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dfltryesterday at 8:42 PM3 repliesview on HN

The English language is messy as hell, and yet, here we are using it because it's a shared set of rules and symbols that pretty much everyone who wants to join in on this conversation already knows.

Same with staff notation: If you want to communicate music to other people, learning the slightly clunky but universally-known written language is generally the way to go.


Replies

nwatsonyesterday at 9:22 PM

The choir director at my church, Michael Dodds (UNCSA), covers the early development of musical notation, "From Modes to Keys in Early Modern Music Theory" [0]. Currently on sabbatical at Cambridge. Once in a while during rehearsal he will give an impromptu lecture on music history, always interesting.

[0] https://a.co/d/0bLcrlyE

laroditoday at 9:00 AM

No, English language is easy as sh... as piece of cake. A lot of it is marginalized French tbh, sorry, no offense, and the English in the USA is further simplified. You think tis difficult, because you never tried Russian, French, or Mandarin - then we discuss again. Had it not for the simplicity of English Language, it wouldn't be so omnipresent. So you are so wrong on this account.

And I really want to see you communicate wobbling bass or fast random notes. Well you can - in Studel.cc - but is impossible in this notation. Same for complex drum sections (as in dnb, yes), and I can give you fair amount of other examples where medieval notation is useless.

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odyssey7yesterday at 8:53 PM

> learning the slightly clunky but universally-known written language is generally the way to go

A certain Amazon Web Services comes to mind…