There are some ideas for simplified music notation (with different shapes for flats and sharps) which work _very_ well for making sight reading easier. I have thought a lot about the problem (worked as a professional bassoon player for a very long time), and I can't say I have had many good ideas. A new system is proposed every now and then, and even though they might be better in a specific problem domain (say, microtonal music), but they always fall apart. The current system is 800 years old, and over that time it has won over hundreds of different systems. It is difficult to learn.Īlso keep in mind that music notation has undergone many iterations, and it represents developments over hundreds and hundreds of years and covers every instrument under the sun - the breadth of what it has done throughout history and what can do might be hard to see. I think the problem is that difficult to learn and bad are easily confused. That should give you enough pause to ask why and consider the possibility that the system we have is really good in a way that you haven't recognized yet. I see some great responses, but I wanted to add that you have to keep in mind that tons of people have actually tried to make a better system, and nobody has succeeded. You're not alone, this is a common reaction to music notation by engineers a lot of people have wondered the same thing, even here on HN. > I always wondered why musicians keep up with the conventional musical notation system, and haven't come up with something better (maybe a job for a HNer?). not recognizing notes fast enough to play by the sheet) has kept me from becoming proficient on the piano (well, that, and my lazyness). I for one know that my dyslexia when it comes to musical notation (eg. A consequence is that, for example, with treble clef, you find C' in the top but one position between lines, and thus at a very different place than C (one octave below) visually, which is on, rather than between, an additional line below the bottom-most regular line. ![]() Since western music has 12 half-tone steps per octave (octave = an interval wherein the frequency is doubled, which is a logarithmic scale so compromises have to made when tuning individual notes across octaves) this gives a basic mismatch between the notation and eg. ![]() I mean the conventional music notation represents tones in five lines, each capable of holding a "note" (is that the right word?) on a line, as well as in between lines, possibly pitched down and up, resp., by B's and sharps (depending on the tune etc.). ![]() I always wondered why musicians keep up with the conventional musical notation system, and haven't come up with something better (maybe a job for a HNer?).
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