innovation? It developed alongside standard notation in its own right - there are lute tablature scores from the Renaissance (and possibly earlier - my background is more keyboard-based so I’m unsure when the earliest tablature records appear). Especially in Spain.
- The 5-line staff with clef became standardised because the distance between the note one ledger-line below the staff through to one ledger-line above encompasses the standard vocal range for each type of voice once you chuck in the appropriate clef (C4 - A5 for Treble; D3 - B4 for Alto; B2 - G4 for Tenor; E2 - C4 for Bass). If there are fewer lines there are more ledger lines needed; more lines just get more confusing, especially with multiple parts on the same page. 5 is the sweet spot for melodies within a human vocal range.
- Figured bass notation, lead sheets, or lyric sheets with chord symbols could also get honourable mentions here. All of them have quirks that are intuitive to some and completely weird to others.
- I am not a fan of the idea of going completely digital, personally. THAT idea does end up risking elitism/gatekeeping while access to technology remains uneven. It’s certainly a useful tool in the way you’ve described it, but shouldn’t be the end-goal, imo. Nothing will ever top the 1:1 human dynamic of the teacher/pupil relationship when it comes to sharing musical knowledge.
Guqin notation (in China) has been evolving for around 1500 years, and is a form of tablature. That's the oldest that I know of, though in the western world, the organ (!) has the earliest known tablature, from 1300.
And absolutely agreed about not going full digital. For the same reason, the idea of color as part of notation would never catch on - I can't count the amount of times I handwrote out a bit of music before a show, or printed things out on a black & white printer, or pulled up a music PDF on an eBook reader. Music needs to be accessible in any form.
At least guitar tablature is easy enough to learn. Keyboard tablature is a mess to the point where we still don't have full agreement on how to realize it in modern notation.
I mean not everyone has access to a teacher and not everyone has access to technology
Figured bass is a counterpoint improv-targeted exercise masquerading as a notation :)
@@za_wavbitColor will do great given how about one in 15 men is color-blind 😂
Small note about the "mouth pictogram" idea at 40:24, the Korean Hangul system is almost exactly this, just simplified slightly to be able to be written. Featural writing systems are uncommon, but are not purely pet projects or shorthand systems unusable for the general populous.
yeah one of my favourite featural things is in characters like ㅋ, ㅌ, ㅊ, ㅍ in particular bc when you get that "it's like ㄱ, ㄷ, ㅈ, and ㅂ, but with an extra line to represent more air for a fricative" it's fucking mindblowing I love it sm
I think Hangul really is the best of both worlds: it's based off of "mouth shapes" which could make it easier to learn but each is also abstract enough that you can read it easily when more familiar with it
Hangul is literally the best writing system imo. Makes SO much sense
The reason why Hangul makes so much since is that it is a constructed writing system. Instead of evolving naturally it was designed and to my knowledge it is the only constructed writing system that is widely used.
Hangul works well for Korean and not so great for English. Because of the way Korean consonants change in the middle of words. We could probably adjust it in some way.
And from what I gather it is the literal counter example to his statement. It broadened access to reading and writing since the more it was used, the less you have to learn thousands of Chinese characters.
Still since it's creation, Korean has changed and the my teachers lacked the ability to hear the difference between 에 and 애.
If you like Hangul, try Hiragana and Katakana in Japanese. There is some overlap in accents, but also shapes that look very similar and are not that related.
Thanks!
Thank you very much!