Time Values in Alternative Notation

[lettersquash]

What do you think is a good way to notate time values? I see several ANs use the bulk of TN's time value symbolism, perhaps adjusted where closed and open heads are used for pitch, etc.

Another method is the graphical one where the extent of the note itself (Dodeka) or a shaded area (WYSIWYP) show the duration of a tone against a proportional time dimension of the staff.

If you have opted for one or other, why? What do you see as the advantages and disadvantages of either system? Are there others that are noteworthy?

Cheers

¬~

[lettersquash]

I forgot to mention Mark Gould's design, by the way.

[Musical Supersystem]

Hi John,

I think it all depends on what your goals are, TN duration figues produce very compact scores on the time axis but have a lot of inconveniences, they have also proven to be good on the long run for professionals.

It seems there is not a perfect solution that is better in every comparison that we could make, so we are forced to take sides.

Alternative notations are usually presented from the all-in-one-for-everything point of view, as if improving TN inconveniences represented the same when playing one-note-at-a-time instruments and when playing the piano, but they do not, and the huge lot of people that only play monophonic instruments should be fine with just a little cosmetic to TN.

I think it has been the piano, or piano scores that have triggered most of the existing proposals. That instrument is really something.

From that point of view I decided to approach the optimized solution for the piano.

Then we may need to be told What notes to play, How to play them, When to play them and How long to play them, for me in that order of importance and we might talk about it later.

Regarding your question about time values, only the last two, "when and how long" have to do with it.

On the other side we have limitations about the possibility of obeying to said indications if provided as they really happen, e.g. piano roll can notate that information for each note in a very uncluttered way but we are only humans.

Notating when and how long for humans then should be an approximation or sometimes even a hint of reality, what we choose to do will determine if we are going to depend more on our eyes and training or on our ears, playback and memory.

YY.

 

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[Musical Supersystem]

In this excerpt I show, I think a novel variation for humans, using the PianoTabs, where the extension for how long for the entire chord is one line only, instead of extending every note as other notations do, these lines as well as the dots have overloaded meaning.

[Mark Gould]

Rhythm in some ways is more complex than pitch notation. Does it need to notate 'exactly' what is required or does it notate realtively?

Consider the performance of a waltz by Chopin, or swing in Jazz. Or, if you think about it, how to notate the rhythm of 'America' from West Side Story, derived from Huapango rhythms, which is actually quite a difficult thing to do for all it's apparent simplicity.

On the one hand you have time flowing, but also tempo 'beats', which may be constant, speeding up or slowing. Rhythms indicate duration but also division, and not easy to reconcile.

Generally music is written with a 'tempo' of regularly occurring beats in the 'temporal background', even if like Ferneyhough, you write rhythmic complexities that are probably impossible to play accurately.

Then there are additive rhythms, like Hindu and Tibetan forms, and additionally free rhythms, notated in a conceptual 'piano roll' manner.

I tried to encompass them in my own notation for rhythm, which still has faults and awkwardnesses, with the minimum possible number of symbols. I also tried to encompass the problem of notation in terms of 'counting', showing how the beat or sub beat is divided, or how multiple beats could be counted, in such a way that simple melodies would require only minimal symbols. 

Mark

[John Keller]

I think traditional rhythmic notation is fine. Except for one thing. If the note head has pitch information only and we cannot use the solid/hollow property for duration, all rhythmic information has to be in stems and beams.

Adding a beam halves the duration; adding a stem could indicate double the duration.

Applying this to multi-note chords is straight forward.

The problem is that the present system of indicating 1.5 times the duration by a dot to the right of the note head means that every note head in a multi-note chord has to be dotted. This is inconsistent with the rest of the system.

Rhythmic notation doesn’t have to be able to indicate every conceivable rhythm any more than pitch indications need to be able to represent any conceivable pitch. I can happily keep music notation for the generally accepted system.

Cheers,

John Keller

 

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[Mark Gould]

If we used the multi stem approach, we would end up with one for quarters, two for half notes and three for whole notes. The 'add one half again' dot would still be useable, as would the double dot. I think others have tried to incorporate dots on the stem (i can't recall how, but I've seen ideas like a little circle on the end of the stem for something similar). Putting the dot on the notehead comes from older notational practice. I have seen scores of Beethoven where the dot is used across the barline with the dot placed in the following bar. 

Symbolically traditional rhythmic notation is a type of binary halving notation, like older weights systems with 2 units 1 unit, 1/2, 1/4 etc, from which any weight can be made up (to a certain accuracy).  Others have argued this type of notation doesn't cater for 1/3 or other non base 2 divisions.

I only developed my notation as a response to issues I have with the 'proportional' system that was devised for Equiton originally, mostly as an experiment, and using ideas from older chant notations of rhythm. Putting an extra stem or extra line on the notehead would mean traditional rhythmic notation could be used with Equiton, too, which I am fine with. 

Mark

.

[lettersquash]

Thanks for these replies so far, guys, which raise some good points. I think YY makes a good point about the piano versus monophonic instruments, and I would couch all my comments in the understanding that notation systems will probably diversify enormously from here on in for different uses, and all the better for it.

Another general point I want to make is that it's really difficult for us to see difficulties once we've overcome them. John, I'm surprised you see so few problems with TN rhythm notation, and wonder if that is partly due to your familiarity with it. Perhaps not. For you to say.

One of the difficulties I find (as a returner to reading music after decades) is tied notes. It seems utterly insane to me that the additional note(s) look just the same as the first, despite doing nothing except extending the duration. Furthermore, the tie itself, the arc, is not dissimilar to the slur symbol, causing me to check if the following note is the same pitch before I know which it is!  Some tweaks to this (like William Tapley's Gabriel notation, which shows the tied note in grey) are the least we can do, it seems to me. A graphic bar depicting duration (as in Stuart Byrom's WYSIWYP) seems superior by far, although it may involve some slight issues of its own.

Another thing that I find endlessly confusing is where a phrase includes different numbers of beams, because some notes will have two beams (say) on one side and one on the other, and it takes another moment of mental processing to remember that the larger number wins and the note is (in this case) a sixteenth not an eighth. Furthermore, these kinds of constructions may be combined with dotted values or ties or god knows what else, and split or joined according to beats or phrasing. The general point is that this form of rhythm notation involves quite a lot of cognitive work, similar to adding and multiplying, dividing and subtracting, according to a complex array of symbols in myriad combinations.

In contrast, following mentally at a steady pace along a dimension of the score involves almost no such mathematical computation, although I admit it is a different skill and not entirely trivial. However, remembering that new notations will be taken up mostly by new users, many of them young people, I think we'll see increasing preference for the graphic. None of them have spent years practising doing all the dots-and-beams-and-ties maths and become familiar with it, and they are more likely to be used to following along a time dimension in some way, since it features in many kinds of application, including graphic computer games and, of course, DAW displays, which often illustrate the fundamental skill that must be internalized, the moving "now" line crossing the note graphics.

Since such scores usually indicate beats (see WYSIWYP again) and even sub-beats (as in Klavarskribo where required), there is a fallback position for complex rhythmic structures of noting how many beats and sub-beats a duration line indicates and doing a bit of the old mathematical processing.

Triplets can be shown, of course, in the same way three beats in a bar are shown, with sub-beat divisions ('tics' or dotted lines, etc.), with the note's start and end positioned on those, or, for occasional triplets where the usual sub-division is binary, we can revert to something closer to the traditional. However, spacing out polyrhythm indicators, where they start and end, is much more revealing of how they relate to each other than with traditional dots and brackets.

Again, I'd encourage all who think TN time notation is good enough to consider how much time they've spent gazing at it, learning it, and whether they might be comparing this to a brief scan of a graphic system, which will strike them as alien and relatively incomprehensible.

John, with regard to dotting chords, this reveals another knotty set of problems. There are many occasions when notes of a chord have different values (i.e. they begin together but some are held longer than others). Now, I'm no expert on TN, as I've made clear, but it seems to me this situation automatically requires splitting the chord into different "voices" or "parts" as far as the mathematical logic is concerned. This is due to what I've seen described as the "tyranny of the bar".

All the note values in a part, along with their rest values, must add up to the time signature in each and every bar, but - another really confusing thing - different parts are routinely fitted on the same staff, and each follows the same rule, so if there are two parts in a 4 4 bar, the total of notes and rests will be eight quarter notes.

Where parts are literally few and far between, it isn't too confusing, but where there are a number of them, they get close or - god help us - cross over each other or from one staff to another, the score must try to still keep track of all the totals, squeezing rests in where it may and joining parts with stems in different directions, again often requiring quite a bit of study of a score to figure out which is which.

Even in a two-part melody, one hand playing each part, it is sometimes unclear which hand plays some of the notes. I recently asked on pianostreet forum for help on this, and even the experts there ended up saying sometimes it's best just to work out what works for you (which is fine pragmatically, but doesn't value, or facilitate, a composer's intention).

All this follows from the arbitrary tyranny of the bar and part division. A workaround, I suppose, might be to dispense only with that rule, but I think it would make the working out of the timing virtually impossible!

There may be good reasons to retain the different voices in some way, or there may not, but practically it works fine to just give each note its due, it's duration line or (as in Klavarskribo, it's continuation dots or end signs). No problem arises from different notes being held for different timings, and I can't really think of any other problems that arise.

Massive amounts of mental computation are involved in all these sorts of quirks of TN notation, which are perhaps no problem for the old hand, but awful for progressing from beginner to accomplished sight reader.

A few other issues are described here: http://musicnotation.org/wiki/rhythm-notation/concerns-traditional-rhythm-notation/

lettersquash

[lettersquash]

P.S. I'm still not sure I'm right about the greater number of beams "winning"! I generally have to listen to a piece of music played, and then the time duration is just a bit of a reminder.

[Waller Dominique]

> Rhythmic notation doesn’t have to be able to indicate every conceivable rhythm any more than pitch indications need to be able to represent any conceivable pitch. I can happily keep music notation for the generally accepted system.

Very well said, John, and I fully agree. And for a new time notation, indicating all what the traditional rhythm notation already allows to notate would be enough.

Dominique 

envoyé : 20 juin 2021 à 03:20
de : John Keller <jko...@bigpond.net.au>
à : "musicn...@googlegroups.com" <musicn...@googlegroups.com>
objet : Re: [MNP] Time Values in Alternative Notation

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[Waller Dominique]

P.S. I mean to say I agree with John's first sentence, not the second one, sorry. Hence my comment.

envoyé : 20 juin 2021 à 15:06
de : Waller Dominique <d.wa...@orange.fr>
à : John Keller <jko...@bigpond.net.au>, musicn...@googlegroups.com

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[John Keller]

Dominique, Mark, John et al,

I see that there are some more problems with the traditional rhythm system.

One is Ties.

My solution would be for tied ‘notes’ to have no head, just the stem and the slur. This would differentiate them from slurred notes, and duration information is in the stem (and beams).

Yes, Mark’s idea for crotchets to have one stem l , minims 2 ll , and semibreves 3 lll , was what I was thinking.

For ‘dotted’ values, a quarter-stem at the beam end.  ll’ = 3 . 

(Would need a different name than ‘dotted note’)

Lettersquash’s query about notes with different number of beams connected on each side - yes the shortest value ‘wins'. 

But the thing about beaming is, the grouping should show the rhythmic divisions, not the phrasing. 

It should never be necessary to do maths of adding up note values.

Classical compositions time signatures could be revised to make the counting simpler. I think I illustrated Beethoven Pathetique sonata years ago. Here is an upgrade. This was originally all one bar.

[Waller Dominique]

> My solution would be for tied ‘notes’ to have no head, just the stem and the slur. This would differentiate them from slurred notes, and duration information is in the stem (and beams).

That's exactly what I 've done for my own time notation. Dominique

envoyé : 21 juin 2021 à 11:10

de : John Keller <jko...@bigpond.net.au>
à : "musicn...@googlegroups.com" <musicn...@googlegroups.com>
objet : Re: [MNP] Time Values in Alternative Notation

 

 

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The left hand rests help show the beats. Beams show beat divisions clearly. Ties obvious. 

Augmentation ‘dot’ at beam end (2nd-last note) could be a bit longer but confined by Finale characters..

How clear and compact is the chromatic scale without accidentals!

John Keller

Express Stave

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[J R Freestone]

John Keller et al, ...

On 21/06/2021 10:10, John Keller wrote:

Dominique, Mark, John et al,

I see that there are some more problems with the traditional rhythm system.

One is Ties.

My solution would be for tied ‘notes’ to have no head, just the stem and the slur. This would differentiate them from slurred notes, and duration information is in the stem (and beams).

That seems to me to fix part of the problem - of the additional note(s) looking the same. It still seems illogical to me, and still looks too similar to a slur.

Yes, Mark’s idea for crotchets to have one stem l , minims 2 ll , and semibreves 3 lll , was what I was thinking.

For ‘dotted’ values, a quarter-stem at the beam end.  ll’ = 3 . 

(Would need a different name than ‘dotted note’)

Lettersquash’s query about notes with different number of beams connected on each side - yes the shortest value ‘wins'.

Thanks, I thought I had it right. My point is that this takes (me) another bit of mental processing, when there are various numbers of beams joined in a set.

But the thing about beaming is, the grouping should show the rhythmic divisions, not the phrasing.

Thanks for clearing that up, too. So each 'set' of beam-connected notes is within one beat as per the time signature. Again, this rule is one of thumb only and these sets get broken by ties, dots, etc., and all of those complications are things the player has to learn over an extended period of time.

It should never be necessary to do maths of adding up note values.

I defy you to do it without. I don't mean you have to get out a calculator or a paper and pen and add numbers up. I mean that the way the time notation works is in fractions, mostly binary, so each sign (notehead shape, beam, stem number, dot or whatever) indicates an implicit numerical fraction, a value, and these are computed by the player (and even more so by the composer) to "add up" to beats and bar contents, including the addition of similarly fractional rest signs.

While some of this same mathematical reasoning, dividing and adding, may be used in a proportional notation system at times, it is also possible, most of the time, to compare the positions of items on the score while following it (and counting the beats). For example, with lines showing the duration of notes, one can see that a note's duration line ends just as another begins, or that a sequence of notes have duration lines that are the same length as the empty space in between them, and another continues for three of those divisions, etc. - judgements made by eye and a sort of kinesthetic mapping rather than "maths".

Classical compositions time signatures could be revised to make the counting simpler. I think I illustrated Beethoven Pathetique sonata years ago. Here is an upgrade. This was originally all one bar.

With respect, and a reminder of my "horses for courses" principle, I can hardly imagine a better illustration of the monumental task of parsing such a script!  I can hardly begin to make sense of the beamed notes, how to actually play them, and if I asked you to describe how they work, I can't imagine how you're going to do it without some maths. Part of this will certainly be my inexperience with such levels of division in the music I've played, of course.

How, for example, are the notes timed in the second bar that are all joined by beams (the ones without the triplets)? Are they all the same duration? I guess so, and the gaps between the four, or three, beams, are merely to help the division of the beat into half, then quarters. Applying the rule, it is true that all of them have at one side or another four beams, so yes, it makes sense.

I admit this is something I hadn't got to grips with before (if I've seen it), and I have been confused by the different iconography of those beams! But I'm not sure if this is part of your new adjusted version, and/or a style of notation used in TN (since I have several examples where no such nested divisions are made: a run of 16 semi-hemi-demi-semiquavers (or whatever) are just joined by five beams right across the lot).

It also helps if I apply this to the first set in the first bar where presumably the last two triplets make up half the beat, and the first two beamed notes make up the other half, along with the silent headless stem tied to the other full beat note! If this isn't some kind of maths, I don't know what is.

I also confess I am somewhat troubled by the thought of how I would notate this with proportional duration lines, or rather, how the reading of it would compare - actually notating it is trivial enough. I should give it a try. A general point is that complex rhythm isn't easy to communicate by any means (other than immitation - if I could hear this, I could play the rhythm with little problem, I feel sure).

I much appreciate having a discussion about this. If nothing else, this has raised a question about the limits (in terms of small divisions) of proportional time notation, which may have to be complemented by some other technique in extreme circumstances. I am, of course, assuming that a piece doesn't retain the same proportional notation throughout - bars can be compressed or expanded to accommodate fewer or more notes, and even beats can, as long as their relation to the rest is clear.

Many thanks,
lettersquash (if everyone calls me that, or LS, it will avoid confusion, by the way)

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The left hand rests help show the beats. Beams show beat divisions clearly. Ties obvious. 

Augmentation ‘dot’ at beam end (2nd-last note) could be a bit longer but confined by Finale characters..

How clear and compact is the chromatic scale without accidentals!

John Keller

Express Stave

On 21 Jun 2021, at 2:23 am, Waller Dominique <d.wa...@orange.fr> wrote:

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[Musical Supersystem]

On Mon, Jun 21, 2021 at 8:31 AM J R Freestone <j.r.fr...@gmail.com> wrote:

It should never be necessary to do maths of adding up note values.

I defy you to do it without. I don't mean you have to get out a calculator or a paper and pen and add numbers up. I mean that the way the time notation works is in fractions, mostly binary, so each sign (notehead shape, beam, stem number, dot or whatever) indicates an implicit numerical fraction, a value, and these are computed by the player (and even more so by the composer) to "add up" to beats and bar contents, including the addition of similarly fractional rest signs.

While some of this same mathematical reasoning, dividing and adding, may be used in a proportional notation system at times, it is also possible, most of the time, to compare the positions of items on the score while following it (and counting the beats). For example, with lines showing the duration of notes, one can see that a note's duration line ends just as another begins, or that a sequence of notes have duration lines that are the same length as the empty space in between them, and another continues for three of those divisions, etc. - judgements made by eye and a sort of kinesthetic mapping rather than "maths".

This conversation reminds me of my original project which was about humans commanding computers to play music, I used to think of it as a high-level language for music but it was actually a hybrid of notation and features of computer languages.

- It had a specific type of variable-proportional notation by beat, where if there were many notes, they could be accommodated and if few notes we could save space.

-  The proportional notation separated the onset of the notes and the duration of the notes, which is what most complicates TN rhythms or time notation, but TN works for humans because we are good at "assuming". The duration was notated by individual length of the notes.

- Another feature was that the sequential notation of onsets had two nested levels, (like a routine and a subroutine) it may sound complicated but it is a simple and extremely powerful method for rhythm notation. 

A special feature was that the beats ended with a special symbol like a wildcard e.g. * that represented any reminding value til the beginning of the next beat, in that way I could make any rhythm combination without having to calculate values like TN.

In the future I could still apply a variation of that system but things have evolved into another direction so I am not sure if that will be necessary.

Enrique.

[J R Freestone]

On 21/06/2021 15:32, Musical Supersystem wrote:

This conversation reminds me of my original project which was about humans commanding computers to play music, I used to think of it as a high-level language for music but it was actually a hybrid of notation and features of computer languages.

That sounds intruiging.

- It had a specific type of variable-proportional notation by beat, where if there were many notes, they could be accommodated and if few notes we could save space.

-  The proportional notation separated the onset of the notes and the duration of the notes, which is what most complicates TN rhythms or time notation,

Yes, I'm working on such a system myself. I haven't yet figured out how to make it variable yet, but that's not because it is difficult in itself, it's difficult to use in combination with calculation of how many bars to put on a row, page breaks and all the other stuff!

but TN works for humans because we are good at "assuming".

I'm not sure what you mean by that. If you mean we tend to guess what a sign means, and often it works out ok, this is problematic, or at best sub-optimal. But it is true for most musicians. We do this in relation to reading the pitch, often judging an interval from the score or by guessing where the music progresses next. I used to do this most of the time until I memorised a piece, rather than relying on reading accurately. But we should avoid notation signs that are vague, hoping the player will interpret them as we wanted, except at the avant-garde end of the compositional spectrum. I recently read a paper by a self-styled composer who apparently paints watercolour pictures on manuscript paper and calls it "music". After all the pseudo-intellectual guff, I guess the players just look at it and make shit up. https://direct.mit.edu/leon/article/33/3/215/43870/Color-Music-Visual-Color-Notation-for-Musical  (follow the pdf link for the full belly laughs)

The duration was notated by individual length of the notes.

- Another feature was that the sequential notation of onsets had two nested levels, (like a routine and a subroutine) it may sound complicated but it is a simple and extremely powerful method for rhythm notation.

Maybe I need to pick your brains about that!

A special feature was that the beats ended with a special symbol like a wildcard e.g. * that represented any reminding value til the beginning of the next beat, in that way I could make any rhythm combination without having to calculate values like TN.

I am giving each note a specific position in the bar where it starts (and, of course, keeping track of the bars!), and then the duration can span any number of bars, rows, pages, if necessary, according to its duration variable. Since I've rejected the tyranny of the bar, my durations don't have to add up to the time signature and there are no ties. I see few, if any, problems arising from this approach.

In the future I could still apply a variation of that system but things have evolved into another direction so I am not sure if that will be necessary.

Yes, it's very interesting. I see you're still using a line indicating durations, although one per chord.

Cheers
LS

[Musical Supersystem]

On Mon, Jun 21, 2021 at 11:47 AM J R Freestone <j.r.fr...@gmail.com> wrote:

but TN works for humans because we are good at "assuming".

I'm not sure what you mean by that. 

The issue is that rhythm is not defined by the duration of the notes, fix duration instruments (e.g. percussion) highlight the rhythm of music, which is rather defined by the onset of the notes. 

A real rhythm notation should instead notate or make reference directly to the onset of the notes, where rhythm figures exist.

Consequentially a 'duration figure' is not a 'rhythm figure' but we can assume it is, we have been doing it for centuries because if the assumption works (like octave equivalence) we do not care if it is a fact or an assumption.

But we have been penalized for that assumption because the ability of computers to assume is zero, or we have not found the way to make them assume as we do, also because of that assumption complex scores are cluttered with other indications.

We can make computers produce piano roll scores so easily and uncluttered because there are no assumptions, the onset and duration of notes is separate and well defined.

At the time of my original project I did not know about the piano roll notation, but I imagined that representing musical notes with lines or traces and having separate rhythm lines was better for me to command computers to play music.

Enrique.

 

we tend to guess what a sign means, and often it works out ok, this is problematic, or at best sub-optimal. But it is true for most musicians. We do this in relation to reading the pitch, often judging an interval from the score or by guessing where the music progresses next. I used to do this most of the time until I memorised a piece, rather than relying on reading accurately. But we should avoid notation signs that are vague, hoping the player will interpret them as we wanted, except at the avant-garde end of the compositional spectrum. I recently read a paper by a self-styled composer who apparently paints watercolour pictures on manuscript paper and calls it "music". After all the pseudo-intellectual guff, I guess the players just look at it and make shit up. https://direct.mit.edu/leon/article/33/3/215/43870/Color-Music-Visual-Color-Notation-for-Musical  (follow the pdf link for the full belly laughs)

The duration was notated by individual length of the notes.

- Another feature was that the sequential notation of onsets had two nested levels, (like a routine and a subroutine) it may sound complicated but it is a simple and extremely powerful method for rhythm notation.

Maybe I need to pick your brains about that!

A special feature was that the beats ended with a special symbol like a wildcard e.g. * that represented any reminding value til the beginning of the next beat, in that way I could make any rhythm combination without having to calculate values like TN.

I am giving each note a specific position in the bar where it starts (and, of course, keeping track of the bars!), and then the duration can span any number of bars, rows, pages, if necessary, according to its duration variable. Since I've rejected the tyranny of the bar, my durations don't have to add up to the time signature and there are no ties. I see few, if any, problems arising from this approach.

In the future I could still apply a variation of that system but things have evolved into another direction so I am not sure if that will be necessary.

Yes, it's very interesting. I see you're still using a line indicating durations, although one per chord.

Cheers
LS

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[John Keller]

Hi LS,

The tie to a headless stem cannot possibly be mistaken for a slur, in that you would have to make up a note to slur it to!

You don’t have to count the number of beams really. Just remember that a single beam divides the beat into two halves (quavers), and two beams divides it into 4 quarters (“se-mi-qua-vers”).

This is my reworking of the TN rhythmic notation. You can see the beat grouping at a glance and if you can mentally think 4 pulses per beat, you can see how the faster notes fit into those 4 semiquaver pulses.

Here is my excerpt again, this time with the ‘classic’ ES note-head font.

[drtec...@gmail.com]

QUOTE: But the thing about beaming is, the grouping should show the rhythmic divisions, not the phrasing. 

 

My experience is that the "beat" tends to be felt/sensed as occurring on the sustained note.

In many if not most cases, a short note following a long note it felt as an "anacrusis" or "pick-up" to the following note

rather than as an extension of the long note's phrase.

So the dotted convention, especially with beams such as a dotted eighth followed by a sixteenth, though simplifying timing arithmetic,
in my opinion, violates the "rhythm".

That is to say, I "hear"  DAH   di-DAH    di-DAH ..., not DAH-di  DAH-di   DAH ...

 

Joe Austin

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[drtec...@gmail.com]

> My solution would be for tied ‘notes’ to have no head, just the stem and the slur. This would differentiate them from slurred notes, and duration information is in the stem (and beams).

Dominique, I've tried something like that in Finale.

 

1st line--all noteheads represent the same duration; use slurs to extend "duration" of each note.
2nd line shows a note only for "note initiation time"; note continues until the next note in the voice

See Absolute Timing Notation — Note On Only | DrTechDaddy.com Blog

Timing-Examples1x-TieDuration-NoteOn.jpg (465×223) (drtechdaddy.com)

 

I also had an example with stems-only instead of rests. I can't find the graphic at the moment, but as I recall it was do-able in Finale.

I'm not sure about Lilypond.

In either case we need a reliable notation or convention for "note off". 
When using stem-only for "continue", rests work for note-off if all notes in the voice end at the same time,

which is a reasonable assumption in many cases.

With many polyphonic voices, of course one could use separate staves for each.

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[Waller Dominique]

Hi Joe,

What I've done ressembles what you have in your second system, when you tie notes to rests, with that difference that in my system the signs for rests are the same than for duration, like the example you can't find. Take a look at this excerpt from a piano tablature (3 beats by measure).

envoyé : 22 juin 2021 à 18:09
de : drtec...@gmail.com
à : musicn...@googlegroups.com
objet : RE: [MNP] Time Values in Alternative Notation

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/musicnotation/014401d76781%2405ed7850%2411c868f0%24%40gmail.com.

[tinma...@gmail.com]

LS,

We could classify notations into two broad types: absolute and relative.

In "absolute", we specify an exact position of every point; in "relative", we specify a distance or interval from a previous point.

For timing, we specify the relative position to the "next" point.

 

An let's clarify another situation:  We speak of "duration" of a note, but there are really two "durations" of concern.

One is how long to hold the note. But for purposes of rhythm, we are really concerned with the delay until the next note--the "inter-onset time".

For percussion instruments and certain playing styles such as staccato, the duration of the sound and the interval between notes are different.

Traditional "note duration" is really inter-onset time; the actual duration can be modified with staccato, tenuto, legato,  etc. Then there's fermata!

 

So, In traditional notation, pitch is notated "absolute" and timing is notated "relative".

But there is no logical reason we couldn't do it the other way around.

I've seen proposals for notating chord by a root note (absolute pitch)  but  intervals (relative pitch) for the other notes in the chord.

Similarly, we could notate the strike-time for a note as an absolute position within a bar or line on some timing grid,
just as we notate pitch as an absolute position on a pitch-staff.

 

It seems to me that you are proposing something like that, and I for one think that is a more "musical" way of representing timing.

I have been struggling to represent rhythm in a manner similar to the way we represent scansion of poetry, with "feet".

In general, I have been thinking about "higher-level" components, analogous to syllables, words, phrases, rather than just "letters",

and how notation could at least expose them if not directly represent them.

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[drtec...@gmail.com]

Dominique,

Yes, we seem to be doing similar things.

 

As I recall, I actually repeated the stems for each count, as in line one of my example, rather than using various numbers of beams.

Thus I would use a succession of stems "tied" with a beam to "count" a longer duration tone, instead of using a variety of beam or stem counts within a syllable.

Ideally, I would like to use beams to connect the notes in a "foot" or rhythmic "word", such as an iamb. 

But then I notice that the syllables do not always start on a "beat" or on an even division of the measure.

This is often true in 6/8 marches, triple-time in general, and in jazz.

Then, for  short-long patterns, the beam extends beyond the last notehead, like this:   **--

If I use beams for "words", then they do not divide time in the conventional way, and may even span bars.

So I would add a time gird, or hierarchies of bar lines, to represent time, and use beams to connect feet, so both metrics would be shown.

 

So the result might be:

* a hierarchy of bar lines indicating the measures and count within a measures.

* a note-head for each note onset, positioned to the correct measure and count within the line and bar

* a "beam" spanning each "foot", connecting the notes in that foot (e.g. with stems)                                     
               and serving as a "continuation" mark for the "duration" (inter-onset-time) of the note.

* a "rest" symbol indicating the onset of a period of silence in a part.

* one might also  include some kind of "rests" within a foot to represent staccato, etc.

* I would allow "word-beams" to span bar lines, and I would allow lines to break within bars, at natural phrase breaks.

 

This begins to expose the fact that "polyphony"  applies to timing as well as pitch sequences:

the "drummer" marches to a different "beat", in terms of higher-level structure, than the singer;

the "ideal"  line breaks for the drummer don't match the ideal breaks for the singer.

Or for piano, "the left hand doesn't care what the right hand is doing."

 

 

From: musicn...@googlegroups.com <musicn...@googlegroups.com> On Behalf Of Waller Dominique
Sent: Tuesday, June 22, 2021 12:33 PM
To: musicn...@googlegroups.com
Subject: RE: [MNP] Time Values in Alternative Notation

 

 

Hi Joe,

What I've done ressembles what you have in your second system, when you tie notes to rests, with that difference that in my system the signs for rests are the same than for duration, like the example you can't find. Take a look at this excerpt from a piano tablature (3 beats by measure).

 

envoyé : 22 juin 2021 à 18:09
de : drtec...@gmail.com
à : musicn...@googlegroups.com
objet : RE: [MNP] Time Values in Alternative Notation

 

> My solution would be for tied ‘notes’ to have no head, just the stem and the slur. This would differentiate them from slurred notes, and duration information is in the stem (and beams).

Dominique, I've tried something like that in Finale.

 

1st line--all noteheads represent the same duration; use slurs to extend "duration" of each note.

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[J R Freestone]

Hi JK...

On 22/06/2021 15:45, John Keller wrote:
> Hi LS,
>
> The tie to a headless stem cannot possibly be mistaken for a slur, in
> that you would have to make up a note to slur it to!

Quite right. I was referring to TN ties.

>
> You don’t have to count the number of beams really. Just remember that
> a single beam divides the beat into two halves (quavers), and two
> beams divides it into 4 quarters (“se-mi-qua-vers”).

Yes, I know how the divisions and beams work, and it's generally not a
problem where a whole beat is divided, it's when that gets broken up
with rests, dots, ties, and different levels of divisions, leaving
partial beams hanging, single notes with flags, and various values of
rest signs also needing remembering and processing.

>
> This is my reworking of the TN rhythmic notation. You can see the beat
> grouping at a glance and if you can mentally think 4 pulses per beat,
> you can see how the faster notes fit into those 4 semiquaver pulses.

Yes, I think that's quite a good method where the whole beat is divided
with one type, as you can see the logic of the divisions laid bare. It
doesn't quite fix all the other problems, to my mind.

>
> Here is my excerpt again, this time with the ‘classic’ ES note-head font.

I prefer the other one. In these, the different notehead shapes are
difficult to discern.

Cheers,
¬~ LS

[J R Freestone]

Hi tinman,

On 22/06/2021 17:43, tinma...@gmail.com wrote:

LS,

We could classify notations into two broad types: absolute and relative.

In "absolute", we specify an exact position of every point; in "relative", we specify a distance or interval from a previous point.

For timing, we specify the relative position to the "next" point.

Hmmm. I suppose. I'm not sure the distinction is particularly useful.

An let's clarify another situation:  We speak of "duration" of a note, but there are really two "durations" of concern.

One is how long to hold the note. But for purposes of rhythm, we are really concerned with the delay until the next note--the "inter-onset time".

I suppose....

For percussion instruments and certain playing styles such as staccato, the duration of the sound and the interval between notes are different.

Of course.

Traditional "note duration" is really inter-onset time; the actual duration can be modified with staccato, tenuto, legato,  etc. Then there's fermata!

No, I'd say note duration (traditionally) is the time the note is held for, not "inter-onset time". I think I get your idea of the distinction between that and "rhythm", which we generally feel relative to the onset of notes (although not always), but a note's duration, as you said, is different from inter-onset time. This is why TN has rests, to show the gap, and different note values, quarter (crotchet), half (minim), etc. These are the note's duration.

So, In traditional notation, pitch is notated "absolute" and timing is notated "relative".

I suppose. The duration is the most obviously relative. The onset is about as absolute as the pitch, just rather vaguely fitted into the bars rather than being rigorously spaced out. In fact, pitch is pretty relative - it's relative to the clef, key signature and accidentals!

But there is no logical reason we couldn't do it the other way around.

I've seen proposals for notating chord by a root note (absolute pitch)  but  intervals (relative pitch) for the other notes in the chord.

Similarly, we could notate the strike-time for a note as an absolute position within a bar or line on some timing grid,
just as we notate pitch as an absolute position on a pitch-staff.

Yes.

 

It seems to me that you are proposing something like that, and I for one think that is a more "musical" way of representing timing.

Yes, thanks. Instead of each note sign indicating its duration by its complex iconography (shape, stem, beams, ties, dots and the like), it has a line from the position where it starts (which is "absolute" against a time dimension) to where it is released. It doesn't have to heed where bar lines are or add up to a time signature with any other notes. It doesn't have a shape that indicates it's half of another note, or one-and-a-half of what it would be otherwise, etc.; that is implicit by how many beats and sub-beats it stretches across. And therefore, there are no rest signs (generally). If a note ends before another starts (if it's duration is less than the "inter-onset" time), its duration line ends to the left of the other note by the relevant amount.

To be honest, I haven't tested such a system long enough to pronounce it a great improvement, or even any better at all, and it would just be my subjective opinion anyway. It isn't perfect, but no system is. It has its own challenges in the reading of it. But it's easier than the similar method of Klavarskribo (IMHO), which dispenses with time-value signs for notes and uses proportional timing, and that's reputed to have 10,000 users. (But they are mostly Dutch, so...? ;)

I have been struggling to represent rhythm in a manner similar to the way we represent scansion of poetry, with "feet".

In general, I have been thinking about "higher-level" components, analogous to syllables, words, phrases, rather than just "letters",

and how notation could at least expose them if not directly represent them.

It's all useful work. For me, the most important thing for a notation to do is tell me how to play my instrument, which begins with which notes (or drums, vocal sounds, etc.) to initiate, in what manner, and for how long. If each "letter" is accounted for fairly well, the words and phrases tend to emerge, but of course there can be marks to tell us how to phrase a passage too.

Cheers
LS

[John Keller]

Ha ha, I like your greeting "Hi JK" … That is why I was so excited to call the black keys HIJK between the two ‘Links’.

If you could find a difficult rhythm, I could perhaps show my solution to it. e.g. notes with flags could be joined to rests, or the flag becomes a beam to the right or left to show which part of the beat it is in.

Yes the classic ES font de-emphasises the 6-6 shapes, but it is calming on the eyes and looks more like TN music. Intervals within chords are more consistent. (With jazz font, major thirds in ‘smalls' have a larger gap than with ‘bigs’.) I use both fonts about equally.

JK

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[John Keller]

Here is an illustration of a passage from Scriabin showing how a complex TN passage can look much simpler in Express Stave.

The original is very tiring to read because of the double sharps and other accidentals which must be retained for notes later in the bars.

I have also illustrated in ES the tied note and the dotted crotchet and minim.

Cheers,
John Keller

[Mark Gould]

Hi John,

The first measure of that excerpt - you have an A in the original TN and what I think is an A# in the ES - 3rd 1/8th note of first beat. I don't have Op.42 Etudes to hand but I am guessing from the surrounding notes it should be an A# in the TN. Of the two versions of Es fonts you have I find the white = white and black = black version easier to read myself, I just think white note = white key when deciphering. The extra stave extensions in the RH over the first few bars I find I have to do the old-fashioned thing of 'counting the lines' in the ES.

Mark

[John Keller]

Hi Mark,

Thanks for checking over my work. You are correct of course. 

Although the Finale file played correctly, the accidental # on that A was missing. If you know Finale, the way to check accidentals is to use the speedy entry tool, select the stave and bar, place the curser on the note, and press *. Sure enough, it was an A# with the accidental hidden for some unknown reason.

Checking with my score, I also found two more missing accidentals, both naturals, which I have added:

B natural (5th semiquaver in the 2nd beat, bottom RH voice), and E natural (3rd semiquaver in the 4th beat). The reason these were missing is that Finale doesn’t acknowledge accidentals in other parts.

For the same reason my hard copy score can omit a couple of accidentals that this excerpt includes, where the same accidental occurs later but in the other part.

It all goes to show just how confusing accidentals can be in TN.

How did you go sight reading this passage in the original? Did you baulk at the legerline low Ex (2nd semiquaver in beat two)? What about when the same notes are repeated in beat three?

My two fonts are both the reverse colour versions, just having different note head shapes.

I will include an attachment comparing both fonts.

When you get more familiar with ES, the note colour to key correspondence does become second nature.

Counting legerlines also becomes unnecessary with familiarity, since each note-head (except B and F) has a distinctive shape. For example, the afore mentioned Ex ( = K ) is obviously a ‘big’ i.e. a 3-group black key.

Overall, this piece is in C# minor, but at this point, the key has gone in the sharp direction to D# major. On the piano though, you will probably see it simply as Eb major. Composers such as Chopin would have made the enharmonic change. Scriabin is a stickler for not making it easy for the player. In ES I just describe it as having progressed anticlockwise (the sharp direction) on the key-clock to J major. 

How do you like my idea for  the minim, and dotted note values?

[Mark Gould]

HI John

 The dotted stems look fine, the only issue I can foresee is that someone will confuse the 'dot' (which is a little vertical dash) might be mistaken for a misplaced staccatissimo mark. How would you mark a dotted 1/8th in this way if we were to keep dots away from noteheads but not confuse them with staccato marks etc?

Thanks for the two side-by side examples - I was thinking of how the 'reversed' version of jazz font would compare side by side with your preferred white = black keys notation.

The classic font to my mind tends to grate with my idea of notehead placement - notes overlapping look 'wrong' in some way to me. I remember somewhere seeing a much earlier version where b and f had some sort of mini-ledger or slash through them? My main problem with the notation we have already discussed, but that aside, I still find the movement from 'black to white'  with the same note vertical position means up or down and 'white to black' means up or down depending on where on the stave it is, but that's because I'm used to Equiton - the notehead shapes I feel are not 'differentiated' enough but again that's personal 'preference' not to be meant as a criticism. I think from reading hand written instrumental parts and composer MS facsimilies where the notation is imperfect, two different notehead shapes for an 'oval' are likely to be confused at speed (or if small), so a more obvious shape change may help with smaller font sizes etc. If only other shapes than oval/circle were as easy to draw rapidly.

I know most use computer based tools, this is fine for 'fair copy' but as a composer I use music (or lined) paper for my sketching because I can write without tools griping at my musical grammar, and I can scribble other symbols in and around or noteheads in an adjacent stave and so forth - all very free-form.

I keep meaning to redo my 'presentation' on my experimental rhythm notation. I think I didn't make it clear that it can be used with stems and beams just they mean something different, so this might be worth revisiting. 

Mark

[Waller Dominique]

Hi John F.

I'm reading you had troubles with understanding beams and ties. But it's normal! Beams and ties in their present form are illogical! Normally one reads from left to right, in the direction of time; stems mark the starting of the note and the beaming indicates the division of time. But in today's ligatures, one must look backward so to say. For example, in the case of a dotted 8^th note + a 16^th note, one has to look at the beaming on the left of the second stem to identify the 16^th note, not on its right! All those discrepancies stem from the same original cause: the shortening of the final beam.

What I mean is that, originally, in medieval tablatures, there were three beams for three quavers in ligature ; but with time, the last beam fell off and disappeared. A consequent reform of time notation would imply to fix that and restore ligatures in their original form, so that they appear much more logical and visually intuitive, and time-proportional (yes, all that at the same time). Have a look at the added file, it's explained with examples I've edited rhythms with Bach, OpusText and MusiSync fonts. Dominique

N.B. For rhythms in binary division, in my system a plus sign appears instead of the augmentation dot.

envoyé : 22 juin 2021 à 23:44
de : J R Freestone <j.r.fr...@gmail.com>
à : musicn...@googlegroups.com

objet : Re: [MNP] Time Values in Alternative Notation

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[J R Freestone]

Hi Dominique,
(Is your given name "Dominique"?)
That's quite right! Your idea is much more logical. Of course, for anyone who's already got used to the "more beams wins" rule, it could be a little confusing, but that's the fault of history. (I didn't know they'd dropped their beams like that - very interesting.)
lettersquash / John F

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[John Keller]

Hi Dominique,

While logical, I worry that your idea will look too continuous when the various one beat patterns are used in succession. And the idea that the beams must always follow after the note head, makes it much harder to learn TN as well as your system.

My idea is that the beaming is flexible and should always show beat divisions and subdivisions.

Also, your idea for augmentation + instead of a dot, would be better at the beam end. 

How would you go for large double-dotted chords!

Cheers,

John K

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[Waller Dominique]

Hi John K.,

> While logical, I worry that your idea will look too continuous when the various one beat patterns are used in succession.

I guess you mean those signs are too compact when tied together. It's true that TN better separates signs. To indicate the end of the beat or show subdivisions inside the beat, it's always possible to leave a little blank, a little visual interruption from a beat to another or a beam to another if it is for clarifying subdivisions. So, groups of notes are clearer. Check the attached file with an excerpt of the Bolero melody in cipher notation (tablature). Separations between beats are clear.

> And the idea that the beams must always follow after the note head, makes it much harder to learn TN as well as your system.

The goal is to reform or replace TN, not to make it easier to learn! My system is not harder to learn for someone who hasn’t been raised with TN. On the contrary, the benefits of this solution are numerous: 

- it's time proportional

- it's explicit and visually intuitive

- it's intellectually satisfying because it's logical

- it's faithful to the history of music notation and tablature

> Also, your idea for augmentation + instead of a dot, would be better at the beam end.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean. What would be better? Where exactly would you put the sign? Please give me a visual example.

> How would you go for large double-dotted chords!

There would be only one plus sign (or double plus sign) attached to the stem that supports all the notes of the chord. Exactly like you proposed yourself in your Scriabin excerpt recently. Or maybe I misunderstood your comment (possible). Cheers! Dominique

envoyé : 27 juin 2021 à 13:21
de : John Keller <jko...@bigpond.net.au>
à : "musicn...@googlegroups.com" <musicn...@googlegroups.com>

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[Mark Gould]

Hi Dominque,

I wonder if some sort of little end mark should be used to end the 'beat'? I've attached a tiny image to indicate my idea (though the symbol itself here is only an idea, perhaps there is a better symbol to be devised?)

Mark

[Dominique Waller]

P.S. Gotcha! Maybe you made your opinion about the plus sign position from my "Beams and ties" page, where the sign follows the note-head. I was forced to do so because of the fonts. It's not what I do usually: I place the sign next to the stem, not the note-head. Dominique 

[John Keller]

I assume you are answering my question about the plus sign.

Yes that was my concern because the plus sign was next to the note head in your diagram list.

John Keller

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[John Keller]

Hi all,

Here is my version of Ravel’s wonderful Bolero melody, showing clear beat delineation, headless tied notes, minims with double stems, and augmentation ‘dashes' at the beam end of stems.

[John Keller]

I am resending the attachment as a TIF instead of a PDF, in case the pdf appeared with grey lines.

John

[John Keller]

Mark,

There is something vaguely unsettling to me about trying to mark the ‘end' of a ‘beat'.

Like trying to mark where is the end of one centimetre.  

Or what is the very last number before 2.

The beginning of a beat is defined. 

It is where the drumstick strikes the drum or where the note begins its sound.

The end of a beat is either the start of the next beat, or it is undefined!

John

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<70D9E4C8-2A52-4A60-975A-8153EE048EFD.jpeg>

[Dominique Waller]

Hi Mark

I had a look at your view. Not bad! I just wonder when or where that would be useful. I have no opinion yet. But your drawing looks fine, really.

[Mark Gould]

I was thinking of your comment that many one beat units would look continuous, so I was thinking something that 'ends' a group or beat to separate it off from others. The small gap between the beams in Dominique's original Bolero troubled me, but didn't want to have a symbol that looked like a stem.

Ending a beat here is only a graphical convenience, a separator symbol, no more no less.

Mark

[John Keller]

Better to mark the start of each beat. But there is nothing wrong with the traditional way of doing it! 

Looking at my transcription of Bolero, it is easy to take in the rhythms by separating the beats clearly, just as words are separated when writing.

Dominiquesideaisliketryingtoreadthissentencenooffence!

John

 

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[Mark Gould]

I really don't care about the notation, as the discussion is again all about you Mr Keller. And how you're right all the time Isn't it. Too much ego methinks. None of the conversations on here are discussions they are just arenas for hard sell of express stave and what a genius you are. It's getting offensive for other users to be honest.

Really you should think about that.it's putting everyone off.

[J R Freestone]

Hi all,

Just rushing out the door, but noticed this and wanted to say I don't feel the same. I wonder if some of the bad feeling here comes from a combination of people's passion for their inventions (which are hard for any of us to criticise fairly when we've invented what suits us perfectly), other people having very different preferences, and that old problem with text convos, misinterpreting styles of expression and humour.

"But there is nothing wrong with the traditional way of doing it!"

I disagree, but it suits you, so that's fine. It will suit lots of other people, and it will not suit lots of other people. They'll prefer Mark's idea, or mine, or someone else's. We don't all have to find THE BEST NEW NOTATION. We can't find it. There's no such beast.

Cheers
¬~

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/musicnotation/ec320f22-a555-49d5-9a41-b2ca39519662n%40googlegroups.com.

[Mark Gould]

I agree with your statements there Lettersquash. 

We're here to discuss, not to proselytize. We all disagree with other's solutions. 

What I think we should not be here to constantly use every topic to say:

"Look at MY notation, SEE how wonderful it is, and how it solves all your problems., and I think your ideas are rubbish"

I'm trying to be dispassionate about the problems discussed here, but please, can people leave their soap box behind. People will tend to believe their solution is the *only* one possible, but they need to be open to see alternatives, and that is what I don't see. I saw others come and go from this group because it's become a one person advertising stream.

Mark

[lettersquash]

Hi John,

On 02/07/2021 15:31, John Keller wrote (in another thread):

Lets continue by breaking up the discussions to separate topics from here. 

eg in “Rhythmic Improvement", I would like John (or anyone) to show an example of a rhythm that is a difficult deciphering problem. Or show a case where my augmentation ‘dot’ solution may not work.

For my part, I'm not sure what the point would be. There are clearly going to be rhythms that are "difficult deciphering problems", since the complexity of rhythm is without limits, so where anyone pitches their example is pretty arbitrary. I'm confident your methods will work in notating just about anything.

I am not sure we're on the same page regarding my criticism of the "quantum" approach (where note types and other marks indicate a quantity of time they will play for). You have already indicated that you don't agree that there's anything "mathematical" going on (although you now talk about "deciphering problems", suggesting music is in a cipher, which it is).

So I've been imagining responding to this suggestion. I post a difficult rhythm example, presumably in TN, to which you respond with exactly the same, only tweaked in various ways, and (QED), your method "works". Perhaps that's not what you were meaning, but my issue with quantum notation is not addressed by this line of inquiry.

In contrast to the quantum approach, there's the time-proportional graph approach. This has bars divided proportionally with beat marks and, where required, finer divisions (including tuplets, where that suits) with the notes and end marks (as in Klavarskribo) or notes-that-are-duration-lines (as in Dodeka) occupying the relevant physical space on the page.

There is obviously cognitive work going on to read it, but it's less like the hieroglyphics of TN and more like watching cars go by and knowing when they'll pass a lamp post, or the skills we develop when playing space invaders, or those we develop when working with a DAW. Instead of counting our "one-and-two-ands" or our "ta-tatti-tatti-tas" which involves deciphering the note heads, beams, dots, flags, tied notes, rests, etc., the idea I am hoping works better is that we learn to scan across (or down, as they do when reading Klavarskribo) at a steady pace, seeing where the notes lie.

It is more likely that we visually process the positions of note onsets and ends against the background depicting the beats and sub-beats, rather than "scanning at a steady pace" like a computer cursor. But the beats are given - they are there as dotted lines or whatever within the bar - so the positions of notes and their endings are easily discernable, judged directly by eye, like you can see where half an inch is in between zero and one inch on a ruler by eye, not by reading the numbers or deciphering anything.

Since pitch-proportional notation is useful to judge intervals directly by eye, a point often made here, I'm baffled it's such a weird concept to suggest time-proportional notation might be better than all the beams and dots and ties!

Rests disappear altogether. They are where no notes are indicated. We can also judge the width (or height) of those spaces directly against the "scale" of the bar's beats if we wish.

An interesting fallout from this is that, although the beats are shown on the score, we do not have to group notes into beats in order to help us decipher them, nor do we have to stop a note's value flowing into another beat or another bar. There is no "tyranny of the bar", which, as far as I can tell, is a tactic like note groupings to help us check our note-value maths. Why else would it be unseemly for a 4/4 bar to have, say, a final minim at beat 4? There's nothing irrational about it, it's just that TN time notation uses its strict, per-bar (and per-voice) note-value accountancy in order to help us do the "deciphering".

We're so used to this accountancy we want to protest, "But there'd be five beats in a four-beat bar!". But there aren't, obviously, the last one is in the next. We do it all the time, have a "minim at beat four", we just chop it in half and put its orphan in the next, tied to it with a little arc. Now, to show it's not really its own thing, you're trying it with its head chopped off, causing new problems. Gabriel puts it in dotted lines. It's all workarounds heaped on workarounds, just as much as sharps and flats on the diatonic scale.

Cheers

¬~ lettersquash

[John Keller]

Hi LS,

You make good points.

Perhaps we could add a 'neutral time-value' mode where the rhythmic beat divisions are indicated with noteless stems. Then the actual played rhythm is shown without note ‘values’  being indicated, but just with note-heads and neutral rest symbols at the appropriate places.

In a sense, this could look somewhat similar to my previously posted example of the Bolero.

Cheers,

JK

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/musicnotation/ed527205-f028-437b-a714-646981b0e980n%40googlegroups.com.

[Mark Gould]

The original version of Equiton notation uses 'bars' as vertical lines, with beats as 'tick marks' and sub beats as smaller tick marks (ad infinitum). For the simplest of divisions of time, this is fine, but suppose you have a rhythm found in Brahms in 4/4 time - two beats, then three in the time of two. If you put the noteheads or 'onsets' in the right place then you have to show the note going 'over' from one 4/4 beat to another. 

I would be interested to know what those who would propose a 'piano roll' type notation would do in the case of the attached (somewhat arbitrary) example.

Mark

[lettersquash]

Hey Mark,

Great to be talking about notations again! I'll respond to your other post in a bit too.

Thanks for that nice little challenge. It's a difficult issue, and sometimes complex tuplets might be better notated with something other than a graphic representation, but for most things we come across the same proportional system should work. I've sketched the basic idea (assuming I have parsed the TN correctly in my head - you know I "can't do that";).

Here I'm using something a little like Dodeka note graphics, a rectangular bar (although in Dodeka I think they're all black and separated by a little space instead of having a line round them and grey fill - something, of course, is needed to distinguish the minim from two crotchets or more smaller notes). I've also ignored representing the actual pitch scale, but put each voice with its notes proportional to each other, and I've separated these, a bit like they were on a great stave (so the pitches are not proportional between one part and the other). It is oversized, of course. This isn't how I'm doing it in my system, but if I showed you that I would unfortunately have to kill you. ;D

It all looks immediately readable to me. The lower "eighth ticks" aren't really needed (and aren't put in the upper part), but the last one helps to identify the dotted eighth, although it would be recognisable as 3/4 of a beat followed by 1/4 anyway, depending on how small this is printed.

One thing this makes clear is the oddity in TN where the tuplet bracket breaks the symbolism of the note values. We have crotchets that aren't the same value as normal crotchets, and quavers that aren't quavers. Furthermore, the span of the bracket relative to the basic meter, and its number (it could be a 5 or 7 or other number) can make the actual duration of these notes and their rhythm entirely different. The maths gets quite fun at this point!

Here's David Bruce grappling with some extreme nested tuplets. I think just about any notation would struggle with it, and I can't imagine anyone's brain being able to process it! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcDS1y1o9t0

Cheers

LS

[Mark Gould]

Hi John

The upper part in the 3 in 2 - this is dotted quarter to eighth, I think your graphic just shows an even division.  I'd like to have seen that with pitch indicated too, though why you don't want to share your pitch notation is crazy in a group dedicated to looking at alternatives! Strictly proportional rhythm notations aren't used in print because they take up too much space horizontally. Imagine a passage of long duration notes with occasional passages of short duration notes would look.

The 3 in 2 is 'implied' in your example notation, but technically speaking, the proportions aren't given 'exactly' so how would we 'know' what rhythm is meant? We can sort of visually 'approximate', but TN rhythm notation indicates which duration is meant, but 'proportional' notations are by 'eye'. I think this notation would have difficulties with indicating the difference between a dotted rhythm and a 2+1 triplet rhythm clearly, not to mention parts that cross over each other. I'm sure John K could also point out how TN's symbolic approach to rhythm allows for performance flexibility.

I see a lot of examples of these new rhythm notations (like Dodeka) but with really simple music, but I really think they'd run into problems even coping with a Mozart piano sonata, let alone anything more modern like Debussy or Stravinsky. 

I've taken the liberty of attaching some Equiton, both in the original published form of its rhythm notation and in the notation (which can be used for other stave notations) for rhythm I devised. The original is very hard to read, and the lower one attempts to clarify how the four beats are counted in the bar. It's an improvement, but whether it's any good is debatable. I devised the notation because I was dissatisfied with the original form. Given that we can use double stems for half notes, this modified TN rhythm could be used with Equiton, though for some reason visually it looks like a kludge.

I'll 'raise' you with another example of 'Black Pages' - this is by Brian Ferneyhough. I'm agnostic on whether this is possible or impossible (the BBC Symphony have performed it btw - it's on You Tube), but it pushes the limit of notation of rhythm (and pitch, the parts include microtonal accidentals). Could it have been done differently and sounded the same ? - that's an interesting question. My own notation can write this, but, for all practicality, would it be worth it?

https://issuu.com/editionpeters/docs/ferneyhough_la_terre_et_un_homme_online__fs

Mark

[J R Freestone]

Hi Mark...

On 03/07/2021 14:13, Mark Gould wrote:

Hi John

The upper part in the 3 in 2 - this is dotted quarter to eighth, I think your graphic just shows an even division.

Doh. You're quite right - I was in too much of a rush to reply!  I think I've got it this time.


Of course, it isn't quite as clear, but then it is more difficult to play. Generally with things like this I have to dig down to the lowest common denominator and tap out every one of those smallest 'beats', but when there are this many overlapping, I'd probably not get it unless I hear it and keep trying to reproduce it by ear.  ...Which is the goal of music generally, it's worth remembering, to be able to play it by ear and memory!

 I'd like to have seen that with pitch indicated too,

Sure, but the question was about time notation!

though why you don't want to share your pitch notation is crazy in a group dedicated to looking at alternatives!

I think you meant to say, "why you don't want to share it is something I don't understand, and haven't bothered to ask, but I'll assume it's crazy anyway..."

Strictly proportional rhythm notations aren't used in print because they take up too much space horizontally. Imagine a passage of long duration notes with occasional passages of short duration notes would look.

I've written here already at least once about that. I agree, if "strictly proportional" means "using the same time scale throughout". That doesn't have to be the case, just as it isn't in TN. Whole bars of rests or a few notes can be short. Bars with a moderate population of notes or timing divisions can be longer. Many short-duration notes can have a wider bar. The player will be expected to spend the same time playing each bar, obviously, but that's not hard, is it? If care is taken about how the beats and sub-beats are shown (rather than allowing confusion between them), even a single beat with lots of notes could be expanded while the others are left shorter. It will be obvious what that means.

The 3 in 2 is 'implied' in your example notation, but technically speaking, the proportions aren't given 'exactly' so how would we 'know' what rhythm is meant? We can sort of visually 'approximate', but TN rhythm notation indicates which duration is meant, but 'proportional' notations are by 'eye'. I think this notation would have difficulties with indicating the difference between a dotted rhythm and a 2+1 triplet rhythm clearly, not to mention parts that cross over each other. I'm sure John K could also point out how TN's symbolic approach to rhythm allows for performance flexibility.

This is partly true. Clearly, there needs to be a convention that if a beat looks like it's divided into three, it's divided into three, unless some other instruction is given that it is more complex than that. Then, the "3 in 2" is not "implied", it is specified according to the rules of how to read the notation. And clearly there will be complex timings that require other methods. It may be quite reasonable in some instances to place a tuplet bracket above a section, but most of the time, most music that most people want to play can be followed by eye. You complained earlier that people were deluded in thinking their notation system would replace TN, but I get the feeling you're now pushing me with this method to do everything any notation system might do! As I've said before, I'm interested in helping most ordinary individuals to play music to the best of their ability, and this will obviously be within limits. TN has limits too.

I see a lot of examples of these new rhythm notations (like Dodeka) but with really simple music, but I really think they'd run into problems even coping with a Mozart piano sonata, let alone anything more modern like Debussy or Stravinsky.

Yes, I agree. It's not an easy hobby. Also, the MNP listings are full of a bunch of timeless chromatic scales from C to C that apparently pass for "new notation systems".

I've taken the liberty of attaching some Equiton, both in the original published form of its rhythm notation and in the notation (which can be used for other stave notations) for rhythm I devised. The original is very hard to read, and the lower one attempts to clarify how the four beats are counted in the bar. It's an improvement, but whether it's any good is debatable. I devised the notation because I was dissatisfied with the original form. Given that we can use double stems for half notes, this modified TN rhythm could be used with Equiton, though for some reason visually it looks like a kludge.

Yes, thanks for that. I find it very encouraging...if you see what I mean! I have to remember we all find different systems better than others, but to me, the one I posted is easily the clearest. I would - as I said - still struggle to play it, but I could very easily compare how the different notes were placed with respect to others. It would be interesting to get an honest answer from anyone reading this, by the way, which they find the clearest (but of course it's tricky - we have to allow for our exposure if we can, particularly to TN).

It's hard for me to judge how to place the Equiton and the TN next, because I've no experience at all of the former, and several decades looking at the latter. The TN, I have to know how to parse the triplet across two beats, and then I have to play a "third" of it (ignoring the fact that it looks like a crotchet), and the dotted "third" (or is it a "two-thirds"?), and the remaining "sixth" ("third") without any real visual guidance, because the notes are mostly just ciphers - I just have to learn how to do these things and practise them. The Equiton does look like it goes some way towards a proportional notation, but it doesn't seem to get there. I do want to be charitable, but my partner just looked over and said it looks like a circuit diagram, and she's "always right"!

I'll 'raise' you with another example of 'Black Pages' - this is by Brian Ferneyhough. I'm agnostic on whether this is possible or impossible (the BBC Symphony have performed it btw - it's on You Tube), but it pushes the limit of notation of rhythm (and pitch, the parts include microtonal accidentals). Could it have been done differently and sounded the same ? - that's an interesting question. My own notation can write this, but, for all practicality, would it be worth it?

https://issuu.com/editionpeters/docs/ferneyhough_la_terre_et_un_homme_online__fs

Hells bells! I fold.

Cheers,
LS.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/musicnotation/4e24b593-a37e-4a2e-825a-68151039ce56n%40googlegroups.com.

[Mark Gould]

Hi John,

I'm not against the idea of a 'piano roll notation' per se, and I'm not suggesting it has to replicate all music, but I think if a notation is going to have value as an alternative (if people find TN difficult to understand), they shouldn't be denied the opportunity to have music they love in the notation they can understand, and that's why I think alternative notations should try to good enough to render at least Classical and early Romantic music literature. I can also think of a number of 50s and 60s song standards in my copy of the 'Real Book' which alternative notations would struggle with.

I agree about stave notations - lots of proposals, without thinking about what it might look like with a rhythm notation. Most just use an adapted TN rhythm. I tried that with Equiton and it just didn't look right. Circuit diagrams, I agree - the one with the lines and here's one that's even more 'electronic' looking from Kurt Stone's article on notation. I think the example is from Schoenberg (but I'd have to check to be certain). Here, duration lines are everywhere, and obscure the stave lines making it hard to work out where those blobs are (maybe they're stations on a Metro line somewhere). 

I'm going to post on staves soon - a separate but interesting topic - like what range should they cover, how do we read notes outside of them, and should we start them on different notes than is their original design?

I looked up Dodeka again - has anyone noticed nothing on it since 2019 - has this too become a footnote?

Cheers

Mark

[J R Freestone]

I look forward to your thoughts on staves. I'm not sure I have much to contribute at this stage, as I'm still working some of this out, and some of it that I have I want to keep as a surprise! ;~D

One thing I forgot to say about the example I gave - I hope I got it right finally - is that the beats (as per Klavar) are on the bar lines (and then divisions of the bar), rather than the notes starting inside the bar. It's definitely weird at first, but more logical.

I'm not sure what you're referring to with "piano roll notation" - the proportional time dimension?  It could also imply a stack of black and white lines as in most DAWs, but these options are independent of each other.

Part of my reservation about sharing bits of my notation ideas comes from the discovery that the various elements aren't always independent. In fact, more often than not they affect each other quite a lot. I spent several months playing around with notation ideas, starting from different first principles, and whatever angle I came at it from would often dictate the range of options I had for other factors.

You doubt the ability of other notations to cope with more complex pieces. I wonder what sorts of things are in the 200,000 Klavarskribo transcripts.

LS

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[John Keller]

Hi Mark,

In your adaptation of Equiton (2nd example), do you use the dot to represent each extra beat, rather than the conventional augmentation by one half?

The way you split a stem into two: It worries me that the triplet of stems over the 2 beats, are not spaced evenly. I would much prefer the 3rd triplet stem to align with the first of the two stems it splits into. Similarly with the underneath voice. Whenever a note-duration is subdivided, the starts should coincide!

If the TN example had the 3rd and 4th beats (semiquavers etc) spaced evenly (linearly), then the positions in time of the upper triplet notes would be clearly seen. You would simply play them as though they are grace notes to the particular semiquavers they precede.

What music program do you use (Is it Finale)?

Can you convert to Equiton automatically, or do you produce these examples graphically?

Cheers,

John K

[Mark Gould]

Hi John

Yes, the dot means 'count one beat'. This way, if you have say (apologies for doing this in text d. = 2 d.. = 3 d...=4 beats.) Subdivided beats don't use the dot except to add beats afterwards - see below), because the subdivision markers indicate the number of sub-beat parts earlier notes should continue through. There is another use of the dot so: .d (i.e. before a notehead), this is to indicate a tied note where it would not normally be possible just to place a dot in the following bar (page turns, and where complex part writing on one stave would lead to loss of clarity.) The TN example is from a notation programme I use on my iPad, so the spacing is something I think is reasonably right from TN engraving rules.

In this link https://share.icloud.com/photos/0BR1xCR_6g-lnMKcJYIcRBJ4A, there is a 're-beamed' version in the manner you suggest. I decided against it for the reason encircled in red, because I felt at speed (sight reading) this could be confused with a different subdivision of the beat (three in this case - it looks like a triplet), hence I chose a 'hierarchical' view of the beat, saying this stem is attached to two sub beats - and the noteheads placed in the correct rhythmic position. 

I have also added some example rhythms in the same image, A B and C. A is just a representation of how the rhythm works - 2 beats, 1 beat, 2 halves, 3 1/3s, and a beat divided into two parts, then one into two sub parts and the other into three. Example B demonstrates ties, and example C the use of the tie dot, and the repeat of C is how I would notate it normally. I'm using the 'stemmed' version of my rhythmic notation as it is closest to traditional notation, but for handwriting ease, I use curved lines. The whole idea is based on the notion of a visual group = 1 beat, and hierarchical groups (structured recursively the same) set out the same way. There's no notion of a 'tuplet', just a 'group' of notes. In the second C example, I think the attack points of the notes is seen clearly, and the dots show the counting of 3 beats in the bar. The B example also includes a rest symbol - a short dash added to the stem to indicate 'no symbol here', rather than an 'invisible' continuation symbol (as I describe in the original presentation). I'm still not happy with the rest symbol - I've tried several and none seem to fit the bill from my original use of the 1/8 rest looking like a 7, to an X and later an ø.

It is an experimental notation, and for most music I think it's reasonably clear. I prefer a notehead to attach other markings such as accents etc, than a 'duration rectangle', which I think can look confusing with mixed long notes and short notes overlapping on the same stave. One of the things musicians explained to me was that counting was difficult in music, and that notation obscures the basic pulse, and that if there was a way to 'see' the beat structure, things would be clearer.

I draw all my examples in a graphic programme, as I don't have the necessary modern programming skills to devise a notation app to translate to Equiton.

Kind regards

Mark

[Ian Dey]

Thanks Mark for posing a challenge and John for addressing it. This seems a good way to explore alternatives. 

Having tried to ‘embed’ rhythm in pitch notation using nested beams, in my own notation I now record them in a separate stave. In TN, the Brahms bar would look like this: 

Conventional notation

From the third beat the upper voice departs from the signature time while the lower voice continues to follow it. You can interpret the temporal values mathematically if you wish  - e.g. from the start of the bar the final upper note is 4.6667 beats, and the lower is 4.75 - but my own playing does not permit such precision!

By migrating rhythm to a separate stave I escaped the ‘tyranny of the beam’ - the tendency (sadly irresistible in my case) to treat beams as in effect slurs, even when inconsistent with the melodic phrase. Here is the same bar without beams:

Conventional notation - no beams

Ian

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<291092F4-E5AE-4C5F-9256-B07935ED2968.jpeg>

[Mark Gould]

Hi Ian,

I looked at both of your examples in your reply, and the line of 'marks' belowto indicate the 'rhythm'. Though the horizontal distribution of attack points is preserved, it seems to me to replicate the same problem I had with Equiton's original rhythm notation - it too places notes on the stave then marks out the divisions by 'tick marks' of varying sizes (sometimes dotted, sometimes dashed) along the stave lines. I see that you give no 'beat' point for the 3rd sub-beat in the triplet (other than marking the 1/8) at the end. 

When devising my own rhythmic notation, I sought the advice of instrumentalists, who said that if there were some visual equivalent of the 'click track' it would help them orient the rhythms. I'd argue then that the 3 in 2 should have marks for each of its sub-beats, and leave the quaver half-way after, so the performer can 'see' the 3 in 2 beats. Indicating where a note happens is important, but it's also important to indicate where the 'beat' happens, as a kind of rhythmic landmark. That's why I chose a 'beat' based grouping system, so syncopations and ties were clear. 

In the beamless second example, I would have to look in two places to see where the 'beats' occur, and if reading quickly, I would probably mistake the longer tick marks with the not-so-long ones, and also be uncertain as to how the other parts are mathematically related, without having to get a ruler out!

Mark

[John Keller]

Mark,

Thanks for the illustrations. I understand it I think. I remember reading about it previously also.

I would just disagree with the TN spacing, and don’t know if there is such a thing as 'agreed engraving rules'. I would prefer more even, time-proportional spacing at the beat or sub-beat level.

And I think your hierarchical structure (marked in red) could be made more clear by just increasing the length of the vertical line to the subdivision, like it is the the upper part.

Cheers,

John K

[Mark Gould]

John

Regards the TN spacing and engraving rules - there are some quite specific ones for all sorts of things, spacing notes, how long stems are, how much 'slope' there should be on beamed groups depending on the notes themselves. I discovered this when I bought my first piece of notation software, and when I had proofs back for the scores I was setting for a publisher - the software then didn't always apply all the rules - now most of them do (well the one I use makes big claims now as to how compliant it is with them).

I had thought of making the beam part thicker as in the attached, but is seemed 'ugly' to me.

Mark

[John Keller]

Here is my version of the spacing for the Equiton example.

[Ian Dey]

Thanks for the helpful comments, Mark. I take your point re the sub-beat.

I have the advantage of knowing my own rules, so I can see at a glance what you might need a ruler to figure out…  In complicated passages I include more information (I extend the bar if need be to avoid clutter) while in regular passages I might omit some, on the basis that ‘less is more’.  

The more general point is that I find extracting the rhythm (however you do it) rather than embedding it makes both pitch and rhythm easier to read.

Ian

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[Mark Gould]

Thanks for those examples - I'll take another look at this type of layout. I see you couldn't resist putting a cadence on that example! 

[Dominique Waller]

Hi John and all,

A point about ties and slurs. In English music vocabulary, slurs I guess are those big arcs that indicate to play notes legato, in a continuous way. And ties I guess are those arcs that bounds note-heads of the same pitch to indicate to sustain the sound from a beat to another. 

If we agree on this vocabulary, then what you’ve proposed, that I’ve proposed too, is to tie stems without repeating the notehead(s). But I've noticed that to do so, you’ve tightened the time symbols at the place of the (missing) note-heads and not at the other end of the stem. Because I also work with tablature, where ciphers and time symbols are joined but autonomous (which what I try to do with staves) it appeared more natural to me that time symbols should be linked together, and therefore not at the place of their missing noteheads.

One advantage of your solution is that, in the more usual case of stems above noteheads, slurs could be drawn above stems and ties under noteheads, so that one could not confuse them. But I come with the opposite solution: it should be more natural to draw slurs next to noteheads, and ties next to the opposite end of the stem, on the “pure rhythms” side so to say. Of course, this could not work for the choral, with its entangled voices, only for melodies and chords.

Besides, to go on with your linguistic joke on my time notation, it’s not true that ittiestimesymbolswithoutanygpapinbetweenthem. The truth is it separates clearly each beam from the other but with a smaller gap and not in the usual way. On the contrary, traditiona notatio cho of th natura en of eac duratio o els tur i backwar insid th ti an i th ga i large i i becaus i take th plac o th missin bea! Dominique

[Mark Gould]

HI all,

I'd been thinking about the idea of containing all the rhythmic duration relating to stems. I wonder if anyone had explored using 'shaped' stems, say straight for 1/4 notes, curved one way for 1/8, the other way for 1/16, s shaped for 1/32 reverse s for 1/64 (one could ostensibly go on adding more curves to the stem). One could add extension lines to these wavy beams for multiples, with some convention for 2x 3x etc, and you would indicate the old dotted problem not with 1 1/2 but with 3/2 + 1/2. 

This way duration is all on the stem and not on the notehead, as Dominique suggests. I've attached a 'guess' at what this notation might look like, though I've worked nothing out to check if it would be 'sensible'.

The only issue I see is with how you'd indicate tuplets (some sort of bracket, I'd guess).

Mark

[Douglas Keislar]

Interesting idea. Another issue with non-straight stems is what you do about chords (multiple noteheads on the same stem). If you have a 6-note chord on a curved stem, it's probably going to occupy a significant amount of horizontal space and possibly be confusing to read, especially with respect to other notes that may be occurring around the same time.

Doug

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[John Keller]

Good point Doug.

I agree with the idea of keeping timing information away from the note-head which codes only pitch.

We all seem to agree on this point.

I wanted to ask you Dominique, how you represent the longer note values.

Do you continue with beams literally showing duration?

Could you illustrate how you indicate long notes?

Nice to see your in-kind reply to my light hearted criticism.

My idea is that beams don’t so much show duration, as onsets within the beats.

They do this by the grouping. 

Cheers,

John K

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[Mark Gould]

Hi Doug

I was thinking the stem would only be curved from the last notehead 'up' or 'down' depending. The 'carrier' for the noteheads would be a vertical line as always. 

I have to admit I was just 'thinking aloud', I don't have any 'system' in mind (though I did fill up a side of A4 with tryouts to see what would happen. It sort of looked like 'shorthand' in a way.

The problem is that we visually look to the notehead to carry the pitch information, and we have to look elsewhere for the 'rhythm'. John K is right in that visually we need a 'grouping' system like the way we separate words with space, even though a 'sonogram' of speech doesn't show any breaks in actual sounds. The whole 'dot' for 'half-extra' idea being attached to the notehead splits up the duration flag.

This is the issue we have with music notation - the abstractions it needs to show to convey important structural meaning, versus the 'graphical' representation of the notes. This is the issue I have with 'durational' notations, in that although the duration is conveyed by the length of the line or note-head, we have to look to the structure of the whole bar or beat to work out just what that 'length' means.

The problem with the 'curvy stem' notation to my mind is how to convey those visual groups so they can be read 'quickly'. Musicians do learn their music, but sight-reading is a very important part of musicianship, from performers to conductors to composers and the humble score-reader.

Mark

[Waller Dominique]

Hi John,

> I wanted to ask you Dominique, how you represent the longer note values. Do you continue with beams literally showing duration?

In my system (see added table), longer values are perpendicular to short values: the half note has a stem, the whole note a double stem, the maxima a triple stem. It’s not thick stems like the ones that hold the beams. There are bold stems that contain the timing information just as beams contain it. And at the foot of these single, double or triple bold stem may emanate a thick line (dotted line if necessary, see added excerpt) that extends the time symbol from left to right in proportion of its value. This is for pedagogical purposes only, so as the beginner may internalize the value of the symbols on a visual basis. It’s not meant to survive in more complex scores, or only virtually, when the extending line can be recognized or identified with the staff line (added excerpt)

The case of the quarter note is slightly different. We all agree that the central duration of the system of values is now the quarter note and not the whole note anymore. So, in my system, this value is symbolized with a vertical stem with a little black circle in its middle that symbolizes que turning point of the logarithmic progression of beams to another progression of stems. And so, this quarter note symbol can be extended from its very center (no image available for now).

But those extending lines would be reserved for beginners for pedagogical purposes, at the early learning stage, and for simple melodies. After that, bold stems would be used as the abbreviations of those extended forms. This is necessary because if those extended lines were maintained in more complex scores, they could be very cumbersome, sometimes cluttering the score. And a notehead without stem, or a cipher alone, would be considered a quarter note by default.

envoyé : 15 juillet 2021 à 01:11

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[J R Freestone]

Hi John,

On 15/07/2021 00:11, John Keller wrote:

Good point Doug.

I agree with the idea of keeping timing information away from the note-head which codes only pitch.

We all seem to agree on this point.

Well, yes, if you ignore those who don't agree with any of this method of rhythm notation!

But it's ok, I'm not seriously upset or one to bear a grudge. I recognise that on this forum I'm in a small minority who don't like this method, and currently I'm mostly talking to myself when I describe and give examples of alternatives. Stuart Byrom (WYSIWYG notation) would probably support and develop this alternative, but he's less bull-headed than I am and doesn't post much here, mostly just to update people on the development of his notation system and multiple-platform free app that transcribes MusicXML. Indeed, we now discuss all this privately, since there's little support for our ideas here.

I was encouraged to hear someone here report that musicians said they'd like an indication of the background pulse, the beat of the music, which I believe is to see clearly where notes (beginning and end) fit against that, and this is one of the main reasons I see the timeline method as superior to constraining the duration information to the note's onset iconography, whether in its head or some attachment to it going vertically (i.e. in the pitch direction, rather than along the timeline). The timeline method brings its own challenges, I freely admit, but does provide the thing these musicians asked for, I assume, a background pulse graphic against which to measure a note's onset and release.

There are two elements to this. First, the position of the note's release can be explicit (if there is a line of some sort extending to that point - Klavarskribo's method is not quite explicit in this sense, which I see as one of its failings). The second benefit is that the "background pulse" is always present as part of the staff in some way, and thus there is no requirement to indicate beats by grouping of notes, as per TN and most of these adjusted versions of it.

It seems hard to get it to dawn on people how many problems this method causes, while they design their clever workarounds. Notes, it seems, either must be grouped into the beats of the time signature, or it is deemed desirable to do so to help the player time the notes, but the actual notes in music aren't naturally part of a beat like that, especially where any kind of syncopation is involved, and in almost any music, notes' duration will extend outside of the beat, so another workaround is required to join those to some other portion of the next beat. This can extend into whole beats (as well as portions of them), requiring another iconography (dots, multiple stems, etc.) to be notated and symbolically processed - i.e. they are implicit, not explicit.

Anyway, I'll not keep flogging a dead horse, I just wanted it to be noted that the only methods now being discussed are essentially minor tweaks of TN, and don't provide the thing musicians were reported as asking for. I can't remember (sorry) who said that, or how often it was requested, or by what kind of musician.

All the best
¬~ lettersquash

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[John Keller]

 Hi John F,

I was thinking of Mark and Dominique when i thought we agreed on this. I wasn’t aware of you vehemently disagreeing!

Anyway your mention of Stuart Byrom and his WYSIWYP, got me looking up his website, and WOW, I was amazed he has his app working for translating musicXML files.

I just converted and looked at Bach prelude and fugue 2 (WTC bk 1).

I imaging that he could probably do a timeline version of ES if I asked nicely.

He must be very knowledgable in programming or coding (Is that what its called?) to know how to turn the XML into such a clear graphic output.

It would be good if he posted about his achievements here. Its not important that his system is not 12 step.

Neither is Equiton or Dominique’s system.

Stuart, if you are listening, Congratulations!

Cheers,

John K

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[Waller Dominique]

Hi John and all (not sure you had my answer by mail),

> I wanted to ask you Dominique, how you represent the longer note values. Do you continue with beams literally showing duration?

In my system (see added table), longer values are perpendicular to short values: the half note has a stem, the whole note a double stem, the maxima a triple stem. It’s not thick stems like the ones that hold the beams. There are bold stems that contain the timing information just as beams contain it. And at the foot of these single, double or triple bold stem may emanate a thick line (dotted line if necessary, see added excerpt) that extends the time symbol from left to right in proportion of its value. This is for pedagogical purposes only, so as the beginner may internalize the value of the symbols on a visual basis. It’s not meant to survive in more complex scores, or only virtually, when the extending line can be recognized or identified with the staff line (added excerpt)

The case of the quarter note is slightly different. We all agree that the central duration of the system of values is now the quarter note and not the whole note anymore. So, in my system, this value is symbolized with a vertical stem with a little black circle in its middle that symbolizes que turning point of the logarithmic progression of beams to another progression of stems. And so, this quarter note symbol can be extended from its very center (no image available for now).

But those extending lines would be reserved for beginners for pedagogical purposes, at the early learning stage, and for simple melodies. After that, bold stems would be used as the abbreviations of those extended forms. This is necessary because if those extended lines were maintained in more complex scores, they could be very cumbersome, sometimes cluttering the score. And a notehead without stem, or a cipher alone, would be considered a quarter note by default. Dominique

envoyé : 15 juillet 2021 à 16:46

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[J R Freestone]

Hi JK

On 15/07/2021 15:46, John Keller wrote:

 Hi John F,

I was thinking of Mark and Dominique when i thought we agreed on this. I wasn’t aware of you vehemently disagreeing!

No problem, I think there's every good reason to have all sorts of different methods to suit different types, so I don't "vehemently disagree", just have my preference.

Anyway your mention of Stuart Byrom and his WYSIWYP, got me looking up his website, and WOW, I was amazed he has his app working for translating musicXML files.

Yes, within certain limits. It will transcribe a piano piece, or the the piano part of a two-part piece with, say, voice. Otherwise it can often just transcribe a single part out of a multi-part piece. There's a lot of work to do on it, as he'd be first to admit.

I just converted and looked at Bach prelude and fugue 2 (WTC bk 1).

Oh that's a good idea. I imagine it works okay, does it? I haven't tried that. As it happens, I've transcribed that manually to my own system (i.e. just putting the notes in as text in the format my system uses). The next stage for me is to deal with transcribing something like MusicXML...oh joy.

I imaging that he could probably do a timeline version of ES if I asked nicely.

He must be very knowledgable in programming or coding (Is that what its called?) to know how to turn the XML into such a clear graphic output.

Well, he is indeed knowledgable in programming (yeah, 'coding' is just the same thing), but I fear in languages that aren't much used these days, and his app was unfortunately coded by university students, so, although Stuart wrote a long and detailed specification document to tell them what it should do, and worked with them to get it programmed, the actual code will be fairly unfamiliar to him, and I do know he's reluctant to get back into programming because he has a lot of other projects going on.

I'm interested to know why you'd want a timeline version of ES, after being fairly adamant that (an adjusted version of) TN time values is ideal. Doing such a thing wouldn't be worth it as an experiment to see how you like it, it would involve a lot of design decisions, similar to those you've been making in the design of ES.  It's a new idea to me, but my first thought is that the two methods (your different note head shapes, in particular) might be tricky to combine...but it might work. The "timeline" method Stuart uses is a shaded continuation line the width of the head of the note, and this raises questions about how those duration lines for notes close together are shown and can be distinguished. In ES, the wider and thinner vertical sizes of notes might cause interesting problems to overcome. Whereas heads can be put either side of the stem to separate them, their duration lines can't do this. Also, putting notes one side or the other of a stem is a distortion of the timeline approach, since some appear to start before others. All these issues are things I've dug into over past months in designing my own system. Stuart's and my solutions are rather different. Mine is a 12-tone system though. I am facing doing all the programming myself, which is a harder road, but means - if I get there - I will know how every nut and bolt goes together (in theory, lol).

And, no, before you ask nicely...I wouldn't be able to do a timeline version of ES either. That's largely because how ES works already is in systems I don't understand and don't have the time to learn about. If I can help in any way, though, I will be very glad to.

It would be good if he posted about his achievements here. Its not important that his system is not 12 step.

Neither is Equiton or Dominique’s system.

I hope he will be happy to read that. I'll let him know if he hasn't seen it already.

Stuart, if you are listening, Congratulations!

Cheers,

John K

Cheers,
¬~ lettersquash

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[drtec...@gmail.com]

For the record, I would like to state that I also agree with

"the idea of keeping timing information away from the note-head which codes only pitch."

 

I've been convinced for some time that we need something I've called  "absolute notation" to indicate timing and rhythm.

I've offered the distinction of "relative" vs. "absolute" with the example of pitch.

 

TN notates pitch "absolutely". That is, the pitch of the note is determined by it's position on the staff independent of any other notes.

 

I've seen "relative pitch" proposals in some numeric chord notations, where the root note is specified "absolutely" and the other notes are denoted, not by their absolute or scale pitch, but by their interval from the root.  For example, a C major chord might be denoted C 4 7 or even C 4 3 instead of C E G,

where 4 and 7 are half-steps above the root, and 4 and 3 are half-steps above the previous lower note.

My point here is not to debate the merits of such an approach, but just to point out the difference between absolute and relative notation.

 

TN notates time "relatively", i.e. the start (and end) time of a note must be computed *relative* to the start and duration of every other note from the beginning of the composition!  Or at least relative to the start of the measure, except in those cases where the first note in the measure doesn't start at the start of the measure!  It doesn't take much complication until you cannot tell, by just looking at a note, what count is starts or ends on. I suppose the grouping referenced by lettersquash is a mechanism to simplify that computation. 

 

I've also suggested that the orthographic grouping in TN does not always correspond to the way I hear the grouping musically.  For example, I tend to hear a short note following a long one as belonging to the following motif, with the sustained note ending the preceding motif. But TN typically groups a short note as the end of a previous "beat" rather than as a "pickup" to the next beat.

 

Irrespective of any other considerations, TN timing notation is also an ad-hoc jumble of different sorts of notation, a situation that drives software developers mad.

Consider how many *different* orthographic features are used to convey timing: solid or hollow noteheads, stems or not, various numbers of flags or maybe beams instead, one or more dots following, dots or dashes above/below (staccato, tenuto, etc.), fermata, repetition of the notehead with added ties (easily confused with slurs) across a bar or half-bar, numbered "slur" arcs for tuplets, and bar lines of various sorts, plus the time signature. And another whole alphabet of notehead shape for rests.  Then there's swing, where the nominal timing is reinterpreted as something else. And perhaps I've omited some.  Reform would be warranted just on considerations of simplicity and consistency!

 

Joe Austin

aka DrTechDaddy

"Music is Poetry; why print it like prose?"

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[Mark Gould]

Hi

I wonder how you would respond to the notion of metric modulation, or even the notation of accelerandi and ritenuto and other variances to tempo with an absolute system? These are surely the domain of interpretation not notation - take poetry where the declamation and rhythm in say Milton or Shakespeare would be different for each reader? 

I understand there is a disparity between the notation of pitch as absolute (well only relatively, given that different tuning schemes exist, and the reference pitch A=440 or A442 or maybe Baroque pitch as low as A=392)

Music notation as I have said attempts to be both an abstract notation (like language) and a graphic once. I think that notation reform is fine, so long as it doesn't then destroy the artistic component of interpretation, which an absolute duration/attackpoint system would surely do?

Suppose for a moment we had a notation that said Perform this friequency in this timbre at do many dB loudness, with this envelope for 0.36 seconds, and so forth. This notation is not a notation - this is a recording of a performance? How could one 'interpret' this. THis is not art this is 'reproduction' - are performances to be photocopies of other performances? Surely that's what an absolute notation would insist on?

I am challenging here because I think an absolute time notation is frankly a non-starter for both practical and artistic reasons.

Regards

Mark

[J R Freestone]

Hi Mark,

I think you're interpreting the word "absolute" too literally, if I understand how Joe was meaning it. I think he was continuing the idea of "timeline" notation, which really just means using the time dimension of the notation graphic as a way to accurately distribute the position of notes. I'm not sure "absolute" and "relative" are the best way to describe the pitch and rhythm notation in TN, but I get the point he's making.

Anyway, this doesn't have to be "absolute" in the most absolute sense of the word (if you see what I mean). Notes in TN are approximately positioned according to their onset, but they get moved about to squeeze in other marks and other notes. In TN, changes in tempo are notated completely separately from those positions, so making them more accurately timed doesn't remove the need for that, and I see no particular reason not to do the same in a timeline notation.

For example, a tenuto is shown with a short line over/under the note in TN, the note isn't stretched or moved on the score. The exact same mark might be added to a timeline onset notehead (in a notation that has a notehead). So the accurate (absolute) position of the note on the timeline is still a nominal position, indicating where it would occur in time were the passage to be played by an automaton, and other instructions are given, if necessary, about how to change that (although nobody plays like an automaton, even if they try).

The accuracy is nevertheless a useful thing simply for comprehending the rhythm, in my view, instead of having to count up the note's values in the "relative" sense I think Joe means, or that I referred to as doing music maths with the symbols.

Textual instructions may well also be used. Furthermore, just as one will learn the techniques relevant to particular genres and apply them when reading TN, one will do the same. Just because the notes are precisely positioned in a baroque saraband doesn't mean the player won't use rubato or other expression that isn't explicit in the score.

The timeline method does give opportunity for some different indications of some of these things, however, depending on various other details of the notation. The thickness of a duration line might indicate dynamics (volume), for example, or its depth of shading in a shaded line. There are different ways composers express dynamics, with the fff - ppp series or hairpins, and the actual volume is largely up to interpretation. I agree with you that it would not be good to remove the interpretive element of playing a score, but that would be virtually impossible anyway. The human brain isn't very capable of reproducing an audible experience accurately from a visual representation of it - like reading from a waveform output - although we're pretty good at mimicking an audible experience we actually hear.

One example of a timeline notation incorporating an element of expression might be for staccato: imagine that each note is shown with a notehead at its onset, with a shaded line following up to its release, and say the shortest duration of any note in the piece is shown with a duration line the same length as the notehead's width. Now, this gives the opportunity to change the notation of staccato from dots above/below, by simply removing the duration line, leaving just the notehead. Staccato is still up for interpretation - some will make it much shorter than others - but composers might even use a very short shading after a note for a subtle staccato (mezzo staccato) and just the head for an extreme staccato.

Although I agree interpretation is important, I'm sure the inaccuracies of notation are a real irritation to many composers, who never get to hear the music they intended played unless they record it all themselves or work for long hours with the players directly.

¬~ lettersquash

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[drtec...@gmail.com]

Mark,

               I mostly agree with what Lettersquash has said.  I was thinking in terms of identifying the start and possibly end of a note directly in terms of "count position" on a timeline, as opposed to indirectly through the cumulative durations of notes preceding it.

Of course, we do have more literally "absolute notations" like MIDI. And as was pointed out, even "absolute" pitch is not totally absolute if you admit various tunings.

I would say the important question is, how is the sequence of tones defined *musically*.  Do we think of or hear music a cumulative sequence of durations or as  series of events occurring in (our out of) sync with a regular pulse or beat, or pattern of pulses or beats?  So of course there is an element of "absolute" and an element of "relative" in any specification.  The same could be said for pitch as well.  Do we hear pitch in music just as a particular frequency, or do we hear it as a position within a scale or an interval between notes of a chord? 

My goal is for the notation to expose the relationships that we actually hear in the music.  So for pitch, the scale position and harmonic  intervals of notes is "heard", so it should be "shown" as well. That is, shown directly, e.g. by "shape notes" for scale degrees or isomorphic notation for intervals, so the same visual distance in the notation always corresponds to the same aural "distance" in the musical sound.

If we were to apply the same concept to timing and rhythm, it would be clear visually from the notation where each note fits into the pattern of beats and counts that make up the rhythmic pattern of the music, so perhaps we should insist on "time isomorphism" as well, where equal visual separation of notation corresponds to equal time separation of sound.

For that matter, the pattern of beats and counts itself should be notated.  Counts can be done with a grid or ruler.  As for the "beats", I suggested something like poetic scansion, or something like a drum track. If the beat were everywhere the same repeating pattern, it might be specified in an extended time signature, which is essentially what we have now, implicitly.  But I think more flexibility is needed.

In any case, I think TN does a poor job of notating the "beat".  BTW, to the extent TN does include notation for beats, it uses one more  orthographic feature that I neglected to include in my prior list--the accent mark < .

To summarize, my view is that a score should *look* like what it *sounds* like.  Literally, of course, that is absurd. Or course, I don't mean the literal sound but our mental abstraction of *patterns* of sound, in the pitch and time and rhythm dimensions.

 

Let's consider a thought experiment.  Suppose we had sound recordings of a half-dozen short simple pieces and scores for those pieces, of approximate equal durations.

Spread the scores on a table, play the recordings one after another, and invite people to attempt to match the scores to the songs.  I'd say a good notation should be intuitive enough that the "general public", not specifically educated in music notation, could make the match.

 

Regards,

Joe Austin

aka Dr Tech Daddy

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[Mark Gould]

The problem I have with timeline rhythm notation is around its interpretation, or how or should it incorporate interpretative elements.

Suppose we take the same passage of music, played on different instruments. For reasons of timbre and performance practicality, the same TN notated music will appear quite different in a 'piano roll' notation, if we notate 'how it sounds'. Think of the difference between a vibraphone and a xylophone - would you indicate the length of the note according to the decay of the sound, or the length of the note as required?

What about articulations? How short is a staccato - how would it be notated if incorporated into the 'brick' of a note? A tenuto - how much longer than a normal note duration? If you indicate these things as well as the note 'bricks' then someone reading the notation who is told 'these bricks indicate how long the note is' and then told 'but we need to play them shorter or longer according to the articulations' might reasonably think there was something wrong with this notation.

How would a fermata be indicated? How many beats to indicate on the timeline?

Also, ornaments, tremolandi, tremoli, trills, grace-notes - how would you indicate them with points on an abstract timeline, when their interpretation gives more or less time to them depending on the phrasing?

And, for phrasing - playing slurs on the piano usually leads to a slight overlap of the notes (piano), but for other instruments would not (voice) - would the notation show this is it is 'how it sounds'?

Would you notate an accelerando as shortening of note bricks? And similarly a decelerando as a lengthening? Surely it is the 'beat' that is slowing' not the durations lengthening. When playback is rendered on a midi 'piano' roll, all the subtle variations of tempo - rubata - rit etc, these all play havoc with 'quantisation' (which duration is meant) - I'd argue that to notate 'how it sounds' would similarly need to show this in the same way.

The example suggested of matching performances rendered using a 'piano roll' type notation to their recordings is true in so far as the notation 'renders' the performance. However, each performance is a valid *interpretation* of the TN (i.e. abstract) rhythms. To place one of the piano rolls in front of a performer will only result in an attempt to duplicate that performance - which is not interpretation, but 'copying'.

Language is notated using symbols and alphabets, not directly phonetic. Notating language 'how it sounds' with phonetics preserves dialects and other information, which interesting, but would lead individuals to think this was the notation for the language when in fact, the language deals with symbols separately - hence people with different dialects can read the same prose, even though they may speak it very differently.

Personally, I'm not convinced of the use of a timeline notation, as it puts interpretative items into the duration of the music. The differing ways the same notation can be performed by different instruments adds to this. An abstract 'this is half a beat' symbol is always that, even when we indicate a tenuto or staccato over it, yet the timeline 'bricks' would be of different sizes. 

There are many other reasons, such as voice layout where voices share one stave where timeline notation becomes messy - especially where rhythms are different between the voices - to which division lines/time points do the notes refer for their placement?

Dodeka notation is a sort of 'timeline' notation, and it too falls into the same problems. These notations look 'simple' but when presented with any reasonably complex music, rapidly become cumbersome and unreadable.

This is not to say TN is great, not can I say my own 'solution' is great. But I don't get the arguments that timeline notation is better than TN.

Mark

[Waller Dominique]

Hi Joe,

>For example, I tend to hear a short note following a long one as belonging to the following motif, with the sustained note ending the preceding motif. But TN typically groups a short note as the end of a previous “beat” rather than as a “pickup” to the next beat.

I quite understand your point here and feel very much like you. But I don’t think writing things differently would be a progress. It’s possible to create the feeling you wish by adding a slur, so as to clarify groups of notes inside a regular sequence of beats. Historically speaking, it took time to have equal length of time between bars. It was not the case with the first tablatures, in which bar-lines were displayed irregularly, sometimes for rhythmic grouping and sometimes for obscure reasons.

Besides, your mantra through years has been: Music is poetry, why write it like prose?

But I think you’re much more demanding on musical notation then you are on poetry. Because precisely, poetry (in its classical form at least) displays sentences in groups of equal length like musical bars, sometimes independently of the meaning. On the contrary, prose is more faithful to the meaning and inner rhythm of the sentence since commas freely separate group of thoughts, and also at the same time allow a pause to breathe. In typography, they talk about grammatical commas versus physiological commas, but very often both coincide naturally – the sense and the breath. So if musical notation is already written like prose, like you claim, then I think maybe it’s better like this. And I think it somehow resembles poetry already by the regularity of its bar-lines, like I’ve mentioned. Dominique

envoyé : 15 juillet 2021 à 21:02
de : drtec...@gmail.com
à : musicn...@googlegroups.com
objet : *** SPAM *** RE: [MNP] Time Values in Alternative Notation

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[drtec...@gmail.com]

Dominique,

Ah, I guess there are always multiple opinions on any issue.

I suppose what I really want is the *tools* to print the music the way I like it, to make it easier for me to read and play,

and let you print it the way you like it.  As it is, many of the tools on the market make it extremely difficult if not impossible to do things we talk about here, even to break lines between bars, for example.  And almost nobody lets us print 12-position staves. Few of the proposals on this website can actually be produced with commonly-available software.

 

But I think my concern goes beyond that.  I'm also trying to *understand* the music.  I'm searching for notations that expose more of the "musical" structure of the music, that assist in recognition of the form, the rhythm, the harmony, the melody, as well as just the raw notes.  These might not be notations used for performance, but perhaps for composition, or for study.  Reducing ideas to some formal representation has been a tool of science for centuries.  It not only aids communication, but I believe it also aids understanding.  And potentially it reduces the learning curve for new students who what to  master what is known and done before exploring what is yet to be discovered and accomplished.  I would say the existence and persistence of this site, and the continuing emergence of "better" notations, is evidence that the traditional notation is inadequate in many respects.

 

And I am particularly interested in notations that can be produced by individuals, using tools like computers or more recently tablets and the web, because that is my professional field. I know that the computer is, in principle, capable of rendering any of the notations that have been proposed on this site. And I regret that developers of commercial software seem more interested in "enforcing the rules" than in supporting experimentation.

 

Studying notation "improvements" also suggests potential improvements in the way music and instrumental performance are taught, but that is a subject beyond my professional talents. Although, as a professional educator (but not in music) and as a music student myself, I feel qualified to express opinions on how well the method would seem to work for me.

 

Your point about poetry is well taken.  There is a certain multiplicity of structures, and potential conflict between the semantics and the syntax, between the sentence structure and rhythm and rhyme, between phrases and bars.  But wouldn't it be nice to have the freedom to emphasize one or the other, without being forced in one direction just to save paper and ink?

 

Over the years I have "implemented" and tried, to one degree or another, about a half-dozen different notations posted on this site.  I've even simply "improved" TN by such things as splitting lines at phrase boundaries and coloring sharps and flats. I'd say any of there notations are easier to play than TN. But I must say it's proven to be more trouble to convert TN into a "better" notation than to actually learn to "read" the TN itself.  (But I don't think I actually *read* it--I think I simply eventually memorize it and use the notation as a cue to jog my memory.)  So why bother?  Well, for "science" sake.  And in the hope that eventually we will have tools to make transcription easier.

 

So we keep at it!

 

Joe Austin

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[drtec...@gmail.com]

Mark,

I'm not sure I understand your objection.  I think we are seeking a notation that encodes the "essence" of the musical idea in an intuitive, easily interpreted way.

Piano-roll of course works very well for controlling a piano to reproduce a performance.  It seems to be becoming popular as a "falling notes" notation for "teaching" piano songs on YouTube. But I don't imagine the virtuoso pianist of the future will bring a tablet with a "falling notes" score to the stage at Carnegie Hall, but who knows? That's not to say she would not have used it as a student.

 

When I say the notation should reflect what the music "sounds like", I'm of course taking in abstractions.

Consider guitar tablature.  Can one look at it and "hear" the chord progression?  I doubt it.

But I can "look at" the notes in my hymnal and tell that I'm on a different page than what the choir is singing.

 

It seems to me that we who post here have focused our attention to pitch and have neglected rhythm.

I think, in fact, the rhythm notation of TN is more in need of reform than the pitch notation.

(I suspect that might be true for music education in general, but I have no real data to back that up.)

Time-proportional notation seems to be a valuable contribution to that reform, as the 12-step isomorphic staff was to pitch notation.

But I agree time-proportional alone is not the complete answer--we also need to identify the "beat" or stress pattern.

And there are alternatives to a duration ribbon.

 

Joe Austin

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[J R Freestone]

Hi Mark,

I'm sorry, I don't think I was very clear last time. I'll try responding to your points again...

On 16/07/2021 14:53, Mark Gould wrote:

The problem I have with timeline rhythm notation is around its interpretation, or how or should it incorporate interpretative elements.

Sure, but generally I'd say it doesn't need to, and often it should not.

Suppose we take the same passage of music, played on different instruments. For reasons of timbre and performance practicality, the same TN notated music will appear quite different in a 'piano roll' notation, if we notate 'how it sounds'. Think of the difference between a vibraphone and a xylophone - would you indicate the length of the note according to the decay of the sound, or the length of the note as required?

No, generally you would notate it just as you would in TN, in the sense that a crotchet in TN is a filled head with a stem and no beams, while in "piano-roll" (as you seem to prefer to call it) a crotchet would occupy the appropriate portion of a bar. In 4/4, this would be a quarter of the width of the bar.

What about articulations? How short is a staccato - how would it be notated if incorporated into the 'brick' of a note? A tenuto - how much longer than a normal note duration? If you indicate these things as well as the note 'bricks' then someone reading the notation who is told 'these bricks indicate how long the note is' and then told 'but we need to play them shorter or longer according to the articulations' might reasonably think there was something wrong with this notation.

I did give an example of how staccato might work, but instead, if you prefer, you could put a dot over the note head. In other words, a composer indicating "this note is staccato" doesn't impose a particular length for the note (other than saying "it's short"). It might be done with a notehead that has no duration line attached, but this isn't a proportional measurement of the duration (just the width of the notehead), it's just a different way to indicate an articulation is required.

How would a fermata be indicated? How many beats to indicate on the timeline?

Again, you're missing the point, and as I said, many expressive marks can simply be re-used from TN if that's what works best. On the other hand, if a composer particularly wishes a fermata to extend for three bars (given those bars have a regular meter), they might indicate that with a duration line spanning three bars. Mostly, this is unnecessary, and there is no difference in TN: again, mostly a sign is used and the player does what they like, but for all I know some composers might indicate a specific length of hold. All sorts of things are done nowadays, including writing essays to accompany a piece.

Also, ornaments, tremolandi, tremoli, trills, grace-notes - how would you indicate them with points on an abstract timeline, when their interpretation gives more or less time to them depending on the phrasing?

Ditto - generally, these can be given a nominal mark. Some editors score pieces with otnaments with the nominal marks accompanied by an expansion - I have a version of the Aria from the Goldberg Variations that spells out (a suggested version of) how each note of the trills might be played.

And, for phrasing - playing slurs on the piano usually leads to a slight overlap of the notes (piano), but for other instruments would not (voice) - would the notation show this is it is 'how it sounds'?

Seriously? The composer might indicate "voice" or "piano", and the timbre and other characteristics of the instrument will affect the sound. In TN, the same issue is there - why do you imagine it suddenly arises if we use a different way to notate a crotchet or semibreve?

However, again, a timeline version would give a composer the ability to show exactly how much one note on the piano should "overlap" the other, by the extent of its duration line, if such a composer wished to be so explicit. This is not a necessity, just an additional option.

Would you notate an accelerando as shortening of note bricks? And similarly a decelerando as a lengthening?

No.

Surely it is the 'beat' that is slowing' not the durations lengthening.

Of course. TN bars also don't stretch and compress to show accelerando or decelerando. The only stretching and shortening of timeline bars (I would suggest) would be to accommodate lots of notes or few notes, to save space. The longer or shorter physical bars, it would be understood, aren't different lengths in time. TN does similar things.

When playback is rendered on a midi 'piano' roll, all the subtle variations of tempo - rubata - rit etc, these all play havoc with 'quantisation' (which duration is meant) - I'd argue that to notate 'how it sounds' would similarly need to show this in the same way.

And I'm not suggesting a "how it sounds" notation. You've introduced that idea.

The example suggested of matching performances rendered using a 'piano roll' type notation to their recordings is true in so far as the notation 'renders' the performance. However, each performance is a valid *interpretation* of the TN (i.e. abstract) rhythms. To place one of the piano rolls in front of a performer will only result in an attempt to duplicate that performance - which is not interpretation, but 'copying'.

Yes. That's not the idea at all.

Language is notated using symbols and alphabets, not directly phonetic. Notating language 'how it sounds' with phonetics preserves dialects and other information, which interesting, but would lead individuals to think this was the notation for the language when in fact, the language deals with symbols separately - hence people with different dialects can read the same prose, even though they may speak it very differently.

I'm afraid this is all a bit convoluted and not quite the point. In fact, there is no absolute difference between a "notation" of a language with "symbols and alphabets" and with phonetics, since phonetics, just like letters, are approximations, indicating wider or narrower categories of sound; they do not code for an exact sound in either case. And you mean "accents", not "dialects" - people with different dialects cannot always read the same prose, since a dialect includes words that may not be in the reader's vocabulary, so they may not know either how they should sound or what they mean. Quite what all this has to do with the difference between a bunch of symbols that add up to 4 crotchets versus a bunch of lines that show how the same note lengths fit together in time, I'm not sure.

Personally, I'm not convinced of the use of a timeline notation, as it puts interpretative items into the duration of the music.

Well, you seem to have decided that's how it'll work.

The differing ways the same notation can be performed by different instruments adds to this.

Exactly the same in TN.

An abstract 'this is half a beat' symbol is always that, even when we indicate a tenuto or staccato over it, yet the timeline 'bricks' would be of different sizes.

If you invent that system, sure. That's not generally what I'd do (though there may be specific cases where this is superior).

There are many other reasons, such as voice layout where voices share one stave where timeline notation becomes messy - especially where rhythms are different between the voices - to which division lines/time points do the notes refer for their placement?

That's an interesting challenge, although you seem to be talking about two things here. I'd say that voices in TN "become messy", because EACH VOICE in EACH BAR has to keep to the rule of all its values adding up to the time signature, peppering the stave they share with rests that don't always clearly indicate which voice they belong to, especially if voices cross each other. If we break that stupid rule and don't have rests at all, just a symbol for each note and how long it plays, the problem goes away. What remains is the question of which voice is which (not that this was every completely clear in TN). And therein lies the challenge for the notation designer - I ain't giving away my solution until later.

Dodeka notation is a sort of 'timeline' notation, and it too falls into the same problems. These notations look 'simple' but when presented with any reasonably complex music, rapidly become cumbersome and unreadable.

That's true, and is one of the challenges.

This is not to say TN is great, not can I say my own 'solution' is great. But I don't get the arguments that timeline notation is better than TN.

But you seem to have entirely misunderstood the idea. Do you get it now?

¬~ lettersquash

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[Mark Gould]

John F

"But you seem to have entirely misunderstood the idea. Do you get it now?"

No I don't get your idea at all. Mostly on account of we have nothing as EVIDENCE of it.

In any case "I ain't giving away my solution until later." Means I am attempting to critique something that I am not allowed to see. I'd call that unfair. You say I'm wrong but fail to produce ANY EVIDENCE WHATSOEVER that it is wrong.

Therefore I have no option but to dismiss your notation as entirely imaginary. It doesn't exist.

Show it and we can discuss sensibly. But no notation = nothing to discuss.

[J R Freestone]

Hi Joe and Dominique,

I enjoyed your recent exchange on the "poetry" issue. There's a lot in your reply below, Joe, that I agree with, especially the wish for tools to print the music the way you like it, your frustration that this isn't available, and also your optimism about the continuing process we're engaged in.

I did find your "poetry" issue a bit odd, ever since I first read it, although it sounds like "a lovely idea". I couldn't work out exactly what it was that I didn't get about it, and Dominique certainly clarified some of it with his comparison with prose, which has looser rules, not tighter ones, than poetry. Or rather, a certain traditional approach to poetry has lots of fixed rules - poets in modern times write how they like and probably mess about with presentation more than prose writers! Maybe that's what you have in mind!

But my other qualm about that poetic approach is deeper. I feel that notated music should be quite practical and fairly precise. The feelings, the meanings we attach, and also the massive range of technical issues concerning expression, where phrases break, etc., which different players interpret differently - these, to my mind, arise out of a piece as a whole, through familiarity with it and study of the genre, and personal preference, just as Mark points out - we interpret written music differently, but it is the same score.

So, I prefer an engineering approach. This note goes here, that note goes there, in pitch and time, volume, etc., spelled out reasonably clearly. There's no need for it to look fancy (one of the big drawbacks for alternative notation design is that it's rarely as pretty as TN) or to tell me that a phrase ends somewhere other than a bar line by starting another row of the score. But I'd be fine with you having the ability to print it that way, for sure.

As you say, after a time, you dispense with the score because you've memorized the piece, so did it really matter where the line broke the phrase? And as you also say, you can notate the notation, adding your own marks to help you - most musicians do some of that, fingerings, accidentals, etc.

I'm just wondering how much to practise some pieces without the score that I've almost memorized (piano pieces, that is). I suppose it helps to keep reading the notes, as a reinforcement of my sight reading skills, including keeping my eyes off the keyboard where possible, but it's tempting to ignore the score now, because sometimes it distracts me and it's easier to make sure I play the right notes and focus on expression more if I start watching my fingers and forget the dots!

It would probably be easier to keep working at learning TN and overcoming its foibles and irritations than to program my new notation app, but then if we don't press on, we'll continue to be stuck with TN.

And of course I agree with your assessment that the time notation needs overhauling. We often complain about the inertia in the music world, when people don't see the need for any changes, but we often don't see our own inertia, and I think this might explain why so many new designs for staffs have just assumed the time notation of TN is fine as it is. It doesn't take a very long time for us to pick up the basics, the way it works, despite the difficulties at the beginning and tricky passages we encounter later, and we start to think it's reasonable and optimal. At first, that's what I was going to do with my system. It's not great, I thought, but it'll do. But the more I look at it, the more ridiculous it seems.

I wonder if it's time for this change to a timeline method, because it is more "engineering" in approach, and people generally deal with engineering approaches to information all the time now in graphics applications. At one time, the letter-per-letter approach - crotchet, minim, semiquaver, semiquaver, spell it all out - probably fitted with the literary abilities of the time, for the few who could even read and write. Most of us now deal with multi-dimensional displays of complex information just following our social media feeds.

Cheers,
John

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[J R Freestone]

Mark,

Don't be silly. We are discussing methods of notating time durations of notes, in general. In order to do that, you seem perfectly happy to talk about how "piano roll" must involve including all expression and instrumental nuances and thus remove the player's ability to interpret the music (complete garbage), and yet apparently my refutation of that with more words you find "unfair".

On the issue of not giving away my solution, I am clearly happy to discuss certain aspects of my approach, or I wouldn't bother with this at all, and that comment related to one specific problem you cited when switching to a timeline approach from a symbolic approach. I'm not going to be bullied into sharing where I'm at with every detail of my notation just because you don't seem to understand that your premise is nonsensical.

If you want to keep arguing that players won't be able to interpret music with a timeline approach, and insist that every staccato or tenuto must be shown by the "brick" of a note, go ahead. If you've given up arguing that, no problem either.

I bothered with a long explanation for a second time because I thought I'd give you the benefit of the doubt, but you act like a troll, and I've had it with you.

Ta-ta
¬~

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[stuar...@gmail.com]

Response to John Keller post of 15 july

Hi John,

Sorry to be so late in responding to your comments to the other John (lettersquash) but here goes:

… your mention of Stuart Byrom and his WYSIWYP, got me looking up his website, and WOW, I was amazed he has his app working for translating musicXML files.  I just converted and looked at Bach prelude and fugue 2 (WTC bk 1).

 Thanks for the WOW.  As a side issue, I want to ask you if you have a good source of MusicXML files.  I’d be very interested to know as I have had little luck in finding a wide variety of files across all musical genres.

  

I imaging that he could probably do a timeline version of ES if I asked nicely.  He must be very knowledgable in programming or coding (Is that what its called?) to know how to turn the XML into such a clear graphic output.

 The other John was correct that I had the programming done by University students (according to my specs).  After a lot of head scratching, I am now able to make modest cosmetic changes and rebuild it.  But I would not be able to write it from scratch.  Among other things, it requires skills with TypeScript, React, and Scalable Vector Graphics.  So I regret that I cannot create an Express Stave app for you.  However, if you were to find someone with these (or equivalent) skills, they could start by looking at my open source app on GitHub (a software development repository). 

 My main goal in designing WYSIWYP was to make reading music as easy as possible while still retaining all of the functionality of TN.  Currently, the app is like an alpha version in that it implements all of the design changes to TN for staves and rhythm, but it still remains to implement all of the TN symbols as well as support for multiple parts.  This will be a huge job.  (BTW my website has a page that discusses the current limitations). My goal with the three months I had with the University students was to create a proof of concept version that could be used for evaluation of my design.

  

It would be good if he posted about his achievements here. Its not important that his system is not 12 step.  Neither is Equiton or Dominique’s system.

 Early on in my design, I decided that the 12-position chromatic staff was too much for beginning students (at least it was for me).  I could well be wrong about this and that is why I am in search of an academic-type to evaluate various AN designs both chromatic and diatonic including mine for musicians of all experience levels.  My greatest achievement will be when that happens, and I will certainly report back here if/when it does.

 I also decided that students who do want to pursue a “serious” commitment to playing an instrument will sooner or later have to learn TN in order to operate in the current music world.  So I also tried to stay as close as possible to the “basics” of TN (horizontal timeline, diatonic scale, noteheads) in order to facilitate learning TN later.  On the other hand, old retirees like me can just stay with WYSIWYP (as long as they can find the MusicXML files they want !).

  

Stuart, if you are listening, Congratulations!

 Your words are music to my ears.  Thanks John !   Wishing you good health.

Stuart