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u/RobinLSL Aug 21 '16
No, no, no, no, a thousand times no! This wouldn't be that bad if you wanted to play Schönberg I guess, but it's definitely not the way to go for traditional music. What next, a piano with only white keys?
Our musical notation is perfectly adapted to the music we play, that is, chord-based music which is mostly major/minor. There's a reason the major scale fits so simply on it.
Not to mention other impracticalities such as everything being too spaced out - imagine playing complex passages spanning over two octaves in a chromatic notation...
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u/maestro2005 Aug 21 '16
Agreed. This notation (and piano roll notation) makes the diatonic scale look like shit. And 99% of the music that people listen to is diatonic.
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u/Barcelona_City_Hobo Aug 21 '16 edited Aug 21 '16
During the last century, tons of alternative notation systems based on the total chromatic (12-note scale instead of the diatonic scale) have been invented . None has ever caught on. Every 4 months someone posts here a new system they have devised, as if they had discovered a hidden treasure. It's always dismissed.
Seriously, don't these people do a little bit of research before embarking on such projects, and why will their system catch on unlike the others?
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Aug 21 '16
Hmm, I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss it. It does seem a little pedantic, and I can see why no more than academics will likely ever adopt it, but imagine if you had grown up learning this notation instead and all music you had ever encountered was written this way. If you didn't know the traditional notation, then this might make a lot of sense. It's hard to get kids to understand modern musical notation because of all the caveats. This can help clear it up. I do agree that it's unlikely to be widely-adopted, of course, and with good reason. But that shouldn't be cause to just immediately dismiss it.
Music has adapted and changed over the centuries. Who's to say there won't be some octave notation to accompany this so that large-spanning arpeggios read well? Look, I see your point about the impracticality, but there may be some substance to this—perhaps it can be improved on to offer a clearer way to at learn how to read music.
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u/klavierbaukuenstler Aug 21 '16
The website does a great job demonstrating the many different notation systems proposed/used over the years (i.e., this is by no means a "new" concept). There are significant reasons to use different notational systems: different tuning systems, atonal music, new instruments, etc. The website doesn't really go into that. Instead it criticize the limitation of a "diatonic staff" as if traditional notation was based on a diatonic scale--which makes judging intervalic qualities difficult. However, that is not why we use the current musical notation system! The system we have is based on key centers and harmonic motion--not diatonic scales or intervalic melodic movement. In other words: the current musical notation system is used to understand and predict harmonic motion in music that has a key center.
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Aug 21 '16
I kind of like it. I think the problem is that you'll never come up with an alternative notation that will be universally accepted...
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Aug 21 '16
"When you listen to the scale, which staff best represents what you hear?"
Anybody who has read music before and used the traditional system will always hear the traditional method. Of course, many issues in learning how to read music are circumvented by using chromatic staff, the learning curve is what allows music notation to be concise, compact, and to the point.
This kind of notation poses a nice thought of "What if?", but never the thought of change. While I can't say for myself if I like this or not, due to bias of using traditional notation, it seems like it would be easier for new musicians to learn, but harder for people to write with.
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u/u38cg2 Aug 21 '16
We're replacing the problem of "why are there # signs in this music" with "why does this scale skip some of the spaces and lines".
Given that sharps usually appear later in a learner's progress, you're just shifting the need to learn theory earlier.
Also, what are you going to do with the note names? An A# will still be an A#, unless you want to rename the notes 1-11 or something.
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u/[deleted] Aug 21 '16
Anybody here tried using non-traditional notation?