alt Hacker NewsShow HN: XY Music Notation
I've been playing around with a new kind of isomorphic music keyboard that uses a base-12 notation, and wanted some sheet music to learn some new music for it.
The idea is to represent each note in 12-TET as a number, so N ∈ (0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,X,Y).
I used codex to build a music score rendering backend based on MuseScore with custom note heads that display the pitch class of each note.
I've found it pretty helpful for learning how to play my own instrument, so wanted to share in case anyone else was interested.
Comments
This is a system that indicates the lack of information about why the current system (which, admittedly is a mess) is the way it is. This is removing Chesterson's fence without understand why it's there.
A point: one improvement to this system is if the tonic note is always 1. I don't hate the idea of number inside the notes, but as it is currently, its not only useless, but actively making things more difficult to parse.
Having the tonic, the 3rd, the 5th, the 7th... that might make things easier to sight-read. Might.
The current notation is a hodge-podge of compromises of rhythm, legibility, page to music ratio (efficiency of page turns), pitch range, and dynamics. Nothing in music can ever be 'perfect' (the cosmic joke). And without the history of how any why the current system came to be, 'disrupters' are just people who don't know their own ignorance. Even still, sometimes there is value added. Rare as that is.
I like the technical fun of it, but no musician is ever going to give a crap about this. We have hundreds of years of the evolution of music notation and it is pretty comprehensive. Just because there are only 12 unique notes in western music doesn't mean base-12 to notate it makes sense....that completely strips out context of what you are playing.
For example...in the key of aminor when you make the five chord major to create a resolution back to i (aminor) you raise the 7th scale degree. That means the G becomes G#...Ab is the same pitch but writing it that way is wrong. An EMajor chord is spelled E G# B, not E Ab B. Now if you spell that as 9 0 4 you have stripped all context out of the music. Musicians aren't just player pianos, they analyze the harmonic structure of the music the inform phrasing, shape, tone, volume, and pacing (acelarando, decelerando, ritardando, etc).
Whenever I see something like this trying to reinvent standard notation I feel like it is usually from somebody who can kind of play an instrument but can't read music or can't read it well because they haven't put the years of work it takes to be a proficient sight reader and they haven't studied harmony/music-theory.
One of the most important things about musical standard notation is that it is - standard - you can hand it to any musician on any instrument and they can make sense of it quickly. It is a skill that takes a lot of practice but it is what allows musicians who have never met each other to be hired for a gig and show up and play together without ever rehearsing.
This approach won't teach you to "see" music either. It forces pure mechanical number memory....you won't see harmony and be able to quickly notice that - for example - a line is just moving the chord up in inversions and since you know harmony and your chords you can sight read that part without ever even reading every individual note.
But still a cool idea from a hobby perspective.
People who know Nashville system are gonna struggle with that.
Am I understanding correctly that it always starts on C (C==0)? Seems like key changes will be hard without computer assistance, I mean, you could have your chart update on the fly if you're using a tablet, but paper charts will be hard to transpose on the fly.
I do think now is a prime opportunity to get away from traditional notation for folks that want it, since transcription to a new notation is trivial now, even for paper charts, where it once required a lot of human effort. And, isomorphic is very appealing.
But, this feels like it doesn't come from the perspective of a musician who plays from charts? Musicians think in relationships, not absolute notes, and this kind of obscures those relationships. I'm not really arguing that traditional notation is optimal, it takes a lot of knowledge and practice, and I've never invested enough time to be good at it, but I don't think this really resolves the pain (you still have to know traditional notation to be able to read it) and adds something that isn't based on musical relationships and maybe even makes those relationships harder to see for a trained musician. To a musician the numbers they know are scale intervals; a "7" here is a "5" (perfect fifth) to a trained musician and a "4" is a "3" (major third).
It's fun to tinker, of course, and I'm not trying to shit on your idea. Just pointing out why I wouldn't find it helpful. As a musician, who isn't all that great at reading traditional music notation, I find the numbers distracting. It adds to an already noisy and difficult to read thing, one more thing my brain is trying to translate into something my fingers know how to do.
So many software nerds get nerd-sniped into trying to invent their own music notation. I have almost succumbed to that temptation myself. Someone should make a version of https://www.mcmillen.dev/language_checklist.html for this.
Looks like you've either come across or independently reinvented pitch classes! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_class
I like the use of base 12, but IMO it's somewhat wasted on a diatonic staff. This is basically just traditional notation with special coloring to make it easier to read. To better match the keyboard, I'd rather use an isomorphic staff (a.k.a. "chromatic staff", although I dislike that name because it implies diatonic music as a default).
There's a web site you might be interested in with many examples of isomorphic notation at:
It took me a while to understand what the numbers were actually trying to indicate (in part because I'm used to numbers in sheet music being suggestions of which finger should play the given note). If I understand correctly now, are you numbering zero-indexed with C as the beginning (0) and B as the end (Y), as a proxy for remembering which key notes are meant to be played in?
I think you’d be better off with something compatible with an existing system. Perhaps start with nashville numbering and add accidentals?
I was working on a similar idea, I grabbed 2x PartyKeys and I was going to map each key to a finger ( left-pinky = orange ), but the API is such that -- if you have two boards (72 keys) and send a msg to a single board ( 1st key = orange ) -- it lights up both 1st keys (there's no way to address a single board). Was disappointing.
relatedly does anyone have a tool to generate piano synthesia videos from sheet music, maybe with or without AI? They seem fun to play along with. (I'll just look it up, commenting to share the idea too though)
Great video by Tantacrul about all the other previous attempts at "fixing" music notation, well worth a watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eq3bUFgEcb4