alt Hacker NewsI 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.
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I think about this any time a software engineer thinks they're helping Deaf people when they build some AI thing to see/speak finger spelling thinking they're interpreting ASL. Like just ask your customers what they want
> 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).
I feel like those are idiosyncrasies that feed into eachother i.e. you need to have 2 notations for same sound just because other decisions made it so there is no extra info passed other than in b vs #
So alternative notation could still make it clearer/"mathematic" but would essentialy need to include all of that, and for that as you said, you need people with wide experience about music and for them, they already are fine with standard notation so for them it wouldn't be an improvement because nicer learning curve doesn't matter once you learned it.
Classical keyboard layout is kinda similiar in opposite way here; beginner can just slap some white keys and get something musical and they can learn from there, while various chromatic keyboard layouts might have some nice benefits (chords being "same shape" regardless of where you play them), it is harder to start on it.
I give a crap about it. It looks like tablature for an isomorphic keyboard, which seems kind of useful for learning, assuming you have like a Lumatone or a Janko Piano keyboard. There's similar keyboard challenges for instruments like Bandoneon that benefit from learning apps like, like https://bandoneon.app/. For my own current work, I've switched from Classic to Modern Notation in Dorico because there are so many alterations in jazz voicings with a constant stream of key changes that it just seems easier to wipe the key signature clean and alter everything. Also, I've heard that's what they do in movie scores where it's important to get things right in as few takes as possible. Blargh, now I'm rambling. I'll allow it.
>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.
True, but it's not a fatal flaw of the notation, because you can annotate it with written chord names above the notes. This is common in guitar tabs (which are almost isomorphic in standard tuning, and fully isomorphic in regular tunings).
You also unintentionally made a very compelling argument against vibecoding and treating software as a means to an end!
yes but perhaps we should improve society somewhat
I actually was typing up a similar response -- as a very basic example, if I'm playing and I see a ii-V coming up, that's communicating information about what scale I'm likely going to be choosing from to inform my playing. By just giving me tuples of data disconnected from key centers I'm losing all the harmonic information about a tune, which honestly is the most important information for me as a piano player.
The notation isn't just showing me what buttons to press and when -- that's almost the least important part of the notation. What it is showing me is how everything is moving in a tune, which allows me to make decisions inside of it, and I'm not sure a base-12 notation like this is even capable of expressing that.
It's totally understandable for a beginner to want to make something like this though, because that context of harmonic analysis doesn't really come into play until years later.