Best music notation ever invented! 👍

WieWaldi

I know, a lot of people made suggestions how to improve music notation. Often they come with some pros but also with a lot of cons. I came up with a system, that hasn't cons. And if you find cons, they are very little or even arbitrary. But the pros are huge!

Instead of 5 lines, this staff has 6 lines, grouped in two 3-liners (call the 3-liner a "triple" for now).
I was always worried, 6 lines could be too much and look too crowded. But if there is a gap between two triplets, it doesn't look crowded anymore and the eye can very quickly determine the position of a note.

The key of the concept is the triple. One triple ranges the from lowest note hanging note to the highest sitting note 7 notes in total. This are all notes of an octave. For instance, the D is always on the center line of a triple, no matter where the triple is placed. Up and down from the D, the staff is symetric (same as the keys are on a piano keyboard). That the triple ranges from A to G in alphabetic order is a neat coincidence. (Or maybe not?)

Ledger lines are as well very easy to read, as they are made of the same triples. Each note has always it's relative position within the triple. Furthermore the triples make ledger line counting extremely fast and intuitive; even for bigger ranges.

A greater stave for the piano would look like this:

Of course the bass staff can have ledger lines on the top notes, as well as the treble staff can contain ledger lines to the bottom. Same concept as is is today.

The rest of the music notation is as it is (♯, ♭, ♮, key-signatures, and so on)

An open topic is to invent more symbols besides the treble and bass clef symbol to indicate octave shifts. This would make 15/8va¯¯¯¯¯¯¯ and 15/8ba________ notations obsolete. For shorter ranges the va/ba notation makes sense, but somtimes it spans over a page and just crowds the sheet music.
I think in total 7 octave indicators should be enough. Something like this:

TTT (Treble clef 15va)
TT (Treble clef 8va)
T (Treble clef)
C (Treble clef 8ba == bass clef 8va)
B (Bass clef)
BB (Bass clef 8ba)
BBB (Bass clef 15ba - in case you play organ or own a Bösendorfer Imperial)

BartK

This is like trying to reform English spelling because you think you can do it better. Maybe. But if you want to read English literature you need to learn the standard spelling.

Nightowl

BartK It's pretty clear that @WieWaldi already knows how to read music. I think that he just tried to come up with a more user friendly system, by applying some ~~German~~ Bavarian logic.

As for English, his command of that is better than many people who were born here in the UK.

BartK

Nightowl My point is that if you want to play pieces from the piano repertoire you're going to have to use standard sheet music.

WieWaldi

BartK This is like trying to reform English spelling because you think you can do it better.

It's more like going from roman numbers to arabic numbers.

BartK But if you want to read English literature you need to learn the standard spelling.

True, most literature is printed with roman numbers 🙂

iternabe

Vibe code an AI agent to transcode MusicXML to your favorite notation? 😜

WieWaldi

iternabe I am tempted to do....
Unfortunately this means a lot of work, so I probably won't.

I had this idea at lunch, I thought what about with a gap in the staff, that the same note is always on a line or always between two lines. I experimented bit and found the triple idea tremendous logical and easy to read. Because it repeats over and over.

The comparison of roman number to arabic numbers is actually a very good fit.

What do you think about this notation?

iternabe

WieWaldi I am not up for learning another music notation system since I am not yet good at the current one.

WieWaldi

iternabe I am not expecting anyone here to learn it - me included.
I am just curious what do you think about it.

Or let me ask the other way: If people would have decided centuries ago to make it this way, do you think it would be easier to learn from scratch than our current one`?

Jane

Can you make it work with the Dvorak keyboard ?? 😜

pseudonym58

Jane I was going to make a remark about the Dvorak keyboard, but you beat me to it! 😄

Sophia

Pfft. That's the old skool example. Us modern people talk about betamax vs VHS 🤣

Jane

Hmm.... how's Esperanto catching on nowadays ? 🤔

BartK

Don't get me started on the USA and the metric system.

MRC

It's important to distinguish between what is easy to learn and what is convenient and rapid to use once you've learnt the system. In this case, you can certainly argue that people only need to learn one clef in your system, whereas the conventional system has two just for piano, and a couple more for other instruments such as cello and viola.

But what happens when reading at speed? Here's something that strikes me: in the conventional system, to determine the the pitch of a note, I only need to distinguish between a notehead bisected by a line and a notehead between two lines. In this system, there are four possibilities:

a notehead bisected by a line
a notehead centred between two lines
a notehead at the bottom of a wider space between two lines
a notehead at the top of a wider space between two lines.

I think that distinguishing between those last two cases may hamper fluid reading. (This is based on my years of experience reading conventional notation, where I know how I may be tripped up by a notehead which isn't perfectly placed vertically, something that can happen in older scores).

And what of reading intervals? I make extensive use of fast recognition of intervals when sight-reading. Take a fifth, for instance. I can immediately see a fifth, because it's either between one line and the line next to one above it, or between one space and the space next to one above it. This is always the case, no matter the clef or the number of ledger lines. I simply cannot mistake a fifth for another interval, no matter how fast the music is going.

In your system, a fifth can be between:

the top of a space and a space (A-E)
a line and a line (B-F)
a space and the bottom of a space (C - G)
a line and the top of a space (D- A)
a space and a line (E - B)
a line and a space (F - C)
the bottom of a space and a line (G - D)

Will that make reading intervals easier?

If you're interested in researching alternate notation systems, systems from different cultures, tweaks to our conventional system or possible ways to make it easier to learn, have a look at this extraordinary resource: Music Notation Timeline.

BartK

Exactly what @MRC wrote.

What I observe from discussions and from my own progression learning to read music is that beginners often think in terms of absolute note values whereas more advanced readers are more concerned with relationships between notes. For example, I can easily read any note out of context on the staff up to several ledger lines and play it immediately but that is not usually what I do when reading actual music. Most commonly I just follow one or two musical lines mostly by intervals and figure out the rest by their relative chord positions. For instance, when I see three notes stacked on top of each other I immediately know it's a root position chord and my hand knows how to play it without having to think about the individual notes. Having this constancy of relationships (and not necessarily absolute note values) definitely makes reading music easier.

MRC where I know how I may be tripped up by a notehead which isn't perfectly placed vertically, something that can happen in older scores

Oh yes! I can definitely relate to that. Sometimes chords are printed so that some thirds appear slightly wider than others and that trips me up too.

pseudonym58

Yes, the shapes of chords in terms of stacked notes on the staff, as well as that of arpeggiated figures, is something I use often in reading music notation. That's why, at the moment, in reading a piece by Poulenc, the frequent use of double flats, sometimes two or three in a chord or arpeggio, slows me down considerably. I've even resorted in a couple of cases to writing the letter names of the enharmonic equivalents, at least until the music is in my fingers!
(Yes, I understand that as a composer, the concern is with accurately following the harmonic modulation and showing the structure of the movement from key to key. But I have spoken to other composers who feel that it could have been handled in such a way as to facilitate reading, albeit with more "distant" changes in key signature.)

MRC

pseudonym58 That's why, at the moment, in reading a piece by Poulenc, the frequent use of double flats, sometimes two or three in a chord or arpeggio, slows me down considerably.

Ah, Poulenc!

Here's the last page of his wonderful mélodie, "C":

Yes, a key signature with 7 flats, with loads of double flats to trip you up. It's the devil to sight-read! He could have written it a different way, with enharmonic equivalents, that might make it easier to read. But for me, that wouldn't be the same piece. Seeing all those flats contributes to the nostalgic effect. When I play it, the way it's written contributes something to the way I play it.

Here you can listen to it without worrying about double flats:

WieWaldi

MRC Thanks for the input, you made some fair points. Appreciate a lot. I didn't think about intervals - this is why I shared it in the forum and hoping for a profound check.
Just let me visualize the intervals (basically visualize what you said) and share my thoughts:

2nds and 3rds are easy to read.
4ths are still quite good, as there is always half a notehead gap.

5th

Here we have the situation, that you expect to see an even step between to noteheads, but 4 out of 7 intervals look like an odd step (change from on line to between lines and vice versa). I agree this requires more careful looking to recognize the interval compared to the existing system.

6th

Is in my opinion a bit easier than 5th. 5 out of 6 look like an even step with a remarkably big distance. There are 2 exceptions (AF, BG) that are fairly easy to see becaue two noteheads are on the border of a triple with an even step. Still not that easy as the existing system, but IMO better than 5ths.

7th

All steps look odd, with one single exception. This exception is fairly easy to recognize. Not sure if the existing system has that much of an advantage. Intuively, I would say a 7th should be an odd step, because 7 is an odd number. But this doesn't matter.

octaves

I would say, with 8ths, this system is easier to read than the existing one. In the existing one, I am always doing a bit of a guess work that the distance is an 8th and not a 6th or 10th. Only after a bit of repeating I remember it was an octave.

I think the most difficult intervals to read are the 5ths, followed by the 6th and then the 7th.

WieWaldi

MRC If you're interested in researching alternate notation systems, systems from different cultures, tweaks to our conventional system or possible ways to make it easier to learn, have a look at this extraordinary resource: Music Notation Timeline.

Thanks again, I will stick my nose into it. Sounds promising.