I'm fascinated by this kind of cultural technology. I think we ought to be experimenting with notation of all kinds—numerals, alphabets, languages, measurement systems, calendars and so on. We need to make it easier to learn new systems of thought so that we can actually adopt better ones!
This comment reminded me of an episode of Radiolab that I recently listened to. It's about a man named Charles Bliss who attempted to create a set of symbols that would let us think and communicate in a pure way across cultures and languages.
I tend to be a little skeptical of attempts to make "pure" forms of communication, because I think there are bound to be trade-offs, as in any engineering endeavour. I'd rather see schemes that are optimized for a particular purpose. What would a language oriented toward scientific and technical communication be like? How would currencies designed for ecommerce work? How would a calendar for global organizations work?
This looks pretty slick. Just the fact that its a bit easier to write is awesome. Even if the usefulness of this notation doesn't pan out, the hummingbird website is a great example of good marketing and messaging. It's the perfect name and the perfect website to promote something like this.
Every note has to have a line that extends its full rhythmic value past the notehead -- you can't just write 10 circles to say "this big chord fills the whole measure". Every accidental must be marked on the note -- so if you're writing a piece in C# major and it doesn't diverge from that key, you're going to have to notate the accidental on every single note.
EDIT: they do allow key signatures; they just don't mention it in the example or intro video.
And every notehead's shape varies based on the pitch class (i.e., C, D, E, etc.) -- so except for "E"s (empty) every note head has some decoration you'll have to do... you can't just make a spatter of dots/stems with a slash over them for eighth notes.
For some music, this seems like it would be a bit more work (mainly the varying noteheads); for other music it'd be a serious problem.
My first thought looking at the sample notation was that this would be hard to keep legible in hand-written music. It seems like it doesn't really do much to improve the legibility of notation while it does force the use of their software.
Redundancy can actually be useful in notation as a sort of error-detecting code. In this case, if the pitch-symbol and pitch-position don't match up, someone must have made a mistake in transcribing it.
Whether it helps one when reading music is another matter. I remember learning to play an electric organ as a youngster with a book of sheet music that came with the organ; being aimed at beginners, each note head had the note letter written inside it. Hummingbird is basically using the same idea, just replacing the letter with a symbol. It probably does make it easier to learn. Whether it would be of any use for an experienced musician, I kind of doubt. (I certainly outgrew expecting the note head to contain the note letter, myself.)
It depends on the purpose. Introductory materials sometimes use a large enough note that they can write the letter name inside the note head. (Works better for black note heads.)
The redundancy helps associate the name and position.
I don't think I would prefer it in this case. The extra note name information is visually noisy and detracts from the shape of the line, which is mostly what experienced musicians see. The shape of the line, the absence of sharp and flat marks, and remembering what key you are playing in, covers most of your reading.
not really, it can help in reading things faster&reduce errors and in this case the standard notation is just "wasting" some bits of information (the shape).
But, I, for one, am annoyed by the english language needing both grammatical structure _and_ a question mark to express questions ;)
I completely support anyone who wants to invent new notations for things. It's fun. But I'd just like to note that if logical, regular notation was necessarily better, we'd all be speaking Lojban and programming in Scheme. Also, I suspect a conventional eighth note would be easier to make out in a dim concert hall...
If that theory was correct, one might expect Forth to be really popular among Japanese speakers. I don't see a lot of evidence for that.
I tend to think it's a more general effect where humans actually want a certain amount of irregularity in their languages/notations, to act as markers or error-detecting codes of some sort. e.g. "he", but "him" in accusative case. But who knows; English gets by with "you" being both singular and plural...
I don't understand what C, below and above mean. Making the bass and treble clef notes the same seems like a win. Other than that the traditional notes seem pretty easy to read.
I found the 'above' and 'below' also confusing, as 'above' seems to make sense as a pitch 'above' C (i.e. D) and below would be a pitch below C -- which is B in their notations. Having 'A' be 'Above' yet represent a note below 'B'-'Below' is logically problematic for me.
I disagree with making different clefs the same. Clefs are different for a reason-- they attempt to keep most notes on the staff. Bass and Treble have won out over competing clefs (if you ever want a challenge, trying reading the various versions of C Clefs like alto/tenor) because they keep most notes on the staff most of the time for most instruments. (Violas, Celli, Trombones, and a few others excepted).
There's also the fact that Treble (G) Clef and Bass (F) Clef are a perfect fifth away from Middle C, which reinforces the importance of perfect fifths in the system of major keys, but I suppose that's a small consideration overall.
I've actually just spent my afternoon writing out some music for the first time in about 15 years, so this is quite interesting.
However I must say that I just don't get it. Every example I look at appears significantly more complex than the standard notation, and harder to discern at a smaller size. One place I can see it really struggling is on copies. Music tutors spend a lot of their time copying music sheets, and I suspect this would be quite difficult to read on a low quality reproduction.
Standard notation has survived for hundreds of years. I'll be the first to admit it's not exactly easy to get your head around to begin with, but once you understand the rules it becomes apparent as to why it is the way it is.
I've often thought that if there's space for something to be reformed in musical notation, it's the fact that different wind instruments are notated in different keys[1]. I realize there are historical reasons, but it just seems like such an artificial barrier between musicians in a modern band or orchestra.
This is mildly annoying for composers, but it doesn't really matter for the players. They play the notes they see on the page. I suppose if they have perfect pitch it might be a bit jarring.
It's a standard part of musical training to be able to read a part written in either concert pitch or in your instrument's pitch, or even to be able to transpose on sight into any key. It's not easy but learning to do so pays off when you're on a gig and the singer insists on playing Lush Life in B natural.
We can debate how large an obstacle it is, or whether learning to overcome it is valuable, but clearly it is there, even if it's just an annoyance. I just think it would be really nice for (e.g.) a clarinetist to be able to sub in on an alto sax part on sight without having to go the extra mental work of "Ah, right, up a perfect fourth --"
I play mainly clarinet (which is written Bb transposed), and the transposition thing is not a problem at all. It's the relative intervals that matter anyways. I don't feel it creates a barrier when communicating with others in the orchestra (we talk about concert pitch anyways), and not having to count five extra staff lines makes up for the small inconvenience.
This makes it much it much easier when switching between different instruments of the same family - a clarinetist (when playing any clarinet part) associates one note on the staff with one fingering. If all instruments were in C, the player would need to associate the same dot with multiple different fingerings, depending on the family member being played.
The embedded visual cue to the name of the note, plus the proportional sizing, seem really nice to me. The sharping, flatting, and lack of ascenders and descenders I'm not so sure about.
You also lose the "wall of black notes" warning you of deadly fast notes up ahead. ;)
The embedded name of the note seems to be the only thing this has going for it, and only in high-quality prints. I feel like the stems help me to distinguish where notes start and end, and the sharps and flats seem a little... small.
Also, properly typeset standard notation is proportional anyway.
Additionally beam groups convey a huge amount of information-- there's a reason, for example, that 6/8 is typically beamed in 2 groups of 3, whereas 3/4 is grouped in 3 groups of 2. Understanding the micro- and macro-pulse relationship make sight-reading much easier, in addition to subtly informing performance.
To me, the visual cue of the name of the note is idiotic.
VERY idiotic.
He choose to use the C, D, E... system that is not the norm (the norm, maybe not in US I guess, is Do, Re, Mi...)
And then create graphical representation of words starting with those letters.
Except this works only in english.
How a portuguese speaker for example would associate the dot thing with D or Re? It looks like neither, at most it looks like a dot (that in portuguese is "ponto", thus starts with a P)
Or the above and below? Below in portuguese is "abaixo", thus starting with a A, so you have to teach someone that A actually means B.
To me this new notation might make sense in english (maybe), but in other languages is even more arbitrary and silly (and tedious to hand-write)
>He choose to use the C, D, E... system that is not the norm (the norm, maybe not in US I guess, is Do, Re, Mi...)
A musician is usually able to use both. The A/B/C/D/E/F/G is used even in European notation, for chords and stuff.
>How a portuguese speaker for example would associate the dot thing with D or Re? It looks like neither, at most it looks like a dot (that in portuguese is "ponto", thus starts with a P)
He would either have to learn 7 words in English, that almost everybody in the planet under 30 already knows, or just learn the visual shapes, which are distinct and take about 10 minutes to memorize. It's not as if "Do, Re, Mi" means anything in Portuguese either.
The average US musician knows the C/D/E, and possibly moveable Do/Re/Mi (where Do is the tonic of whatever major key you're singing in).
The fixed Do system isn't even much covered in basic college-level music theory in the US (to my recollection); I doubt most performers will know much about it.
About asking the Portuguese musician to learn 7 English words, and switch from fixed Do to the C/D/E system... well, the problem is not that it's hugely difficult, but that it will seem like a foolish choice to music teachers. Who would teach this new system?
The benefits of the new system have to be huge and obvious if it's going to gain any ground, because the existing system is everywhere.
Tell a teacher that "here's a new system! Only a miniscule fraction of extant sheet music is available for you and your students, you'll have to re-write all of your teaching materials, and you'll have to force your students to learn the American C/D/E system with English-language-only mneumonics!"
It's different in that the visual shapes stay constant in all "clefs" as well as up and down the pentagram.
So a D below middle C looks exactly the same like the D above middle C -- something which is not true for the regular notation, where you have to count the pentagram lines the note is in, or how many lines below or inside the pentagram.
So the new system retains the position-on-stuff and ADDS another visual cue for the same information (the shape of the note).
I did read TFA and... pentagram? Do you mean the staff/lines?
Adding more visual cues isn't necessarily a good thing. 'Counting lines' is what you get when you're a neophyte at reading music, and is chaff for the more experienced. And when you're playing a complex piece of music, you want to minimise visual clutter.
>I did read TFA and... pentagram? Do you mean the staff/lines?
Hah, yes, sorry. In my language it's called "pentagram" (which means "five lines" literally). For some reason I had the idea it was the same in english. Well, after all, other words like "harmony" and even "music" were borrowed in English as is ;-)
This was my thought as well. If you're going to create a symbol association language, why not just use the original symbols? You're just adding an extra layer of learning otherwise.
If it's because the symbols (ABCDEFG) aren't universally recognized, then you shouldn't be basing your language off of them in the first place.
These symbols are fussier than necessary, because they are trying to be cute about both the mapping to the alphabetic scale and slavishly sticking with circles.
What is required is a sequence of length seven (for convenience) that allows sharp/flat prefixes and time length suffixes. Circles are merely one option.
If written by hand, there will be ambiguities between C, Dot, Empty, and Full. I think a graphic design artist had too much fun with this project...
For those studying music theory in the English-speaking world, A-G is the norm. (German has H as well.) That being said, I've only ever met musicians from the commonwealth... I will not comment on other languages and whether or not they use solfège since I've no experience in that area.
So, that's just the mnemonic for remembering the names, which is only marginally interesting, and which I already called out for being anglo-centric in another comment. What I like is how easy it makes to spot, say, an octave, at a glance.
I would draw a parallel between this notation and guitar tablature. Unfortunately, all professional guitarists (and especially classical guitarists) that I know prefer traditional notation to tab. I personally find tab terribly hard to parse (disclaimer: I'm a classically trained musician). I think that the proponents of Hummingbird will need to somehow address and overcome this idea that "real" musicians only read "real" music. Overcoming an entrenched standard, especially one with hundreds of years of history is a terribly hard journey, even if you're only aiming at a tiny fraction of users.
I also have quite a few quibbles with the specifics and usability of this notation, but this is not the place for that.
considering I grew up with do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-si I find the mnemonics impossible.
But also, I don't understand the point: why not just write "A-B-C-D" rather than strange half filled circles?
That would make your do-re-mi problem worse, no? They're designed to be compact and visually distinct, and such mnemonics are really only useful at the very beginning anyway. I like the design, it's just a case of probably unconscious "English privilege".
"sol diesis", but I believe you refer to reading it while doing solfege with chromatic alterations, where you would read Sol# as "Si", right?
The answer is: I have no clue, I think we do not actually account for flat and sharp when doing solfege.
Or better put: "si" was changed to "ti" in UK to be able to read chromatic alterations without ambiguity.
Most of the latin and slavic world ignored this, AFAICT.
But full discosure: I know very little about music, music theory or music history, I just have vague memories of reading about it.
One advantage traditional notation has over this is that the modifiers are a lot larger and more visible. For sight reading, notation needs to be easily scannable and irregularities (like sharps and flats) need to be highly visible. Connecting the beams on eighth and sixteen notes also serves to group the notes according to beat, and that makes parsing a measure much easier (also easier to skip ahead when you mess up). Neat idea though.
Learning musical notation is not the hard part of playing music; getting your instrument to make the right sounds is. Changing the notation doesn't make that any easier.
Also, if you've only learned this new notation, you'll be unable to read any of the 99.99999% of music that has been published in the conventional notation over the last few hundred years. It would be pretty limiting, somewhat like learning to speak a language that's only spoken on a small island in the Arctic Ocean.
It depends on the instrument. For melody / monophone instruments (woodwinds, brass and to a lesser extent strings) musical notation is easy. For piano, it's easy once you master the bass clef. For guitar, it just never gets easy because the score has to be full of fingering information to make it even remotely clear where on the fretboard your fingers should go.
the only problem with this to me is that this new notation simply seems to add redundancy to the score, repeating information which is already there,but not adding much new.
In handwriting it will be much more illegible than conventional notation. Also, small details are very bad for nearsighted people.
Don't get me wrong. I am always fascinated by new approaches for doing things and new musical notation is a fun idea. But not in this case. Practically speaking, they don't improve anything at all.
Conventional notation is not broken or something.. Imho, it is actually looking pretty great typographically, and works fine in practice.
They could make new notation that works better on computers, to be used in music software, such that it is easy for typing using a keyboard. That could be a real improvement.
Maybe it's easier to learn, but it's definitely not simpler. There's a difference [1].
Probably because I'm used to reading the tradional notation, I had a hard time deciphering theirs. There's a reason why, after centuries, the standard notation is still relevant. You basically need 3 elements to play an instrument: height (pitch), length (rhythm) and power (dynamics). And I can't imagine a better way to translate these informations than a traditional score.
But I appreciate any attempt to revisit musical notation, like the one that spawned the guitar tablatures, which is incredibly simple and easy to learn.
I'm concerned by Hummingbird's readability. Though each symbol carries multiple (and sometimes redundant) informations, I feel like there's a lot of noise. Also, drawing these symbols requires some high precision and I fear that handwritten versions will render some confusion, especially the small rest and rhythm symbols. I often scribble some music lines on a piece of paper, and I rarely have issues re-reading myself.
On a side-note, using English-based mnemonic hints ("Empty" for E, "Full" for F...) will hinder its portability across other countries, especially Latin ones where Do-Ré-Mi-Fa is more widely adopted.
Guitar tabs are simple and easy to learn, IF you're playing a song you already know. Most tabs I've seen just tell you which fingers to press down and which strings to hit, often excluding time signature, note duration, note intensity, rests, and other sightreading essentials.
Tabs' major appeal is that there's no learning curve: what you read is almost a physical representation of what you play. And it only requires a text editor to write, and can easily be published and shared on a website.
The best tabs are printed under a staff that contains the missing rhythm information (along with the actual pitches, etc., of course). Not exactly concise, but very info-rich.
This is technically true, but is approaching notation from a perspective that everything needs to be specified (I’d call this a “classical” perspective, but even in classical music, this was not traditionally true).
In e.g. Jazz jam sessions, good sight readers can definitely figure out what to play from lead sheets consisting of chord symbols + melody, and in terms of information, those are equivalent to guitar tabs + melody.
Admittedly, there are also books only giving tabs/chord symbols + lyrics (or sometimes not even those), and for this form, I agree that your assessment is valid.
My understanding is that in the big band era, you got fairly large bands (though not as large as 40 members) to play tightly together without undue precision in notation (and often without all members being good readers of sheet music).
The difference is, typical guitar beginners want to play certain riffs they already know or are listening to while looking at the tabs or they can easily write down ideas in tabs. Very often you get the traditional notation above the tabs, then you have all you need. Most guitar training nowadays is very non-classical, the summit of that modern learning route is being able to improvise freely. You are actively being trained to LISTEN and pick it up that way, you pick up chord changes, rhythm and melody, even the key, just by listening and then repeat them or improvise over what is there. You end up applying quite a lot of theory but most guitar players don't study 100% dry theory but are taught to use certain patterns or to use their instrument to find out certain correlations others are learning by heart. It is more about expression.
In contrast, the highest point you can reach in typical classical training is being able to perfectly sight-read and reproduce the music exactly as it is on the sheet, hence the very clear and detailed instructions. The focus lies on re-production and precision.
A Jazz guitarist's lead sheet can be as short as half a page and he could still play for hours.
Both ways have their merits and disadvantages, this notation actually helps neither. It is still way too complicated for the average tab user - while the proficient classical player is missing vital information.
On top of that I find it EXTREMELY hard to read, the difference between the circle being filled on the side or on top is practically indistinguishable when you are a little further back, so are the tiny little lines sticking out of circles pointing up or down.
>Maybe it's easier to learn, but it's definitely not simpler. Probably because I'm used to reading the tradional notation, I had a hard time deciphering theirs.
If you just found out about this from HN, then you didn't have ANY time to get familiar with it.
Plus, your knowledge of traditional notation put you already at a disadvantage. You could only compare it with a control group study, or after you have spend as much time in this, as it took you to be proficient in standard notation (e.g 1-2 months at least).
"You basically need 3 elements to play an instrument: height (pitch), length (rhythm) and power (dynamics). And I can't imagine a better way to translate these informations than a traditional score."
(1) Hummingbird translates length in a trivially superior way to standard notation. No contest imho.
(2) I would say it does a somewhat better job on pitch as well. Both have huge shortcomings so I can well imagine far better systems.
Dynamics is a push so I'll say Hummingbird is an improvement in translation. I don't think it's a big enough improvement to climb the mountain of inertial standard notation has in it's favor. I'm typing this on Qwerty keyboard too, yep.
Hummingbird is fatally flawed for anything beyond beginner level stuff. It's not going to deal well with any sort of complicated rhythm. I'd love to see you accurately notate something at all complex, like say this, a snippet from a Beethoven piano sonata:
While it might have some minimal value for beginners, you might as well teach them real notation.
Let me present a metaphore.
You're in charge of the foreign language curricula in, say, Japan. You can offer either Esperanto or English but not both. Esperanto is easier to learn, but English is infinitely more useful.
The example picture you provide is a great example of how horribly, horribly flawed the current notation is for annotating rhythm.
I mean, many people have gotten used to that language, but there obviously can be a far simpler way to represent the same timing information than the first line of that pic.
And the example you give is not THAT complex - try to represent any interesting polyrhythm drum pattern in traditional notation, now that will be an excercise in futility.
The hummingbird is not a good enough solution - it's a step in the right direction and another step sideways; but we need to go much further to improve both ease of reading and ease of learning music.
To use a programming analogy, the current music notation is like if everybody had to learn programming through COBOL - it works, it's usable and widely used... but still, using a better, cleaner language for the same concepts would obviously bring benefits to all new users; even if it's of no benefit to all the current experts who already know the current notation by heart.
I think you misread me. I clearly said Hummingbird was not better enough to triumph. I was taking apart the idea that standard notation is so awesome that it can't imaginably be improved on.
Standard notation, QWERTY, English, Facebook, etc. are all flawed in many ways but to replace them you can't just be 1% or 5% better; you need to be an order of magnitude better. No one cares about learning Dvorak for 5 more WPM but if people could double their WPM the world would switch.
I'm not convinced length is translated in a superior manner. Any spacing based rhythmic notation quickly gets ridiculous when you combine long and short notes. Space your demi-semi-quavers out far enough to read them (especially if you have to annotate them with hummingbird accidentals) then see how far apart the minims and semibreves are. Traditional notation tends to be set so the rhythm is suggested by the spacing but isn't prescribed.
Mapping the pitch of notes to special symbols (to distinguish, eg, 'B' from 'C' or 'la' from 'ti') has been done before. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shape_note and the accompanying images. Introduced in year 1801.
And I think it's a reasonable idea, especially for studying, practicing, or sight reading. I'm current struggling to map staff notation onto the guitar fretboard (I can play piano from staff notation, and play the guitar "by ear," so I'm trying to synthesize the two abilities), and I think this might make it slightly easier. For a lot of classical guitar transcriptions, or any guitar transcriptions that refuse to transpose (an octave), there is a lot of extreme ledger lines, and the shapes would help immensely.
If you're choosing between "rewrite this guitar music to transpose so there aren't crazy ledger lines" vs. "rewrite this guitar music into a radical new notation system", I think I'd go with the first choice.
Standard notation for guitar music also suffers from the "where on the fretboard do I play this" problem -- sometimes there are hints (like finger numbers), but often you just have to try a few options and see what's best... which is rough going if you're trying to sightread a piece you don't know yet.
TAB notation, of course, fills in the missing info on suggested finger placement, but omits other essential info (rhythm!), so by itself that's also broken....
Interesting. As a player of piano, woodwinds, and others I've gotten used to different systems of scribbling over the staff to convey something that's not metadata but not primary info. Well-tempered Klavier is a good bad example, there's all kinds of scribblings about what Bach intended, including argumets about incidentals (is a note flatted or not?) (and what's the umbrella term for trills, grace notes, flourishes like that?). It's actually much harder for wind and strings, where infinite pitch/tonality /attack/decay combinations are possible, e.g. lipping up or down on a single reed, squeaking, honking, sibillant, and I'm pretty sure there's no way to write down the loops i get on fretless guitar, bass and cello.
Also I've been trying to get used to Don Ellis quarter tone system, and work thru haskell school of music (fantastic book, for anybody interested not just in notations, but production, composition and capture(A/D conversion/DSP etc. Also shoudl read books by Gould and Read someday:
OT: I'm curious. Does anyone besides me have a tendency to get off by one on the values when playing from a written score?
I have a tendency to play a note and then my eye moves to the next note--and I take the value of that note as how long to let the prior note play before playing the next note.
Like many have mentioned, this seems to add a lot of noise to notation. This isn't really demonstrated in the pieces they have on the site. I'd like to see what it looks like with something a bit more complex like a Bach Fugue. I feel like the rhythm notations, in particular, would become more difficult to parse as the rhythms become more complex.
Do you know of any more resources about this system? One of my side hobbies is learning more about alternative representation systems for languages, math, music etc. Finding resources on alternative music systems is kinda hard in my experience.
The pdf is in Greek, but has been annotated with English notes throughout. It also contains embedded mp3 resources so you can hear what the notation is showing.
I'm very skeptical that this is an improvement (but kudos for thinking outside the box). Here's something that was intended as constructive criticism, but maybe ended up more as just criticism:
Removing the key signature is not a good idea. When playing in G major, the sharp accidental on the Fs is not put at the beginning of the line just to avoid printing it in the score. Rather, it fits there because when I play in G major, I put my brain in G major mode, in which case it would be distracting to have an accidental on every single F.
Similarly, writing a special symbol for each pitch seems it would get heavily in the way of transposing on the fly. The position already encodes the pitch, and the ABCDEFG names kind of get in the way of understanding the melody, which is more about relative intervals than absolute values.
And what does the little parenthesis on the length line mean? For half- and whole notes it seems to mean it doubles the length (a quarternote with one or two parentheses), but for sixteenth-notes it seems to indicate that it halves it (an eighth-note with a single parenthesis mark).
I also question removing the stem of a note. I have a feeling that is one of the stronger queues for reading rhythm. Spacing is not very important, and indeed especially in dense scores for solo instruments, that need to have few page turns, notes are often just spaced as tightly as possible.
The author also recognized that the beams on eighth- and sixtheenth-notes (e.g. in the left hand) are very important rhythmic cues, and replaced them with that horizontal thing with the arrow on the left. This is a bit hard to read though when there are no stems to link them to the note and the pitch interval is big.
The part about it being easy to write by hand looks good, and made me feel good at first. Then you realize that hand-written traditional notation is quite different from typeset one, just like handwritten text is very different from printed text. Drawing all the little balls and filling in the halfmoon C, up and down thingies seems tedious, when traditionally one writes a simple dot or a little slash instead of the note head.
The mnemonics are also anglocentric visual puns (e is for empty). I'd suggest a set of symbols with natural ordering that can be distinguished by shape (vs. all circles)
On your last question, it took me a minute to get that those various "Above" or "Below" correspond to the notes they represent, A and B. The pitch is revealed both in the symbol and in the position on the staff. I found that pretty useful, certainly easier to read than homogenous black dots where you only have spatial information.
I read through the whole page and didn't get that. It didn't click until I started looking at the second page on the site (which goes more in depth).
My immediate thought once I figured that out was "this depends on English". For speakers of Japanese or Russian or French, can you find easy to remember words that can go with the first symbol, and that start with an "a" sound?
I actually found the terms extremely confusing. At first I thought the above/below referred to sharp/flat, but that didn't turn out. I couldn't even come up with concepts for dot and groove.
I know how to read music, but I'm not very good at it. I'll say that the idea of giving each note it's own shape seems like it could fix the problem of losing my place and having to count lines/spaces to figure out what a note it.
The thing I've never liked about musical notation is that the X axis has nothing to do with time. A staff can have 8 32nd notes and then a dotted half note. Those first notes take up 1/4 the time but 3/4 the space. While it would take more space, I find a consistent relationship much easier (such as piano roles or Guitar Hero note charts).
What you mean by this is that the key signature tells you what the tonic is, and, conversely, what the supertonic, mediant, subdominant, dominant, etc. are.
Whenever I teach key signatures this is the biggest thing I try to impart: key signatures are more than just accidentals, they define the roles each pitch plays.
I believe he was referring to the "put my brain in G" comment.
It's all about recognizing when to build tension and when to resolve tension.
Yes, the roles that the notes play is defined by the key, but if you don't mentally make the switch, you'll often perform things poorly because you don't anticipate where things are going correctly.
Or at least that's how it works for me, at any rate. Take anything I say with a grain of salt. I can't sight-read much at all.
How is "tell[ing] you what key the piece is in" different that defining tonic/dominant/leading tone relationships? Those relationships are the product of the whole/half step pattern that the key signature communicates. It isn't just important that G has 1 sharp, and it is F. That sharp actually defines the leading tone.
Sure, but I'd argue that's because the key signature is wrong. The correct way to notate that is with either a modal key signature a la Bartok or notate it as D with a constant natural on the C, showing that the tonal center is D while clearly notating the departure from the traditional major scale.
By this standard probably something like 30% of the music ever written has the wrong key signature -- and I've never seen a piece of non-major music with a correctly notated key signature!
Agreed. Hummingbird seems like a solution in search of a problem. I could see someone trying to learn to sight read music, get frustrated with how it is "broken" and then invent something like this, which seems far less clear to me than the old way.
sight reading is hard because of the cognitive work involved with translating, say, eight notes at a time into the appropriate finger-patterns, rhythm and pace; or translating fewer notes but at a faster rate. i don't see this making it easier.
i'm not sure why they would bother. anyone who finds sight reading too tough, might not really ever need sheet music, whether they do it by ear, or just listen to music. my friend has a disklavier - incredible. robot plays the piano better than i ever could. it makes me wonder why i still bother to try and play, and then i remind myself that every feeble attempt i make is intrinsically satisfying to me, so i keep trying.
I am a neophyte at reading music, but I think that the pitch symbols are almost entirely noise. They would help me personally (oh, that's a 'C' there, I don't have to count the lines!) but for anyone with a modicum of sight reading, surely they already know where the C is due to its location on the staff? At that point, pitch is already represented and the filled figures are noise.
I wonder if a suitable analogy would be like underlining all capital letters in a selection of prose - useful for the neophyte, chaff for the slightly experienced onwards.
robot plays the piano better than i ever could
Apart from the personal enjoyment angle, robots also can't detect the mood of the audience (yet) and play to suit.
Agreed. As a pianist, I not only look at the position of individual notes, but also the positions of the next 3 to 6 consecutive notes. This way I can think in "groups" of notes - which is very helpful for sightreading broken chords quickly.
The one place I could see pitch symbols being slightly beneficial is when notes are either way above or way below the staff. But even then, after some deliberate practice these can be recognized pretty quickly as well.
I've read for piano, bass guitar, flute, and now ukulele. I can read treble clef, and bass clef just fine, but stick them together as you do for piano and my brain has a conniption. The exact same figure at the exact same place on each staff represents two different notes. I suspect this is because the gap between the two staffs would have required too many intermediate lines had they re-used treble clef for the bottom staff, but this doesn't mean it is a good readability choice.
Regarding relative position.
On a piano the relative position of notes on the staff almost directly correlates to position on the keyboard. On a stringed instrument this is VERY far from the case. As i proceed up the scale on a simple instrument like the bass i will proceed right on the neck on one string, then drop down a string, shift left, proceed right on that string, drop down a string, shift left, proceed right on that string. So you've got back and forth, and up and down motions to keep going in one direction tonally. On a guitar the strings aren't all tuned evenly so the back and forth on the neck changes depending on which strings you're switching between. On the Ukulele the top string is higher than the string below it so you end up jumping UP strings rather than down, AND the strings aren't tuned at even intervals. So you've just got a big jumble of movements.
Don't even get me started on the totally unintuitive nature of woodwind fingerings or how they are almost totally disconnected from what's going on on the staff.
In short, the relative positioning of notes on the staff is good from a tonal perspective but crap from a finger perspective on most every instrument except piano.
>In short, the relative positioning of notes on the staff is good from a tonal perspective but crap from a finger perspective on most every instrument except piano.
That's not really a problem once you build the muscle memory, though.
It's the same thing as touch typing. With enough practice, you know that finger placement X will produce note y, the same way you know where the keys on the keyboard are.
I could see someone trying to learn to sight read music, get frustrated with how it is "broken" and then invent something like this...
I felt exactly this way learning to read music. The score just didn't present enough information fast enough for me because I hand't learned to build the context in my head and spot the relations. I fumbled about with alternatie notations, extra notations etc. I finally settled on colors. I wrote a small program to color the dominant, subdominant etc. and then printed it on my color printer. This helped me immensely and I didn't take the dead end road of learning alternate notations that would shut me out of all written music everywhere.
Some windmills should be tilted at, some should just be left alone.
About hummingbird, it's amazing. Really, I found it strange in the first minute. Then I got it
Why? My major peeve with traditional notation is the lines above and below. And I never know what are they talking about after adding some lines above the stave.
About the key signature, 100% agree.
As pretty much all students, I thought the key signature just meant which notes are always sharp or flat ("oh these guys want us to use more black keys - BORING")
It took me some time to get it. It's not about flat or sharp, but as they said it, it's 'G Major mode'. Then you feel everything is clearer. It's like going from understanding words in a phrase to understanding the phrase.
Your critique is spot on for those trained in music. Is that his target audience?
What about for those being exposed to music and its notation for the first time? What if you had never had a concept of putting your brain in G major mode.
But if complete beginners are his target audience, it begs the question why stop there? Why maintain the use of the staff at all.
I don’t think acquiring a sense of key signature is a dispensable part of the music learning experience, unless you plan to stick to twelve tone music.
No matter what people come up with and who the target audience is, there needs to be a good bridge between the traditional and the new. Staff or not, great for beginners or not, this will only fail because of the total lack of sheet music and other materials with nothing in sight to automate the translation of even a limited subset of music and materials.
(Of course, caveat, I've been playing piano for 20+ years as a hobby. Maybe the ties to the traditional are really not a big deal.)
I certainly hope that in the near future, digital transcriptions are easy enough to come by that you could effectively just change the font from one notation to another.
I know there are a lot of judgement calls in typesetting music, but that's true of text too, and we have some pretty good algorithms for doing so these days.
All that said, I have a lot of reservations about this particular notation, but I think there's certainly room for improvement even inside the current system. Letting the back catalog of work hold notation back isn't healthy.
Certainly the learning process for children can be improved a lot. Really, a lot. But I think it is important to integrate it with the actual notation from the beginning, as otherwise you will hit a wall when you want to play a bigger variety of music that's only available in that format.
All I can say is this, I play guitar for 15 years, learned piano since I was 7, and I never got the classic notation. I can't read notes. And I tried learning a few times.
I looked at hummingbird, and it took me 30 seconds to memorize the symbols, and now I can read any hummingbird note sheet easily.
I would say this is a big win. Same feel I got when I saw Tau, mathematicians might argue it's incorrect, but for me, I don't care, Tau made math easy for me. Hummingbird makes music easy for me. That's all I care.
About transposing, you got a point, I think there should be apps that do it for you (e.g. convert MIDI files to hummingbird notation, I'm sure we'll see a few of these as Show HN sometime soon)
You can now sightread pages of hummingbird after 30 seconds of cursory inspection?
Hummingbird feels like a crutch to me. Hiding key signatures stunts your understanding of how music works. Forcing time to be marked explicitly as well as by altering spacing places odd constraints on typesetters. Humans use several subtle visual cues¹ to read music quickly and efficiently, and hummingbird just throws them all away.
Yes, I can, very, very slowly, but much faster than with the regular notation, and mostly because I'm not used to sightreading regardless of how it's written. I think it will never appeal to classic / professional musicians or anyone who already feels comfortable with the regular notation, but for people lbike me, that for whatever neurological reason just can get the old notation to stick, this is priceless. The Above Below C Dot Empty Full Groove is such a great wiring that I will never be able to forget it. I might not read it fast as you read regular notes, but I will at least be able to practice. Reading regular notes to me was always counting lines, always missing the global # or b, and simply giving up serious music. I recorded music, had songs on the radio, I can play anything by ear, but not being able to read notes always bothers me. Now I can.
Hm. Thanks for replying; this does sound interesting.
If this had that much of an impact on you, and if this has the potential to encourage others to learn notation, I'd like to see a full study of how hummingbird compares to the regular notation.
Looking at the first part of God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen, hummingbird makes it look far more complex than it actually is. A simple series of quarternotes only changing in pitch, but hummingbird is changing two things - visual complexity (filled notes) and location.
I think it's bold and interesting, but ultimately I think it hasn't got legs.
Yes, machine transposing of hummingbird is trivial, but what about transposing while sight-reading? I have to do that regularly, and the removal of the key-signature makes that impossible.
Right, key signatures aren't just shorthand, they're useful information to give the performer up front.
In fact, it's so useful to state the key up front, I might even suggest the opposite; base the notation on relative pitches, as in "movable do" solfege. Then we could replace "all F's and C's are sharp" with just "do is D". Of course, there'd be tradeoffs to this as compared to the traditional notation, but it's fun to think about.
My thought was that a relative-pitch notation might present a steeper learning curve. But I don't really know.
I've worked with intermediate-level musicians who are skilled at regular sight-reading, but who struggle to learn to transpose on the fly. A relative-pitch notation might be like requiring everyone to "transpose" all the time, forcing them to learn this skill before they can proceed.
On the other hand, maybe you'd teach it differently. Instead of learning transposition as carrying around an offset to add to each pitch, you'd learn it as carrying around a scale to which the relative pitches would be mapped. I wonder whether this would be easier or harder to learn.
You're going to stay in one scale for a long time anyway (C for piano). For that duration, pitches in the notation correspond obviously to fingerings (keys, frets, whatever). This includes other instruments which have a different "natural" key (D for the viola, my other sort of instrument): their notation maps just as nicely.
When you get beyond that, "mapping relative pitches to a scale" is, IMO, the correct approach. The "offset to each pitch" thing obscures what's really going on, as if they were all weird derivatives of the key of C. I can see how it might be harder, among other reasons because you have to understand how a scale works more clearly, but I suspect it would be worth it.
Of course, it's hard to really know without getting people to switch for a couple generations.
This is just painful. Instruments do not have scales. Music is written in different keys, and often modulates to another key and back again during the piece. In order to cover the range of pitches, different clefs are used to make the notation easier to read. Piano music is written in two clefs, bass and treble, centered around "middle C". This is called the grand staff. Depending upon an instrument's range different clefs are used. Violoncellos use bass, tenor, and treble clef. Violas use alto clef.
Scales are a function that acts upon the set of pitches used in music. A C major scale has the pitches C, D, E, F, G, A, and B. A G major scale (function) has the pitches G, A, B, C, D, E, and F#.
"Mapping relative pitches to a scale" is nonsensical. A scale (function) is an absolute set of pitches, immutable.
There are two forms of solfège (do, re, mi, ...): fixed and moveable. In moveable the first pitch of the scale is always do. In fixed the pitch called C is always do. Watch "The Sounds of Music" to learn the solfège for a major scale, it's the do-re-mi song. There are other syllables used for the three minor scale forms. To my knowledge (admittedly not complete) Italy, France, and perhaps England used a fixed-do system, whereas the rest of the world uses a moveable-so system.
Actually, most trumpets, harmonicas, and many classes of flute are restricted to diatonic scales. You'll have a hard time finding a chromatic trumpet outside of a museum.
There's more to music than western chromaticism or indeed harmonic theory.
You'll have a hard time finding a chromatic trumpet outside of a museum.
This is kind of a confusing statement to me. Most instruments called "trumpets" where I come from are valved instruments which are fully capable of producing chromatics. (Maybe this is technically incorrect and we should be properly calling them "cornets" or something, I don't know.)
My point is, you certainly don't have to go to a museum to find one, and I expect, in a museum (of history anyway), any trumpet you'd find would be more likely to to be valveless and non-chromatic.
You've just used a bunch of words that sounds smart, but provide deceptive value. The typical Bb valved trumpet that exists now does indeed play chromatically. And so will any other class of modern brass instrument with three valves or more.
The chromatic trumpet is an invention that allowed us to escape the trumpets natural harmonic series (Those being the notes a trumpet can play in a single valve position) before valves were invented by drilling holes along its tubes.
Wikipedia is not the best place to learn music theory, and knowing music theory is as useful as knowing a list of rules for programming best practice.
I was incorrect about trumpets, but not about other instruments. My point that many instruments are restricted to a particular scale is entirely correct.
Also, I was playing and recording music since before wikipedia even came into existence, so dial back those assumptions.
You would pick an arbitrary base and do everything relative to that. This is pretty easy compared to the shoehorning already required to notate such music in existing notation schemes :-).
The musical world has already tried out relative scales. It was in fact the first thing tried in notation. Look at the notation device used for Gregorian Chants to see it yourself.
We already use relative notation for most instruments. Trumpets, Clarinets and Tenor Saxophones typically read notation where Bb is equivalent to C on the page. What you'll note we Don't do, is change our relative pitch between songs.
No. Relative pitch is Very Hard, because as a musician, my hands don't play relatively. When I see an Eb on a notation sheet, my body knows how to play the note without me thinking about it, and it has to, because sometimes you can have notes flying at you with a rate of 32 a bar. This does not leave time to translate between the relative abstraction on paper and the absolute pitch of my instrument. It's not just harder.
It's much, much harder to train your brain and body to be able to map the same object on the page to twelve different body positions, depending on some variable that changes at random between songs.
Also remember, that different pitches have different textures, otherwise we'd never play in a keys other than C.
Absolute pitches and are the concern of the performer, but relative pitches are the concern of the listener. Who's more important? ;-)
This is why I mainly worry that a relative-pitch notation may present a steeper learning curve. Advanced players typically need to be able to think at least somewhat in both relative pitches and absolute pitches at the same time anyway. Absolute pitches because that's what many instruments demand, and relative pitches, because that's where a lot of the meaning is, which informs other aspects of the performance. But it typically takes more practice to learn to think in both ways at once.
> Also remember, that different pitches have different textures, otherwise we'd never play in a keys other than C.
I did propose that pieces could indicate their intended key.
Absolute pitches are the concern of the performer. Correct. Also consider that the performer is the one who is looking at the sheet music, and not the listener.
That would be the ideal notation for a diatonic harmonica player like me. I never really have an idea of what letter note I'm playing, unless I think about what key I'm in, and then I have to count. But I always know exactly where on the scale I am.
It's funny, before I read your comment I wrote a longwinded harmonica player's lament elsewhere in the thread, and I was thinking the same thing: A relative notation would be perfect.
My first observation was that it was difficult to discern the notes on my screen. Imagine that on paper farther than arms length away in a darkened room. That's plenty enough to disqualify it.
But yes, classical notation could certainly use some refinements.
I had the same reaction. No matter how small the notes are in classical notation, I can tell if they're filled or hollow, and whether an accidental is a sharp or flat. Distinguishing between hollow, partially and directionally filled, and filled notes, with diacritical accidentals seems more difficult.
Solid points, although I think you're zeroing in on too many low-level details too early even though your criticisms are valid.
Also, maybe you could make your feedback constructive by providing ideas, alternatives and suggestions instead of just ripping it apart but adding no value or solid suggestions beyond that.
The point here is much bigger and more significant than any of your individual criticisms.
The point is this - these people are rethinking the problem of notation, and redesigning it from the ground up.
I think their approach is totally badass, and I love the fact that someone is tackling this!
> Also, maybe you could make your feedback constructive by providing ideas, alternatives and suggestions instead of just ripping it apart but adding no value or solid suggestions beyond that.
Pointing out flaws IS constructive criticism. This happens all the time and it bugs me:
person A comes up with an idea
person B gives good reasons why it's flawed
person A - the one who wants to innovate - says that fixing those flaws isn't his problem, and that person B should fix them.
WRONG.
The person who generates an idea, the person who wants to do something new, is the one who is responsible for brainstorming, finding problems, finding solutions, and pivoting as needed.
To say "your criticisms should be bundled with solutions" just raises the bar on criticism, and when it costs more to generate criticism, you get less of it.
We should all encourage criticism, and then we should make finding solutions OUR problem.
I much prefer someone to criticize my work, rather than sitting quiet just because they can't think of improvements. After all, I'm probably much more likely to come up with a solution than they are, and the reason I didn't is just because I didn't think of that problem.
> Also, maybe you could make your feedback constructive by providing ideas, alternatives and suggestions instead of just ripping it apart but adding no value or solid suggestions beyond that.
Pointing out flaws IS constructive criticism. This happens all the time and it bugs me:
person A comes up with an idea
person B gives good reasons why it's flawed
person A - the one who wants to innovate - says that fixing those flaws isn't his problem, and that person B should fix them.
WRONG.
The person who generates an idea, the person who wants to do something new, is the one who is responsible for brainstorming, finding problems, finding solutions, and pivoting as needed.
To say "your criticisms should be bundled with solutions" just raises the bar on criticism, and when it costs more to generate criticism, you get less of it.
We should all encourage criticism, and then we should make finding solutions OUR problem.
Thanks, yes I realized my lack of suggestions for improvements after writing my comment. I simply didn't have any (it was also quite late), as I think there are some fundamental choices in that system that are not beneficial. My "low-level details" were meant as arguments against those fundamental choices, rather than nit-picks that could be easily solved.
In the end, I judged that (valid) criticism is better than no criticism, despite the negative feeling of being the guy that just "tears it down".
Musical notation has never been spoken-language-free: the scores I play are all full of Italian words. I have never learned any Italian; these words are simply part of the notation, much as English words are parts of the notation in many popular programming languages.
It was invented for the Chromatone, a keyboard that eliminates black and white keys and treats all keys the same way, similar to a guitar fretboard. http://muto-method.com/en/index.html
Transposing then becomes easy because every scale has the same shape.
Thanks for that link, that is very interesting indeed. Being able to read the intervals more easily is certainly valuable, especially if you are playing on a chromatic keyboard.
However, I do like the fact that accidentals in traditional notation say something important: This note is out of the scale you are playing in. This is usually audibly very noticeable, so it makes sense to have it very noticeable in the score as well.
The three line system could be enhanced to show the notes that are in and out of the scale slightly differently, e.g. with color, or the size of the note-head. This would still have the benefit of being easily transposable.
Instead of difficult to read/write symbols which map to letters, which map to pitches, why not just use the letters themselves?
I would totally love to just learn with letters written on the staff. And over time, maybe my sheet music app could randomly replace letters with black filled circles, and then eventually with standard music notation.
jesus this would have been so helpful back when i was playing music at a kid. i'm sure after a while you can swap out the letters with notes without missing a beat, just like you can remove the letters from a keyboard after learning to touch type. but, along the way you never actually are forced to "learn" the positions. (which is incredibly challenging when you are trying to learn to play at the same time.)
honestly this makes me want to re-try to learn piano with this type of notation. perhaps even a notation that would let me focus more on the piano and less on deciphering the notation.
Yup. If I was teaching a 6 year old to play piano, I wouldn't start by teaching them how to read standard notation.
The key is to make it fun and easy in the beginning, so that piano players don't give up! Then, make it harder once they are motivated to learn.... and you can show them why standard notation is more expressive/compact/better than the letter notation they started out with.
Yup, I think this would be the second step, once the beginner is used to the bare letters on the staff. This introduces extra visual noise, but begins to teach the player what standard notation looks like.
With software, the view can adapt over time as the player becomes more comfortable reading notation. If the sheet music was displayed on a tablet, eventually the little letters could disappear.
This could be a nice set of "training wheels" for beginner pianists.
The drawback is that this notation is less compact. But, it's the best notation for teaching beginners.
I'm trying to figure out how Hummingbird notation is any better than "piano roll" notation or simply putting letters on the staff. It's definitely a cool idea (infovis-wise), but I think it needs to be user tested: standard vs. hummingbird vs. letters-on-staff vs. "piano roll"...
I've come across Synthesia before and it's well-thought learning tool. But its major drawback is that it's only aimed at piano players.
I think Hummingbird's goal is to become an alternate standard of global music notation, based on the fact that it resembles the traditional one (and actually uses it as a base). But Hummingbird also has its flaws (that I mentioned in another comment).
Hummingbird notation: lots of little dots, vaguely grouped together
Traditional notation: 16th notes are tied together, with the tying actually serving to reinforce the duration of the individual notes while indicating that they should be played as a group.
If I'm not mistaken, the few bars from the homepage are Chopin's Revolutionary Etude, Op 10 No 12.
I think I prefer the way it looks in traditional notation, and I think music might be more intuitive to write as such – but heck. Always be innovating.
Maybe I come from a different musical background as the authors of this, but none of this make any sense to me.
"Long notes are longer; sharps point up and flats down."
- Having notes take up more space is about the worst possible thing in the world for me; as a pit musician, the last thing I need is more wasted space on a page, giving me more page turns to deal with while I'm changing instruments and key signatures.
"...rhythms have the same spacing" - I don't know what this means. Rhythms don't have spacing. The spaces between the notes has nothing to do with the music that's played.
Then there's the fact that all current musicians would have to re-learn how to read music. Perhaps someone can tell me what's drastically broken about the current system? I'm not saying it's perfect - I don't believe any system is perfect. But it's worked pretty well for the last few hundred years.
I believe that argument is that the current system is difficult to learn. But I personally feel this notation gives up way to much in order to try and be easier to learn. (which I still don't think is not a good enough reason to create a new notation since if you are putting the time and effort to learn how to play an instrument I think you are likely ok with taking some time to learn the notation)
I would expect page turns will be going away. You can already use your iPad as a music stand, though it's kind of small.
If you're using a real device, page turns can be automated or eased. The device can listen to what you're playing (tempo shouldn't be too hard to pick out) and turn pages appropriately. Or, you could use a foot pedal or what have you - perhaps your phone.
Apps for this sort of thing already exist, though I don't know how good they are.
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[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 227 ms ] threadIf you want to give it a listen: http://www.radiolab.org/2012/dec/17/man-became-bliss/
I tend to be a little skeptical of attempts to make "pure" forms of communication, because I think there are bound to be trade-offs, as in any engineering endeavour. I'd rather see schemes that are optimized for a particular purpose. What would a language oriented toward scientific and technical communication be like? How would currencies designed for ecommerce work? How would a calendar for global organizations work?
Every note has to have a line that extends its full rhythmic value past the notehead -- you can't just write 10 circles to say "this big chord fills the whole measure". Every accidental must be marked on the note -- so if you're writing a piece in C# major and it doesn't diverge from that key, you're going to have to notate the accidental on every single note.
EDIT: they do allow key signatures; they just don't mention it in the example or intro video.
And every notehead's shape varies based on the pitch class (i.e., C, D, E, etc.) -- so except for "E"s (empty) every note head has some decoration you'll have to do... you can't just make a spatter of dots/stems with a slash over them for eighth notes.
For some music, this seems like it would be a bit more work (mainly the varying noteheads); for other music it'd be a serious problem.
Whether it helps one when reading music is another matter. I remember learning to play an electric organ as a youngster with a book of sheet music that came with the organ; being aimed at beginners, each note head had the note letter written inside it. Hummingbird is basically using the same idea, just replacing the letter with a symbol. It probably does make it easier to learn. Whether it would be of any use for an experienced musician, I kind of doubt. (I certainly outgrew expecting the note head to contain the note letter, myself.)
The redundancy helps associate the name and position.
I don't think I would prefer it in this case. The extra note name information is visually noisy and detracts from the shape of the line, which is mostly what experienced musicians see. The shape of the line, the absence of sharp and flat marks, and remembering what key you are playing in, covers most of your reading.
But, I, for one, am annoyed by the english language needing both grammatical structure _and_ a question mark to express questions ;)
Theory: people prefer infix to prefix or suffix notation because it more closely mirrors the Subject-Verb-Object patterns of their native languages.
Corollary: lisp feels awkward because it doesn't map cleanly to native language thinking.
Lojban is mostly SVO as well.
I tend to think it's a more general effect where humans actually want a certain amount of irregularity in their languages/notations, to act as markers or error-detecting codes of some sort. e.g. "he", but "him" in accusative case. But who knows; English gets by with "you" being both singular and plural...
above: a below: b
etc
There's also the fact that Treble (G) Clef and Bass (F) Clef are a perfect fifth away from Middle C, which reinforces the importance of perfect fifths in the system of major keys, but I suppose that's a small consideration overall.
However I must say that I just don't get it. Every example I look at appears significantly more complex than the standard notation, and harder to discern at a smaller size. One place I can see it really struggling is on copies. Music tutors spend a lot of their time copying music sheets, and I suspect this would be quite difficult to read on a low quality reproduction.
Standard notation has survived for hundreds of years. I'll be the first to admit it's not exactly easy to get your head around to begin with, but once you understand the rules it becomes apparent as to why it is the way it is.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transposing_instrument
You also lose the "wall of black notes" warning you of deadly fast notes up ahead. ;)
Also, properly typeset standard notation is proportional anyway.
He choose to use the C, D, E... system that is not the norm (the norm, maybe not in US I guess, is Do, Re, Mi...)
And then create graphical representation of words starting with those letters.
Except this works only in english.
How a portuguese speaker for example would associate the dot thing with D or Re? It looks like neither, at most it looks like a dot (that in portuguese is "ponto", thus starts with a P)
Or the above and below? Below in portuguese is "abaixo", thus starting with a A, so you have to teach someone that A actually means B.
To me this new notation might make sense in english (maybe), but in other languages is even more arbitrary and silly (and tedious to hand-write)
A musician is usually able to use both. The A/B/C/D/E/F/G is used even in European notation, for chords and stuff.
>How a portuguese speaker for example would associate the dot thing with D or Re? It looks like neither, at most it looks like a dot (that in portuguese is "ponto", thus starts with a P)
He would either have to learn 7 words in English, that almost everybody in the planet under 30 already knows, or just learn the visual shapes, which are distinct and take about 10 minutes to memorize. It's not as if "Do, Re, Mi" means anything in Portuguese either.
The fixed Do system isn't even much covered in basic college-level music theory in the US (to my recollection); I doubt most performers will know much about it.
About asking the Portuguese musician to learn 7 English words, and switch from fixed Do to the C/D/E system... well, the problem is not that it's hugely difficult, but that it will seem like a foolish choice to music teachers. Who would teach this new system?
The benefits of the new system have to be huge and obvious if it's going to gain any ground, because the existing system is everywhere.
Tell a teacher that "here's a new system! Only a miniscule fraction of extant sheet music is available for you and your students, you'll have to re-write all of your teaching materials, and you'll have to force your students to learn the American C/D/E system with English-language-only mneumonics!"
It doesn't sound like a winning argument to me.
Which is different from learning position on the staff, how?
It's different in that the visual shapes stay constant in all "clefs" as well as up and down the pentagram.
So a D below middle C looks exactly the same like the D above middle C -- something which is not true for the regular notation, where you have to count the pentagram lines the note is in, or how many lines below or inside the pentagram.
So the new system retains the position-on-stuff and ADDS another visual cue for the same information (the shape of the note).
Adding more visual cues isn't necessarily a good thing. 'Counting lines' is what you get when you're a neophyte at reading music, and is chaff for the more experienced. And when you're playing a complex piece of music, you want to minimise visual clutter.
Hah, yes, sorry. In my language it's called "pentagram" (which means "five lines" literally). For some reason I had the idea it was the same in english. Well, after all, other words like "harmony" and even "music" were borrowed in English as is ;-)
If it's because the symbols (ABCDEFG) aren't universally recognized, then you shouldn't be basing your language off of them in the first place.
What is required is a sequence of length seven (for convenience) that allows sharp/flat prefixes and time length suffixes. Circles are merely one option.
If written by hand, there will be ambiguities between C, Dot, Empty, and Full. I think a graphic design artist had too much fun with this project...
For those studying music theory in the English-speaking world, A-G is the norm. (German has H as well.) That being said, I've only ever met musicians from the commonwealth... I will not comment on other languages and whether or not they use solfège since I've no experience in that area.
I also have quite a few quibbles with the specifics and usability of this notation, but this is not the place for that.
The answer is: I have no clue, I think we do not actually account for flat and sharp when doing solfege.
Or better put: "si" was changed to "ti" in UK to be able to read chromatic alterations without ambiguity. Most of the latin and slavic world ignored this, AFAICT.
But full discosure: I know very little about music, music theory or music history, I just have vague memories of reading about it.
Also, if you've only learned this new notation, you'll be unable to read any of the 99.99999% of music that has been published in the conventional notation over the last few hundred years. It would be pretty limiting, somewhat like learning to speak a language that's only spoken on a small island in the Arctic Ocean.
Musical notation can definitely be improved upon.
Don't get me wrong. I am always fascinated by new approaches for doing things and new musical notation is a fun idea. But not in this case. Practically speaking, they don't improve anything at all.
Conventional notation is not broken or something.. Imho, it is actually looking pretty great typographically, and works fine in practice.
They could make new notation that works better on computers, to be used in music software, such that it is easy for typing using a keyboard. That could be a real improvement.
Probably because I'm used to reading the tradional notation, I had a hard time deciphering theirs. There's a reason why, after centuries, the standard notation is still relevant. You basically need 3 elements to play an instrument: height (pitch), length (rhythm) and power (dynamics). And I can't imagine a better way to translate these informations than a traditional score.
But I appreciate any attempt to revisit musical notation, like the one that spawned the guitar tablatures, which is incredibly simple and easy to learn.
I'm concerned by Hummingbird's readability. Though each symbol carries multiple (and sometimes redundant) informations, I feel like there's a lot of noise. Also, drawing these symbols requires some high precision and I fear that handwritten versions will render some confusion, especially the small rest and rhythm symbols. I often scribble some music lines on a piece of paper, and I rarely have issues re-reading myself.
On a side-note, using English-based mnemonic hints ("Empty" for E, "Full" for F...) will hinder its portability across other countries, especially Latin ones where Do-Ré-Mi-Fa is more widely adopted.
[1] http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2011/11/11/simple-versus-easy/
As you say, most tabs don't include much information besides pitch and order, but can include guitar-specific ones, such as bends or slides.
It's possible though to write good tabs, such as the ones available in Guitar Pro (http://www.guitaring.info/uploads/software/Guitar%20Pro/Guit...).
Tabs' major appeal is that there's no learning curve: what you read is almost a physical representation of what you play. And it only requires a text editor to write, and can easily be published and shared on a website.
It syncs tabs with real audio recordings so that you get the usability of tab plus the rhythm and phrasing cues from the real recording.
In e.g. Jazz jam sessions, good sight readers can definitely figure out what to play from lead sheets consisting of chord symbols + melody, and in terms of information, those are equivalent to guitar tabs + melody.
Admittedly, there are also books only giving tabs/chord symbols + lyrics (or sometimes not even those), and for this form, I agree that your assessment is valid.
In contrast, the highest point you can reach in typical classical training is being able to perfectly sight-read and reproduce the music exactly as it is on the sheet, hence the very clear and detailed instructions. The focus lies on re-production and precision.
A Jazz guitarist's lead sheet can be as short as half a page and he could still play for hours.
Both ways have their merits and disadvantages, this notation actually helps neither. It is still way too complicated for the average tab user - while the proficient classical player is missing vital information.
On top of that I find it EXTREMELY hard to read, the difference between the circle being filled on the side or on top is practically indistinguishable when you are a little further back, so are the tiny little lines sticking out of circles pointing up or down.
If you just found out about this from HN, then you didn't have ANY time to get familiar with it.
Plus, your knowledge of traditional notation put you already at a disadvantage. You could only compare it with a control group study, or after you have spend as much time in this, as it took you to be proficient in standard notation (e.g 1-2 months at least).
(1) Hummingbird translates length in a trivially superior way to standard notation. No contest imho.
(2) I would say it does a somewhat better job on pitch as well. Both have huge shortcomings so I can well imagine far better systems.
Dynamics is a push so I'll say Hummingbird is an improvement in translation. I don't think it's a big enough improvement to climb the mountain of inertial standard notation has in it's favor. I'm typing this on Qwerty keyboard too, yep.
http://www.conknet.com/~proscore/samples/lgcplxpiano.gif
While it might have some minimal value for beginners, you might as well teach them real notation.
Let me present a metaphore.
You're in charge of the foreign language curricula in, say, Japan. You can offer either Esperanto or English but not both. Esperanto is easier to learn, but English is infinitely more useful.
I mean, many people have gotten used to that language, but there obviously can be a far simpler way to represent the same timing information than the first line of that pic.
And the example you give is not THAT complex - try to represent any interesting polyrhythm drum pattern in traditional notation, now that will be an excercise in futility.
The hummingbird is not a good enough solution - it's a step in the right direction and another step sideways; but we need to go much further to improve both ease of reading and ease of learning music.
To use a programming analogy, the current music notation is like if everybody had to learn programming through COBOL - it works, it's usable and widely used... but still, using a better, cleaner language for the same concepts would obviously bring benefits to all new users; even if it's of no benefit to all the current experts who already know the current notation by heart.
Standard notation, QWERTY, English, Facebook, etc. are all flawed in many ways but to replace them you can't just be 1% or 5% better; you need to be an order of magnitude better. No one cares about learning Dvorak for 5 more WPM but if people could double their WPM the world would switch.
Standard notation for guitar music also suffers from the "where on the fretboard do I play this" problem -- sometimes there are hints (like finger numbers), but often you just have to try a few options and see what's best... which is rough going if you're trying to sightread a piece you don't know yet.
TAB notation, of course, fills in the missing info on suggested finger placement, but omits other essential info (rhythm!), so by itself that's also broken....
Also I've been trying to get used to Don Ellis quarter tone system, and work thru haskell school of music (fantastic book, for anybody interested not just in notations, but production, composition and capture(A/D conversion/DSP etc. Also shoudl read books by Gould and Read someday:
http://www.amazon.com/Behind-Bars-Definitive-Guide-Notation/...
http://davidvaldez.blogspot.com/2012/09/quarter-tones-by-don...
http://haskell.cs.yale.edu/?post_type=publication&p=112
I have a tendency to play a note and then my eye moves to the next note--and I take the value of that note as how long to let the prior note play before playing the next note.
Also, how do you notate tuplets?
Ni-Pa-Vou-Ga-Di-Ke-Zo-Ni
The pdf is in Greek, but has been annotated with English notes throughout. It also contains embedded mp3 resources so you can hear what the notation is showing.
More details can be found: http://www.byzantinechant.org/notation.html
Including video tutorials: http://www.byzantinechant.org/tutorials.html
Removing the key signature is not a good idea. When playing in G major, the sharp accidental on the Fs is not put at the beginning of the line just to avoid printing it in the score. Rather, it fits there because when I play in G major, I put my brain in G major mode, in which case it would be distracting to have an accidental on every single F.
Similarly, writing a special symbol for each pitch seems it would get heavily in the way of transposing on the fly. The position already encodes the pitch, and the ABCDEFG names kind of get in the way of understanding the melody, which is more about relative intervals than absolute values.
And what does the little parenthesis on the length line mean? For half- and whole notes it seems to mean it doubles the length (a quarternote with one or two parentheses), but for sixteenth-notes it seems to indicate that it halves it (an eighth-note with a single parenthesis mark).
I also question removing the stem of a note. I have a feeling that is one of the stronger queues for reading rhythm. Spacing is not very important, and indeed especially in dense scores for solo instruments, that need to have few page turns, notes are often just spaced as tightly as possible.
The author also recognized that the beams on eighth- and sixtheenth-notes (e.g. in the left hand) are very important rhythmic cues, and replaced them with that horizontal thing with the arrow on the left. This is a bit hard to read though when there are no stems to link them to the note and the pitch interval is big.
The part about it being easy to write by hand looks good, and made me feel good at first. Then you realize that hand-written traditional notation is quite different from typeset one, just like handwritten text is very different from printed text. Drawing all the little balls and filling in the halfmoon C, up and down thingies seems tedious, when traditionally one writes a simple dot or a little slash instead of the note head.
My immediate thought once I figured that out was "this depends on English". For speakers of Japanese or Russian or French, can you find easy to remember words that can go with the first symbol, and that start with an "a" sound?
I actually found the terms extremely confusing. At first I thought the above/below referred to sharp/flat, but that didn't turn out. I couldn't even come up with concepts for dot and groove.
I know how to read music, but I'm not very good at it. I'll say that the idea of giving each note it's own shape seems like it could fix the problem of losing my place and having to count lines/spaces to figure out what a note it.
The thing I've never liked about musical notation is that the X axis has nothing to do with time. A staff can have 8 32nd notes and then a dotted half note. Those first notes take up 1/4 the time but 3/4 the space. While it would take more space, I find a consistent relationship much easier (such as piano roles or Guitar Hero note charts).
I didn't get that from any part of this. How can such a basic point be so poorly (or not explained)?
Using icons that translate to English words to stand for note letters is a terrible idea.
Whenever I teach key signatures this is the biggest thing I try to impart: key signatures are more than just accidentals, they define the roles each pitch plays.
What the particular notes in that key do (their role, as you put it) is a property of that key.
It's all about recognizing when to build tension and when to resolve tension.
Yes, the roles that the notes play is defined by the key, but if you don't mentally make the switch, you'll often perform things poorly because you don't anticipate where things are going correctly.
Or at least that's how it works for me, at any rate. Take anything I say with a grain of salt. I can't sight-read much at all.
sight reading is hard because of the cognitive work involved with translating, say, eight notes at a time into the appropriate finger-patterns, rhythm and pace; or translating fewer notes but at a faster rate. i don't see this making it easier.
i'm not sure why they would bother. anyone who finds sight reading too tough, might not really ever need sheet music, whether they do it by ear, or just listen to music. my friend has a disklavier - incredible. robot plays the piano better than i ever could. it makes me wonder why i still bother to try and play, and then i remind myself that every feeble attempt i make is intrinsically satisfying to me, so i keep trying.
I wonder if a suitable analogy would be like underlining all capital letters in a selection of prose - useful for the neophyte, chaff for the slightly experienced onwards.
robot plays the piano better than i ever could
Apart from the personal enjoyment angle, robots also can't detect the mood of the audience (yet) and play to suit.
The one place I could see pitch symbols being slightly beneficial is when notes are either way above or way below the staff. But even then, after some deliberate practice these can be recognized pretty quickly as well.
Regarding relative position. On a piano the relative position of notes on the staff almost directly correlates to position on the keyboard. On a stringed instrument this is VERY far from the case. As i proceed up the scale on a simple instrument like the bass i will proceed right on the neck on one string, then drop down a string, shift left, proceed right on that string, drop down a string, shift left, proceed right on that string. So you've got back and forth, and up and down motions to keep going in one direction tonally. On a guitar the strings aren't all tuned evenly so the back and forth on the neck changes depending on which strings you're switching between. On the Ukulele the top string is higher than the string below it so you end up jumping UP strings rather than down, AND the strings aren't tuned at even intervals. So you've just got a big jumble of movements.
Don't even get me started on the totally unintuitive nature of woodwind fingerings or how they are almost totally disconnected from what's going on on the staff.
In short, the relative positioning of notes on the staff is good from a tonal perspective but crap from a finger perspective on most every instrument except piano.
That's not really a problem once you build the muscle memory, though.
It's the same thing as touch typing. With enough practice, you know that finger placement X will produce note y, the same way you know where the keys on the keyboard are.
I felt exactly this way learning to read music. The score just didn't present enough information fast enough for me because I hand't learned to build the context in my head and spot the relations. I fumbled about with alternatie notations, extra notations etc. I finally settled on colors. I wrote a small program to color the dominant, subdominant etc. and then printed it on my color printer. This helped me immensely and I didn't take the dead end road of learning alternate notations that would shut me out of all written music everywhere.
Some windmills should be tilted at, some should just be left alone.
About hummingbird, it's amazing. Really, I found it strange in the first minute. Then I got it
Why? My major peeve with traditional notation is the lines above and below. And I never know what are they talking about after adding some lines above the stave.
About the key signature, 100% agree.
As pretty much all students, I thought the key signature just meant which notes are always sharp or flat ("oh these guys want us to use more black keys - BORING")
It took me some time to get it. It's not about flat or sharp, but as they said it, it's 'G Major mode'. Then you feel everything is clearer. It's like going from understanding words in a phrase to understanding the phrase.
What about for those being exposed to music and its notation for the first time? What if you had never had a concept of putting your brain in G major mode.
But if complete beginners are his target audience, it begs the question why stop there? Why maintain the use of the staff at all.
(Of course, caveat, I've been playing piano for 20+ years as a hobby. Maybe the ties to the traditional are really not a big deal.)
I know there are a lot of judgement calls in typesetting music, but that's true of text too, and we have some pretty good algorithms for doing so these days.
All that said, I have a lot of reservations about this particular notation, but I think there's certainly room for improvement even inside the current system. Letting the back catalog of work hold notation back isn't healthy.
It is enough if machines can translate the existing sheet music to the new system.
This is a very valid point.
Certainly the learning process for children can be improved a lot. Really, a lot. But I think it is important to integrate it with the actual notation from the beginning, as otherwise you will hit a wall when you want to play a bigger variety of music that's only available in that format.
I looked at hummingbird, and it took me 30 seconds to memorize the symbols, and now I can read any hummingbird note sheet easily.
I would say this is a big win. Same feel I got when I saw Tau, mathematicians might argue it's incorrect, but for me, I don't care, Tau made math easy for me. Hummingbird makes music easy for me. That's all I care.
About transposing, you got a point, I think there should be apps that do it for you (e.g. convert MIDI files to hummingbird notation, I'm sure we'll see a few of these as Show HN sometime soon)
Hummingbird feels like a crutch to me. Hiding key signatures stunts your understanding of how music works. Forcing time to be marked explicitly as well as by altering spacing places odd constraints on typesetters. Humans use several subtle visual cues¹ to read music quickly and efficiently, and hummingbird just throws them all away.
I'm not sure this is worth the overhaul.
1: http://lilypond.org/web/about/automated-engraving/software
If this had that much of an impact on you, and if this has the potential to encourage others to learn notation, I'd like to see a full study of how hummingbird compares to the regular notation.
I think it's bold and interesting, but ultimately I think it hasn't got legs.
In fact, it's so useful to state the key up front, I might even suggest the opposite; base the notation on relative pitches, as in "movable do" solfege. Then we could replace "all F's and C's are sharp" with just "do is D". Of course, there'd be tradeoffs to this as compared to the traditional notation, but it's fun to think about.
I've worked with intermediate-level musicians who are skilled at regular sight-reading, but who struggle to learn to transpose on the fly. A relative-pitch notation might be like requiring everyone to "transpose" all the time, forcing them to learn this skill before they can proceed.
On the other hand, maybe you'd teach it differently. Instead of learning transposition as carrying around an offset to add to each pitch, you'd learn it as carrying around a scale to which the relative pitches would be mapped. I wonder whether this would be easier or harder to learn.
When you get beyond that, "mapping relative pitches to a scale" is, IMO, the correct approach. The "offset to each pitch" thing obscures what's really going on, as if they were all weird derivatives of the key of C. I can see how it might be harder, among other reasons because you have to understand how a scale works more clearly, but I suspect it would be worth it.
Of course, it's hard to really know without getting people to switch for a couple generations.
Scales are a function that acts upon the set of pitches used in music. A C major scale has the pitches C, D, E, F, G, A, and B. A G major scale (function) has the pitches G, A, B, C, D, E, and F#.
"Mapping relative pitches to a scale" is nonsensical. A scale (function) is an absolute set of pitches, immutable.
There are two forms of solfège (do, re, mi, ...): fixed and moveable. In moveable the first pitch of the scale is always do. In fixed the pitch called C is always do. Watch "The Sounds of Music" to learn the solfège for a major scale, it's the do-re-mi song. There are other syllables used for the three minor scale forms. To my knowledge (admittedly not complete) Italy, France, and perhaps England used a fixed-do system, whereas the rest of the world uses a moveable-so system.
Actually, most trumpets, harmonicas, and many classes of flute are restricted to diatonic scales. You'll have a hard time finding a chromatic trumpet outside of a museum.
There's more to music than western chromaticism or indeed harmonic theory.
This is kind of a confusing statement to me. Most instruments called "trumpets" where I come from are valved instruments which are fully capable of producing chromatics. (Maybe this is technically incorrect and we should be properly calling them "cornets" or something, I don't know.)
My point is, you certainly don't have to go to a museum to find one, and I expect, in a museum (of history anyway), any trumpet you'd find would be more likely to to be valveless and non-chromatic.
The chromatic trumpet is an invention that allowed us to escape the trumpets natural harmonic series (Those being the notes a trumpet can play in a single valve position) before valves were invented by drilling holes along its tubes.
Wikipedia is not the best place to learn music theory, and knowing music theory is as useful as knowing a list of rules for programming best practice.
Also, I was playing and recording music since before wikipedia even came into existence, so dial back those assumptions.
We already use relative notation for most instruments. Trumpets, Clarinets and Tenor Saxophones typically read notation where Bb is equivalent to C on the page. What you'll note we Don't do, is change our relative pitch between songs.
No. Relative pitch is Very Hard, because as a musician, my hands don't play relatively. When I see an Eb on a notation sheet, my body knows how to play the note without me thinking about it, and it has to, because sometimes you can have notes flying at you with a rate of 32 a bar. This does not leave time to translate between the relative abstraction on paper and the absolute pitch of my instrument. It's not just harder.
It's much, much harder to train your brain and body to be able to map the same object on the page to twelve different body positions, depending on some variable that changes at random between songs.
Also remember, that different pitches have different textures, otherwise we'd never play in a keys other than C.
This is why I mainly worry that a relative-pitch notation may present a steeper learning curve. Advanced players typically need to be able to think at least somewhat in both relative pitches and absolute pitches at the same time anyway. Absolute pitches because that's what many instruments demand, and relative pitches, because that's where a lot of the meaning is, which informs other aspects of the performance. But it typically takes more practice to learn to think in both ways at once.
> Also remember, that different pitches have different textures, otherwise we'd never play in a keys other than C.
I did propose that pieces could indicate their intended key.
It's funny, before I read your comment I wrote a longwinded harmonica player's lament elsewhere in the thread, and I was thinking the same thing: A relative notation would be perfect.
But yes, classical notation could certainly use some refinements.
Also, maybe you could make your feedback constructive by providing ideas, alternatives and suggestions instead of just ripping it apart but adding no value or solid suggestions beyond that.
The point here is much bigger and more significant than any of your individual criticisms.
The point is this - these people are rethinking the problem of notation, and redesigning it from the ground up.
I think their approach is totally badass, and I love the fact that someone is tackling this!
Pointing out flaws IS constructive criticism. This happens all the time and it bugs me:
person A comes up with an idea person B gives good reasons why it's flawed person A - the one who wants to innovate - says that fixing those flaws isn't his problem, and that person B should fix them.
WRONG.
The person who generates an idea, the person who wants to do something new, is the one who is responsible for brainstorming, finding problems, finding solutions, and pivoting as needed.
To say "your criticisms should be bundled with solutions" just raises the bar on criticism, and when it costs more to generate criticism, you get less of it.
We should all encourage criticism, and then we should make finding solutions OUR problem.
I much prefer someone to criticize my work, rather than sitting quiet just because they can't think of improvements. After all, I'm probably much more likely to come up with a solution than they are, and the reason I didn't is just because I didn't think of that problem.
Pointing out flaws IS constructive criticism. This happens all the time and it bugs me:
person A comes up with an idea person B gives good reasons why it's flawed person A - the one who wants to innovate - says that fixing those flaws isn't his problem, and that person B should fix them.
WRONG.
The person who generates an idea, the person who wants to do something new, is the one who is responsible for brainstorming, finding problems, finding solutions, and pivoting as needed.
To say "your criticisms should be bundled with solutions" just raises the bar on criticism, and when it costs more to generate criticism, you get less of it.
We should all encourage criticism, and then we should make finding solutions OUR problem.
In the end, I judged that (valid) criticism is better than no criticism, despite the negative feeling of being the guy that just "tears it down".
http://www.hummingbirdnotation.com/songs/Fur%20Elise%20(Fina...
Musical notation needs to be spoken-language-free.
Tempi and volume are usually given in Italian, aren't they?
It was invented for the Chromatone, a keyboard that eliminates black and white keys and treats all keys the same way, similar to a guitar fretboard. http://muto-method.com/en/index.html
Transposing then becomes easy because every scale has the same shape.
However, I do like the fact that accidentals in traditional notation say something important: This note is out of the scale you are playing in. This is usually audibly very noticeable, so it makes sense to have it very noticeable in the score as well.
The three line system could be enhanced to show the notes that are in and out of the scale slightly differently, e.g. with color, or the size of the note-head. This would still have the benefit of being easily transposable.
http://www.essential-music-theory.com/images/grand-staff-spa...
Instead of difficult to read/write symbols which map to letters, which map to pitches, why not just use the letters themselves?
I would totally love to just learn with letters written on the staff. And over time, maybe my sheet music app could randomly replace letters with black filled circles, and then eventually with standard music notation.
honestly this makes me want to re-try to learn piano with this type of notation. perhaps even a notation that would let me focus more on the piano and less on deciphering the notation.
brilliant in its simplicity, thanks for sharing.
The key is to make it fun and easy in the beginning, so that piano players don't give up! Then, make it harder once they are motivated to learn.... and you can show them why standard notation is more expressive/compact/better than the letter notation they started out with.
With software, the view can adapt over time as the player becomes more comfortable reading notation. If the sheet music was displayed on a tablet, eventually the little letters could disappear.
This could be a nice set of "training wheels" for beginner pianists.
http://synthesiagame.com/
The drawback is that this notation is less compact. But, it's the best notation for teaching beginners.
I'm trying to figure out how Hummingbird notation is any better than "piano roll" notation or simply putting letters on the staff. It's definitely a cool idea (infovis-wise), but I think it needs to be user tested: standard vs. hummingbird vs. letters-on-staff vs. "piano roll"...
I think Hummingbird's goal is to become an alternate standard of global music notation, based on the fact that it resembles the traditional one (and actually uses it as a base). But Hummingbird also has its flaws (that I mentioned in another comment).
Traditional notation: 16th notes are tied together, with the tying actually serving to reinforce the duration of the individual notes while indicating that they should be played as a group.
I think I prefer the way it looks in traditional notation, and I think music might be more intuitive to write as such – but heck. Always be innovating.
"Long notes are longer; sharps point up and flats down." - Having notes take up more space is about the worst possible thing in the world for me; as a pit musician, the last thing I need is more wasted space on a page, giving me more page turns to deal with while I'm changing instruments and key signatures.
"...rhythms have the same spacing" - I don't know what this means. Rhythms don't have spacing. The spaces between the notes has nothing to do with the music that's played.
Then there's the fact that all current musicians would have to re-learn how to read music. Perhaps someone can tell me what's drastically broken about the current system? I'm not saying it's perfect - I don't believe any system is perfect. But it's worked pretty well for the last few hundred years.
If you're using a real device, page turns can be automated or eased. The device can listen to what you're playing (tempo shouldn't be too hard to pick out) and turn pages appropriately. Or, you could use a foot pedal or what have you - perhaps your phone.
Apps for this sort of thing already exist, though I don't know how good they are.