Aligning notation, nomenclature, and keyboard layout for better music learning and memorization

[Guy Mathews]

Guy Mathews <guy.w....@gmail.com>	11:05 AM (2 hours ago)
to musicnotation

This is a new notation post for this group.  I saw John Keller's post about flashcards and it was too timely for me not to respond.

I have developed a notation that matches the layout of a quasi "janko" style keyboard that I have.

My notation matches this keyboard. It has 3 black lines and 3 red lines separating 6 white keys in each octave.  In this way it kind of matches "piano roll" representation used by various DAWs.

Here is the piece in original notation.

This notation is easy to play on my keyboard.  But, because I have also "rationalized" the note names using number-names instead of letters, things like interval determination and solfeggio are also easier (IMHO).  There are no sharps and flats.  Each note has an easily visual identity on the staff.  Because octaves are identical, transposition by octaves is elementary.   Transposition by "even" intervals is also fairly easy.  

Here is a key to explain the name correspondence with the numbers and keyboard layout

TradName.   MyName.     Position on keyboard

C.                  0                  white key between red and black

C# Db           1                   first black key in group of 3

D                   2                  

D# Eb           3                   middle black key in group of 3

E                  4

F                  5                    last black key in group of 3

F# Gb          6                    white key between black and red keys

G                 7                     first red key in group of 3

G# Ab          8

A                 9                      middle red key in group of 3

A# Bb         T. (ten)

B                E. (lev).            last red key in group of 3. 

Following up on John Keller's flashcard question.

I'm currently working on memorizing the jazz blues piece ModalMadnessBlues above, written by Brent Vasstra, a NYC online guitar teacher.

It is a fairly standard jazz blues with some tasty chord substitutions, going to a D-diminished chord after the IV chord and then doing a II/V iv/V V7  I7 turn around to get home.

To memorize this piece, I have typeset this into Lilypond and printed out the WholeTone version above, and treble clef version and then generated a Vocaloid voice singing the WT solfeggio along with some Anki flashcards to practice memorizing the solfeggio note song.  Each flashcard has one measure of the piece that accompanies a Vocaloid voice singing the note numbers above.  

lyrics:     "three" "eight"  "one" "leven"

Play the wav file attached below to hear Vocaloid singing these notes.

It is pretty easy to get these little tunes in your ear and the "lyrics" tell you what notes they are.  One of my outstanding questions is: if I do this enough will I start to develop "perfect pitch".  I'm just starting out so it is too soon to tell.

In general, my hypothesis is that learning gets easier if the mental modalities and representations of the "object to be learned" are aligned and that having more context, i.e. having multiple parallel representations of the same "object" increases the ease of memorizing the object.  My plan is to practice singing and playing this piece using the wholetone representations and solfeggio.  I'm also using flash cards which break this piece into one measure chunks to make it more accessible.

I use the open source flashcard program Anki to make my flash cards.  If you want to try it out, you can use the .APKG  Anki package below.  You will have to download and install the open source flashcard program Anki.

Cheers,

++GUy Mathews

[Douglas Keislar]

H Guy,

Thanks for letting us know about your keyboard and notation! 

Such keyboards have a long but little-known history (dating back at least to the mid-17th century), as summarized on Dominique Waller's site:

https://www.le-nouveau-clavier.fr/english/

Your specific keyboard with its coloring is very similar to the Howe-Way piano, and the notation is somewhat similar to the corresponding Howe-Way notation.

There is a picture of the Howe-Way piano on this page (search for "Roger Williams"):

http://www.balanced-keyboard.org/PeopleAndResources.aspx

and a picture of the notation system is here:

https://musicnotation.org/wiki/notation-systems/howe-way-music-notationby-hilbert-howe/

To accomplish the score rendition of your notation system, did you modify the Lilypond source code? Or did you happen to use Paul Morris's MNP-scripts.ly approach (https://musicnotation.org/wiki/software/lilypond/)?

Best,

Doug

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[Guy Mathews]

Hi Doug,

Thanks for the reply.

My keyboard is exactly based on a Howe-Way piano that my wife found on the Internet 30  years ago.  

One of Hilbert's children had inherited this piano and shipped it out to California and didn't know what to do with it and sold it on the usenet.

My piano was built by the Hobart Cable Co. from La Porte Indiana.

 My lilypond solution is very similar to Paul's.   I also use their lilypond function color-staff-lines.   

%{  
    \remove "Accidental_engraver"
    \remove "Key_engraver"

    staffLineLayoutFunction = #ly:pitch-semitones
    middleCPosition = #-7
    clefGlyph = #"clefs.C"
    clefPosition = #(+ -14 7)

  \override Staff.StaffSymbol.line-count = #24
  \override Staff.StaffSymbol.line-positions = #'( 22 20 18 16 14 12 10 8 6 4 2 0 -2 -4 -6 -8 -10 -12 -14 -16 -18 -20 -22 -24 )
  \override Staff.StaffSymbol.stencil = #( color-staff-lines #f #f #f red red red #f #f #f red red red #f #f #f red red red #f #f #f red red red )
%}

My goal in all this is to make music learning and playing easier.   Isn't this one of the goals of the notation project?

So far I'm the only person who has "taught" myself this particular notation and keyboard and although it works for me

I am curious how others find their notations.  

Thanks again,

++GUy

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[gguitarwilly]

Hi Guy,

Have you checked out existing chromatic notations? Yours might seem 'easy' but in fact there's a lot of redundant information and the notation takes up a lot of space.

My preferred notation is Clairnote (the original version with alternating black and white notes) but I also use my shorthand version which is very easy to write by hand: one wholetone scale is just black slashes, the other consists of white half circles which either are on top of a line or hanging from it. I find the extra visual information this gives useful.

See attachment for an example.

best, Willem

Op vrijdag 20 juni 2025 om 00:01:23 UTC+2 schreef guy.w....@gmail.com:

[Guy Mathews]

Hi Willem,

Thanks for your email and your pointer to Clairnote.  Clairnote is certainly more compact but it is not as intuitive (to me) to use to play this piano.  I see that Clairnote also has a way to represent the key signature and show when notes are outside of the current key.  My notation doesn't have this feature.  

My driving interest for exploring this notation is primarily how to make music easier to learn.  My hypothesis is that aligning the different representations we use to process music mentally will make music easier to learn.  I agree with your observation that my Whole Tone notation is not very compact but it is WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) which is certainly making learning to play pieces on this piano very intuitive for me.   I am a violist by training and only in the last few years have I started to learn the piano.  I don't have enough experience yet to know if this is an improvement.  I'm also trying out this notation on the viola.  It is strange and interesting to be relearning a notation on the viola.  It has opened me up to learning lots of novel fingering on the viola.

I also have re-named the notes.  I call them by numbers with C=0, C#=Db=1, D=2, etc.  One of my experiments is teaching myself to sight sing using these new names to see if this aids learning new pieces and sight-reading.  I believe like Kodaly that we should learn to sing first by ear and then translate these skills to other instruments like the viola.   This is not how I was taught and so I am finding myself going through a relearning process as I attempt this.  I'm not sure that I can fully retrain my ears and my brain at this point in my life but I'm willing to give it a try.

Thanks again for your suggestions.  I'm going to keep pursuing this notation as it aligns to some of these other questions of mine.  I will try to keep the musicnotation group posted with my findings.

Cheers,

++GUy

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[Waller Dominique]

Hi Guy, 

Two simple questions. Do you remember when (which year) you started to call A# = T and B = E ?

And, in doing so, were you influenced by what is called the Set Theory in music ? 

Thanks in advance. I'm collecting data on number notations. 

Dominique

envoyé : 13 juillet 2025 à 03:27
de : Guy Mathews <guy.w....@gmail.com>
à : musicn...@googlegroups.com
objet : Re: [MNP] Aligning notation, nomenclature, and keyboard layout for better music learning and memorization

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[Guy Mathews]

Hi Dominique,

Good questions.  I was not acquainted with Set Theory in music.   Thank you for bringing it to my attention.

I think I share a background in computers and mathematics similar to Miller Puckette and Milton Babbitt and Allen Forte and that has influenced my notation.

My choice of T & E as number names for the pitches Bb and B must go back to the 1990's when I first got my Howe-Way piano.  At the time
I borrowed some number stickers from my kids who were under 10 years old and added these to the first octave white keys.  Bb is labeled as "T".
The red keys are too narrow to hold a sticker.

Here is a picture.  

I recently had my piano tuned by Shawn Skylark and he wrote the conventional names of the notes in chalk above the keys.

Someone also told me that I also represent chords the same way that Milton Babbit  does. 

 I write a C Major triad as  0^43  ie.  Zero raised to the power of 43.   I typically use a superscript to represent  the "exponent", but I don't know how to type superscripts in this email editor.

 I read this as C=0 followed by a note 4 halfsteps above it and that followed by 3 half steps above that, making the three note chord  {0 4 7}. or C E G.

A D minor 7th chord would similarly be written as 2^343.  

I didn't know about Milton Babbit's work and was a little surprised by this coincidence but again figured that this must be attributed to a similar background in math and computers.

Cheers,

++Guy

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[Waller Dominique]

That's right. Thank you, Guy !

envoyé : 13 juillet 2025 à 17:50

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[Jason Maccoy]

Hi, if you are interested in a numbered approach to the notation.  Have a look at my Numbered Notes notation that uses numbers 1-12 for the note names and numbers 0-11 for the intervals.  Since people are familiar with numbers 1-12 like on a clock they seem to take to this idea immediately.  

Octave lines are used to the left or right to show octave degree below or above middle.

numberednotes.com

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[John Keller]

Hi Guy,

Thanks for your posts about the keyboard and your notation system. Do you have a name for them?

As a fellow violist, I am surprised you have renamed the notes with chromatic numbers. Viola fingering is diatonic! (unlike cello)

Also, if you do Kodaly type solfege, it is based on diatonic scales. Does singing up a major scale with 1 3 5 6 8 etc actually feel natural? Also how do you pronounce 0? And is 7 sung ’sev’?

Do you also have a regular piano? I am wondering if you first tried learning it with the traditional beginners methods?

I was surprised when seeing your Janko keyboard that the one obvious common thing connecting it to the normal keyboard - which is the groups of three black keys - are not what i expected them to be!. But if middle C is to be kept as a white key I guess that was not possible. So the first task is relearning the keys. Did you designate the notes and the colouring for the keyboard you had made?

Have you tried Klavarskribo notation on the normal piano (since that is the equivalent of your notation)? I tried it but the wide staves were a distinct drawback for me. My own Express Stave is a kind of compact Klavar.

My own main criticism of the uniform keyboard is the uniform feel. You will always have to look at the keys to know where you are, whereas the irregularity of 7/5 enables playing by feel alone, essential for advanced playing and sight reading.

Interested to hear your progress!

Cheers,

John Keller

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[Douglas Keislar]

Hi John,

Re: Your reply to Guy:

Did you designate the notes and the colouring for the keyboard you had made?

As I understand it, Guy just followed the design that had been created years ago by Hilbert Howe for his Howe-Way piano.

My own main criticism of the uniform keyboard is the uniform feel. You will always have to look at the keys to know where you are, whereas the irregularity of 7/5 enables playing by feel alone, essential for advanced playing and sight reading.

Yes. Some inventors of uniform keyboards have added texture, such as ridges, to some of the keys, to provide tactile identification. Of course, many instruments don't have any tactile differentiation, either, such as most stringed instruments. I suppose piano is a bit different in that one often has to make large leaps to other areas of the instrument, which is less common with stringed instruments. But I find (playing the traditional piano) that often those leaps have to be so fast that the irregular pattern isn't a help -- you have to know exactly where to land without looking and without feeling neighboring keys. Do you agree?

Best,

Doug

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[gguitarwilly]

Hi Guy,

Numbering notes seems like a smart thing to do; I've tried the same system you use, but not often enough to internalise it.

Are you familiar with Muto notation? It is very similar to yours https://muto-method.com/en/score.html 

I've attached an example.

best, Willem

Op zondag 13 juli 2025 om 03:27:44 UTC+2 schreef guy.w....@gmail.com:

[John Keller]

Hi Doug.

Regarding stride type jumping on piano having no time to feel keys before striking them. Yes I agree. (Sometimes!)

However in learning a piece, the slower practice needed gives the opportunity to land first, then play.

And in landing, if it doesnt feel correct, you can quickly adjust. Keep in mind you need to have fingers in among the black keys.

You then develop a strong subconscious security of where your hands are without looking. This cannot be developed with the uniform keyboard. 

With my students I sometimes ask them not to “hit” the keys, Play from the key surface unless you want a percussive sound.

With my own playing, even fast, I think i actually do land then play rather than attacking from a height.

If you see any of my YT performances, do you agree?

Cheers,

John

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