fabian s. klinke

Notation Must Die: The Battle For How We Read Music

notes.

Notation Must Die: The Battle For How We Read Music

Source: Notation Must Die: The Battle For How We Read Music, Tantacrul, 1:16:21, uploaded 2023-11-03, Watch Later position 1095.

In 1590, the priest and chess master Lorenzo Busnardo played a short game in Rome. The recorded moves let us follow a tactical trap across four centuries, from an exposed king to a pawn checkmate that arrives after the bishop and knight have seemed to sit idle. The record feels immediate because algebraic notation compresses each move into a small, shared code. The code itself came later. At the time, a chess writer might have described a move as the black king bringing out his queen and placing her in front of the bishop’s pawn.

Tantacrul uses this gap between a game and its notation to ask why music should keep the five-line staff. Critics describe Western notation as an old system that makes practice, sight-reading and theory harder than they need to be. His answer develops through history and a long tour of proposed replacements. Standard notation has awkward parts, yet each part sits inside a system that has absorbed new musical demands for roughly nine centuries.

The compromise inside the staff

The first compromise concerns space. Rhythm becomes easier to read when equal amounts of horizontal space represent equal amounts of time. Chords and accidentals need room of their own, so a bar with dense harmony grows wider than a bar that lasts just as long. Uniform spacing would waste room and force performers to turn more pages. Compact spacing makes rhythmic proportion harder to see. Tantacrul presents this as one example of the many pressures that notation has to balance at once.

He divides critics into three loose groups. Reformers understand notation well enough to propose serious alternatives. C-reformers know one part of music deeply and overlook the demands placed on the rest of the system. Disruptors approach notation from another field, often technology, and treat the limits of their knowledge as defects in the notation itself. Tim Sweeney’s proposal to replace notation with the piano roll supplies the main case for the last group. The video tests that proposal against history, performance, page layout and ensemble music.

From phonetic signs to the staff

The musicologist François-Auguste Gevaert divides notation into phonetic and diastematic systems. Phonetic notation uses letters, numbers or words to name sounds. Ancient Greek notation belongs here, along with Chinese, Arabic and Indian systems, tonic sol-fa and Jianpu. Diastematic notation uses vertical position to represent pitch intervals. Gregorian neumes and Western staff notation belong to this family.

Ancient Greek notation makes sense inside an ancient Greek account of music. Melody carried the main expressive work, while harmony remained restrained. Plato’s Republic even warns students away from detailed accompaniment because it could corrupt the character of the music and its listeners. Vocal rhythm followed the duration of spoken syllables. Instrumental music needed signs for duration, with the unmarked short as its regular unit and longer values built from it.

The Greeks also organised pitch through the tetrachord, a group of four notes spanning a perfect fourth. Terms such as hypate describe the string’s physical length rather than a high pitch in the modern sense. The system therefore had little reason to place pitch on a vertical axis. The surviving sources are rare and contradictory, so Tantacrul keeps this account brief.

Greek notation continued under the Roman Empire until Christian authorities closed pagan schools in the fourth century. Western Christian plainchant then travelled by ear. Regional practice drifted, and a dispute between Frankish and Roman singers in the ninth century helped prompt Charlemagne’s administration to standardise the liturgical repertory. Neumatic notation appeared as part of that effort. Small marks above the words indicated melodic direction, which made them useful as a memory aid after a singer had learned the chant. They could not teach a new melody from the page, and they carried little precise information about rhythm.

The anonymous Musica enchiriadis tradition proposed Daseian notation around 930 or 940. Its vertical intervals joined ancient Greek theory to contemporary practice, and a page could show four vocal parts at once. The system was not adopted widely. The surviving Daseian sources remain the earliest known written examples of polyphonic music, while the notation itself did not become the practical standard for polyphonic performance.

Guido of Arezzo’s eleventh-century reforms solved more of the problem. He built on an earlier system that used a fixed horizontal reference line, added further lines, and then promoted four permanent staff lines on which neumes could show exact pitch. He also standardised pitch names around the first seven letters of the alphabet and developed the hexachord as a precursor to the modern scale. Guido’s method spread through his teaching, including a presentation to the pope, and formed the core of the staff system that followed.

Plainchant suited Guido’s staff well. Polyphony soon created a new difficulty. Several singers could now perform independent melodies and rhythms at the same time, so the words of a shared chant could no longer carry the rhythm for everyone. The next two centuries saw competing systems for duration. Mensural notation introduced the longa, brevis, semibrevis and shorter values, together with rests and ligatures. Longer notes became hollow in the fifteenth century, while ligatures joined notes through rules that later musicians found difficult to reconstruct.

Franco of Cologne’s thirteenth-century account gives the period its characteristic mixture of precision and theology. A brevis recta lasted three beats because three was perfect. A brevis altera lasted two and paired with a one-beat minima so that the group still added up to three. A dot marked the sign of perfection. The dot eventually became a familiar part of notation, while the basic idea that symbols can state duration without drawing time literally survived into the modern system.

Chromatic staves and the cost of uniformity

The modern system names twelve pitches through the letters A to G, with sharps and flats filling most of the spaces between them. B and C form a semitone, as do E and F, while the other adjacent letter names span a whole tone. The notes look similar on the staff even when the audible distance differs. A chromatic staff gives every pitch its own position and removes the need for accidentals.

Tantacrul accepts the attraction. A chromatic staff makes physical pitch distance more accurate, yet it weakens the visual shorthand of scale degrees. A fifth in ordinary notation remains recognisable as a fifth when it carries a sharp. The same interval in a chromatic staff requires the performer to count more spaces, and the connection to the scale becomes harder to see. The accidentals create a short learning problem. A denser vertical system can create a permanent reading problem.

Several proposals try to solve this through six, seven or eight lines. One eight-line staff matches the black-key pattern of a piano. Tantacrul treats these designs as reasonable proposals whose failure remains an inference. He says that a proper test would compare beginners over four or five years. The video provides no such study, so the claim that chromatic staves have failed because of interval recognition and visual density remains his best explanation rather than a measured result.

Piano rolls and the physical page

Clefs reduce the wasted space that a full pitch range would require. A treble clef selects a high register, while a bass clef selects a low one. Tim Sweeney’s piano-roll proposal keeps every pitch visible and replaces note symbols with horizontal rectangles whose length represents duration. The idea dates back to Karl Christian Friedrich Krause in 1811 and reappears throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Gardner Read describes it as a reform that composers and theorists repeatedly rediscovered.

The piano roll has a physical problem before it has a musical one. Its full chromatic range takes up far more vertical space than a staff, so a printed page or tablet screen holds less music. A performer needs more page turns. Continuous scrolling solves the page height only by moving into a view that notation software has offered for decades. The piano roll therefore gives up the page view that performers tend to prefer without adding a new kind of continuous display.

Literal duration also becomes less useful as rhythms grow more detailed. A rectangle shows how long a note lasts in relation to its neighbours, so the performer must judge that length each time. Symbolic durations show a recognised value immediately. Tuplets and similar rhythms can look deceptively alike in a piano roll, while the notation symbols mark their relation directly. Tantacrul compares this with language, where abstract letters carry more information after the reader has learned them than mouth pictograms would carry at first sight.

The ensemble case exposes a second limit. A solo piano roll can display one instrument’s range. A piano trio, wind ensemble or conductor needs several performers and ranges at once. The display either becomes an enormous grid or needs separate views that reproduce the role of clefs in a louder, more instrument-specific form. The piano roll is already the dominant tool for composing inside a DAW. Tantacrul points to a failed MuseScore.com experiment in which users almost universally switched off the piano-roll reading view. This is the video’s strongest practical evidence against using it for sight-reading, although it remains a single product experiment rather than a general study.

Clefs, resistance and the social story

Standard notation deserves scrutiny around clefs. The same octave appears in different positions on treble, alto and bass clefs, which forces a performer who has learned one clef to learn the others as separate maps. Reverend Thomas Salmon proposed a family of clefs in 1672 that kept the same range across treble, mean and bass. Musicians ridiculed the proposal in later publications. Gardner Read’s account of the nineteenth century describes whole books and long press disputes devoted to defending or attacking notation reforms.

This resistance creates a real inertia problem. Notation sits inside instruments, lessons, publishing, theory and software, so a reform has to replace a network rather than a single page design. Tantacrul leaves open the possibility that useful improvements were lost to resistance. He also rejects the claim that notation itself is aristocratic.

The Muto Method turns that claim into a conspiracy about scores as encrypted information controlled by aristocrats and performers. Its three-line chromatic staff removes clefs and accidentals by placing the twelve pitches across an octave. Two imagined blue lines fill in the chromatic positions between the three visible lines. The design addresses a real visual issue, yet its historical explanation confuses unequal access to musical education with a property of the notation.

The Cross-Eyed Pianist makes a related point from music education in the United Kingdom. Cuts to state provision can make music lessons more available to wealthy families, while the notation remains a teachable system that supports independent learning and communication among musicians. Tantacrul’s distinction is useful: educational inequality concerns access to a skill, so changing the alphabet would leave the unequal access in place.

Tablature and instrument-specific access

Tablature is the most successful alternative in the video because it represents the instrument itself. Six guitar-tab lines represent the strings, and numbers tell the player which fret to press. The system works well for learning songs when the goal is to play a particular instrument. Tantacrul’s own experience supports this account. Guitar tab helped him learn songs as a beginner, then became a limit when he needed to recognise the notes and chords he was playing with other musicians.

Notation carries a different kind of information. It names the music rather than the finger position, so it transfers across instruments and supports sight-reading, arranging, conducting and theory. It also allows chunking. A musician can recognise the direction and shape of a passage without processing each note in sequence. Tab makes the eye inspect each number and string position, which gives it a practical strength for beginners and a practical limit for fast reading.

Guitar Hero makes the distinction sharper. The game tells the player exactly when to press each button. Notation and tab leave room for a performer to shape tempo, rhythm and expression. The game can teach coordination and make a song playable, yet the timing it supplies removes the interpretive work that the source treats as part of musical performance.

Piano tablature follows the physical keyboard. Klavarskribo, Esperanto for keyboard writing, places the keys on a vertical layout, uses black and white dots, and shows the hand through stem direction. Relative durations remain visible through length. Cornelis Pot introduced the system in 1931, after related proposals by Juan-Nepomuceno Adorno and W. Paternoster. By the 1980s, more than 20,000 publications used Klavarskribo, although Tantacrul says its use later declined.

The video moves through other keyboard layouts, including Tao, Hao staff sheets and a 1819 proposal by L. D. F. Dumouchel. Alex Crouch’s 2015 redesign and the Piano Vision augmented-reality app continue the same idea. The examples show that keyboard-shaped notation can be useful for a single instrument. They also show how quickly a design becomes a tutorial interface, a head-mounted display or a piece of piano-specific tablature rather than a common musical language.

Musitude, Dodeka and the beginner’s problem

Musitude presents the most extreme version of the disruptor argument. Its founder claims that only 3% of people can read music and play an instrument proficiently, while 90% of non-musicians want to do so. The presentation treats the instrument as a familiar interface and proposes QWERTY keyboard tablature as the missing layer.

Tantacrul tests the demonstration against a Beethoven sonata. The circles in Musitude’s comparison misstate a dotted duration, so the example plays the rhythm incorrectly. Its pitch names also abandon the A to G system, assign letters and digits to a keyboard range, and give the same pitch class several unrelated names across octaves. Collaboration would require a conversion system that serves the proposal rather than the music.

He also questions the claim that notation causes beginners to quit. New players struggle to make a guitar string ring, change chords, tune an instrument and produce a stable pitch on a violin or wind instrument. Those physical problems arrive before notation becomes the main barrier. Tantacrul reports this from his work with Ultimate Guitar and conversations with other music companies, so the observation remains practitioner evidence rather than a published retention study.

Dodeka begins from testimonials about notation’s difficulty and arrives at another chromatic staff. It uses four visible lines, several imagined lines and relative durations, while adding slanted angles for microtones. Tantacrul gives it credit for considering microtonality and for taking the problem more seriously than Musitude. The testimonials still come from the system’s founders, so they establish its rhetoric rather than independent evidence of the problem.

Accessibility is the part of the standard system that troubles Tantacrul most. Readers report visual phasing, difficulty separating lines from spaces, headaches, dyslexia-related crowding and confusion among tightly packed note combinations. Louis Braille created music Braille as well as the tactile alphabet, yet the video says that notation apps and screen readers support it poorly. Larger staves, note names, notehead changes and colour can help some readers. Colour can create a barrier for colour-blind readers, which means that a universal accessible standard may remain out of reach.

The video gives no statistics for these accessibility problems. Its evidence comes from people who have described their experiences to Tantacrul and from his friends and users. That limit matters because an adaptation that helps one reader can obstruct another.

Colour, numbers and the best candidate

Christian Huth’s Farbige Noten, published in 1888, assigns each of the twelve notes a colour and represents music in a grid. Huth also gives keys mixtures of colours, so C major becomes a ratio of blue, orange and yellow. Curves show duration, while numbers show octaves. The system looks striking in the surviving publication, yet Tantacrul doubts that a performer could sight-read several colours reliably. Gardner Read’s assessment, quoted in the video, calls the construction too far from standard practice for professional judgment and points to its disregard of ordinary performance.

Julian Carrillo’s 1895 system receives the most serious treatment. It assigns numbers to the twelve pitches and uses vertical position to indicate octave. The design removes accidentals and clefs, keeps pitch relationships consistent and extends naturally to quarter tones, decimals and fractions. A performer would have to learn numeric chords such as 2, 6, 9 for D major and 2, 5, 9 for D minor. The harder question concerns speed. Tantacrul cannot tell whether players can chunk those numbers as quickly as they recognise a chord in staff notation, and he calls for comparative data before judging the result.

The remaining proposals pass quickly. Hummingbird combines shaded balls, vertical pitch and extra marks for accidentals and duration. Stenographic systems reduce pitch and duration to shorthand symbols, with John Austin, Harry White and Alex M. Seymat supplying historical examples. Andrew Killick’s Global Notation uses cents, pitch variation, note events and time in a changing grid. Its present purpose is academic analysis of non-Western music, where standard notation can fail to describe textures such as those in Carnatic music. Jianpu replaces sol-fa syllables with numbers and uses dots for octave changes. Its popularity in China makes it worth studying as an early learning aid, while its limits become visible in more complex music.

A digital layer for many notations

The history does not end with the five-line staff. The twentieth century produced notation for microtonal, free-metered and aleatoric music, alongside graphic scores that combine standard signs with visual instructions. Karlheinz Stockhausen’s scores show how several reform ideas can enter a work without replacing the whole system. Some scores make ambiguity part of the performance and stand as visual works in their own right.

Digital tools were slow to support this range. Tantacrul thinks the transition from paper to software in the 1980s and 1990s interrupted some experimentation because early applications could represent only a narrow set of musical data. MuseScore now lets the same material switch among standard notation, guitar tab, coloured notation, solfege noteheads, Braille and, in development, Jianpu. The underlying data remains the same while the view changes.

This is the reform Tantacrul accepts. A fully digital format would retain musical data rather than flattening it into a PDF. Musicians could choose a chromatic staff, piano roll, Klavarskribo, Jianpu or another view for the task at hand. Digital theory books could receive new display standards without being rewritten from scratch. The cost of changing the view would fall because the shared musical data would remain stable.

Standard notation therefore survives as a living cultural system rather than a dead remnant. It crosses instruments and spoken languages, lets performers reach music from earlier centuries and gives readers a common way to work together. Tantacrul sees its flaws clearly. He also thinks learning it has rewarded the effort, and he expects notation to keep changing without disappearing.

Further reading / references

43 paragraphs3,347 words21,673 characters

related notes