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5.31.2007 

Music Notation

Music notation is frequently lauded for its beauty and succinctness. Of course, it has the benefit of being refined by practitioners of music for the last 400 years. For me, it is inaccessible, highly encoded information. It lacks visual spatial regularity in time. Decoding a single note to a position on the keyboard is at least a 5 step process. But music notation is beautiful and historical and used by lots of people. Unfortunately there are probably about 10 people who have failed to learn or love playing the piano, for every one who has succeeded, because of that notation.

As a pianist, it is extremely frustrating to spend hours learning a new piece of music because one can't read music notation. So I am abandoning music notation in favor of Piano Notation. A piano notation should be specific for a piano. I am not presently attempting to learn how to play any other instruments. It should make use of a 600dpi gray-scale printer - remember that the beautiful music notation we use today was originally written with ink and quills.

Below are two examples. They represent two octaves each for the right and left hand. The music is read top down instead of left to right. The octaves are represented by the thinner horizontal blocks.


 
 
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