Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

I love the idea of trying to come up with a better way of notating music to make it more accessible. That's a great idea.

However, I'm skeptical that this is it. First, looking at the 2 notations of "Let it Be," we can see that the new notation does not convey the same data, or even a simplified version of it. It's a different version of it. I find that odd.

Second, I don't think learning music notation is very difficult. I learned to read treble and bass clef when I was 5 years old. It was much harder trying to make my fingers press the right keys at the right time than memorizing which circle on which line matched with which key or note.

Looking at this, I'm reminded of Laban notation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laban_Movement_Analysis) and Benesh Notation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benesh_Movement_Notation) for notating dance. Both are very complicated and essentially never used by the people who actually do the dancing. Furthermore, I'm told that Benesh, for example, allows a notator to add written (human-language) notes below the staff to convey additional information. In other words, they know it doesn't convey everything it's supposed to.

So what do dancers do? They learn from video. They watch the masters who went before them directly performing the movement. Frankly, I think it would be great to see something similar for music. Having a video of someone playing a keyboard from above, possibly with a graphical overlay showing the notes pressed would be way better (in my opinion). (Which isn't to say it's without issues - far more bandwidth, video codecs, playback hardware, etc.)



I have always wondered how dance/ballet is recorded, and I'm not surprised it comes down to video. But music is more limited data I think, an opinion supported by the fact that sheet music exists and sheet dance is still questionable.

There's a passage in a piano piece I'm having trouble with and I tried watching videos of pros on youtube to figure out how to play it. It was frustrating and almost useless. The video goes by too fast. Granted, I was looking for technical details, not notes, but I think notes would be almost as hard.

E.g. Can you tell what notes are being played in the video below?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8IHzqVKugE&t=35

Here's another fun one to try:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpXqdBKSSFo&t=4m51s


You can slow down youtube videos in the gear menu and it still can't be seen. I suppose you would need 60fps to see that.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: