yet another simplified notation
Stuart Byrom
I have hesitated to post on this forum since I am only a recent beginner to music. But after seeing Martin's recent post ("New notation for an old beginner") and how graciously received it was, I am emboldened to chime in. Similar to him, I am 70, retired from a job in technology, and recently started to learn to read and play piano on my own. And, no surprise, I found traditional notation (TN) to be neither very logical nor intuitive. So as a retired engineer with some experience in human factors design of user interfaces, I of course decided to try to re-design it.
I did so without any research to see what other work had already been done in simplifying notation since I did not want to be biased in my design. Only afterwards did I begin research and found out about the MNMA and MNP and the many other ideas and proposals already out there. I was gratified to find that the same problems I saw with TN are well recognized universally. At the same time, I was disappointed that many if not most of my ideas were not totally new. On the other hand, I think some of them are in fact original and that all of them combined together result in a unique and comprehensive solution. Therefore, I believe they may have merit for my target audience, beginners and dilettantes, and so I have decided to forge on and put my ideas out for review.
motivation and intent
My goal is to make it easier for new students of music to read music and spend more time learning to play, and enjoy playing. It is not an attempt to define a new standard to replace TN nor to compete with proposals described on the MNP website. I see those proposals as excellent solutions to the logical problems of TN and allow experienced musicians and musicologists to visualize tonal relationships on a chromatic scale. For my part, I simply want to propose an alternative approach that will be as simple as possible to read by beginners. I want the notation to be visually intuitive requiring a minimum amount of mental gymnastics to get from notation to fingers.
To encapsulate this concept I coined the name WYSIWYP, "what you see is what you play " (note 1). As far as I can search I think this is original although I was still disappointed just to see a number of occurrences of the standard term WYSIWYG on several alternative notation websites. Musicians who are, or aspire to be, "serious" musicians will have no interest in this proposal (unless they'd like to make the musical lives easier for their kids and grandkids). And, certainly I am not trying to convert anyone who has already learned TN. However, I believe many beginning and amateur musicians would be thrilled to be able to quickly learn to play the music they love. After learning the joys of playing music, I would hope and expect many students would indeed want to become more "serious" and would want, and need, to learn to read TN. For this reason, some design choices were made to avoid unnecessarily veering too far off course from TN.
Without further delay, the following is a brief summary of my proposal.
WYSIWYP Simplified Notation
For this discussion, I group the essential design elements into three main areas: staves, key signatures, and rhythm. A sample of a simple tune in the proposed notation is shown as a reference in the following brief description of the essential elements of the design. Note that it's not as nicely presented as I think it could be but this is the best I could do with a spreadsheet. As a budding piano player, there is clearly a keyboard slant to this discussion, but the approach should still work for other instruments.
Staves
As with most of the alternative notations I have seen, every octave has the same format regardless of staff or staff position (a MNP requirement). And while chromatic octaves are a requirement of the MNP, WYSIWYP retains the diatonic staff. Thus I made the tradeoff of fewer octave vertical positions for the price of having to explicitly differentiate among notes as does TN (ignoring key signatures for the moment). The designers of chromatic octaves with fewer than twelve vertical staff positions apparently came to the same conclusion. Of course, the price of the tradeoff is that musicians must make a real-time playing adjustment according to the notehead on the position. I suppose the small "benefit" for WYSIWYP students who later want to learn TN, is that the idea of some real-time playing adjustments will not be a new one. I recognize that without the chromatic octave, one will not be able to see clearly the tonal relationships among notes. Again, I can only emphasize that my target audience, I believe, is only interested in playing tunes and not analyzing them.
The WYSIWYP design takes advantage of the fact that there are two easily identifiable groups of keys on a keyboard because they are separated by the absence of a black key. The "C group" is C-D-E and the "F group" is F-G-A-B. So WYSIWYP octaves have only two lines, one on C and one on F, the first notes in the two groups. Three notes (noteheads) may then be associated visually with the C line: B underneath and touching the line, C covering the line, and D above the line and touching it. This relationship between a line and three consecutive notes is not new (e.g., it is described this way on the ClairNote web site). Likewise the E, F, and G notes are associated with the F line. That leaves one note, A, isolated and not touching either line. Thus, each note has a unique visual appearance relative to the octave lines. The seven vertical positions of the octave always map to the seven naturals A through G. With this design, I try to mentally visualize red C keys and blue F keys on the keyboard. I found it took only a few minutes to learn how to quickly map a note to a white keyboard key in the octave.
On the staff, the C line has a number associated with it to indicate the number of the octave when numbered left to right on the keyboard. Numbering octaves is another idea that exists in many other alternative notations. So with the octave number and the octave position, a beginning musician can rather quickly find any white key on the keyboard.
With WYSIWYP, ledger lines are not used but instead a staff can be "flexible". A staff can be created with any number of octaves and partial octaves, where partial octaves are the C and F groups. I like leaving a space between treble and bass staves as TN does in order to insert lyrics and better separate left from right hands. But this is not required. If there is a space, I also like to connect the bottom treble line with the top bass line on the left (assuming they're the same note). I found that even when stacking up several octaves to create a staff, the look was very "clean" and not overwhelming in vertical space or number of lines. The lowest octave number in a staff does not have to be fixed; the staff can "scroll" by changing the octave number. Note that in my example, the octave lines are color coded but they could just as well be a solid and a dashed black lines (e.g., for hand drawing octaves).
I have searched for an octave approach exactly like this but have not yet found it.
key signatures
WYSIWYP still uses noteheads but there are only three forms used to designate explicitly a natural, a sharp, or a flat. These are visually represented by a circle, an upward pointing triangle ("augment"), and a downward pointing triangle ("diminish") respectively. They are all in black. Since every note is explicit, there is no need for a key signature to be remembered nor all of the rules for overriding it (or not). However, I think the key signature name should be included with the title of the work.
The only real-time playing adjustment necessary for a sharp or flat on a keyboard is to play an adjoining black key to the white key specified by the staff position. Furthermore, one could opt to always use sharp-only or flat-only notation to keep things even more simple no matter in what keys works are written. I acknowledge there are tons of proposals for eliminating key signatures with explicit noteheads but I have not found one exactly the same as this. Several chromatic proposals with fewer than twelve vertical staff positions also use circles and triangles. However, they do not have a fixed mapping definition of shape to naturals, sharps, and flats as does WYSIWYP.
rhythm
To me, the display of note duration on a MIDI editor looks logical and intuitive. But of course I'm an engineer. The duration of the note is clear within the measure as well as its relationship to other notes on the same and different staves. So in WYSIWYP, a shade of grey "stripe" is displayed behind the black notehead (where the tone starts) and continues horizontally until the tone ends. All notation concerning duration (such as ties and "dots") is consolidated into a single stripe to represent a single sustained tone. Stripes may cross measure boundaries. For hand drawn notation, I substitute a simple line for the stripe and terminate it with an "X" to make it visually clearer.
In addition to measures, individual beats are indicated by "tick" marks within the measures. Thus the time signature is visually obvious (beats/measure) and the student simply plays the notes as seen with respect to the beat. Symbols for rests are not needed. I have found several proposals that have a similar strategy for displaying note duration visually (e.g., Dodeka) and beats (e.g., Klavarskribo). However, I have not seen a combination of notehead plus stripes such as this proposal. And, I acknowledge that this veers pretty very far off course from TN in the interest of making it visually intuitive.
other notation
Notation not changed or replaced by WYSIWYP is retained, such as slurs and dynamics. They would be displayed in the same manner as TN. In this way, it is a complete notation system.
the means and conditions for success
To implement any new notation, there will of course need to be an application that runs on a screen device that will convert TN to it (note 2). I have read about software support on the MNP web site but I cannot yet tell if they could support this proposal in terms of defining custom diatonic staves, noteheads, and rhythm. I have started going through the forum to find some answers but I confess I'm a little overwhelmed by it, so I welcome any direction.
I recognize that with any tool, it may be that custom code will have to be written, but I hope it will not be necessary to write an app completely from scratch. Alas, my programming days are over (unless one could write an app in FORTRAN or ALGOL!). So I am in search of the simplest way my proposal could be implemented as well as someone to work with me on it if programming is indeed required. I've dreamed about enlisting a young and enthusiastic university student majoring or minoring in both IT and music who could use this proposal as a research project. And if it turned out to be a promising alternative then perhaps this student would want to become its promoter. It's my thinking that a simplified notation such as this one will only happen in a grass roots fashion. And like an internet meme, it will only succeed when it is discovered on the internet, found to be useful and "cool", and disseminated.
in summary
I hope this proposal proves to be a workable approach to making notation as simple and as intuitive as possible. It attempts to address all of the major issues with TN with respect to staves, key signatures, and rhythm. I do want to re-emphasize that my goal is not to replace TN but to offer an alternative for beginners. At the same time, its basic constructs for staves and noteheads are not so completely different that later learning TN would not be a total reboot (note 3).
Please forgive my explanation of the design process itself, but I spent a lot of time trying many different ideas and approaches before settling on this one. And I confess I am selfishly trying to blunt criticisms that I just stole ideas; I assure you that they were new to me at the time I "re-invented" them (for whatever that is worth). In any case, I hope that some of my ideas are indeed original and that the proposal as a whole is unique and has merit for consideration and evaluation.
Of course, in the end, it should be all about making music. And I think musicians should use all the tools available to make that as easy as possible.
I humbly thank you for taking the time to review this proposal. I have tried to keep this as concise as possible so many details and side topics have not been included for the sake of brevity. I welcome any reactions, thoughts, corrections, criticisms, or advice.
note 1 WYSIWYP is an expired US trademark for "What you see is what you print". It was a system for faithfully matching a computer's printed output to what is seen on the computer's display screen. The system is no longer available and thus the trademark has expired.
note 2 Flexible staves, scrolling octaves, and sharp/flat-only options are examples of many other possible customization options with an app. I believe musicians should be able to customize their personal sheet music to their own needs and tastes. This is a topic I will not expand in this post.
note 3 TN concepts retained by WYSIWYP include:
diatonic octave
horizontal timeline
noteheads
real-time playing adjustment for accidentals.
A software app could also help a musician to transition from WYSIWYP to TN, but that's yet another topic I won't pursue here.
Joseph Austin
I have hesitated to post on this forum since I am only a recent beginner to music. But after seeing Martin's recent post ("New notation for an old beginner") and how graciously received it was, I am emboldened to chime in. Similar to him, I am 70, retired from a job in technology, and recently started to learn to read and play piano on my own. And, no surprise, I found traditional notation (TN) to be neither very logical nor intuitive. So as a retired engineer with some experience in human factors design of user interfaces, I of course decided to try to re-design it.
I did so without any research to see what other work had already been done in simplifying notation since I did not want to be biased in my design. Only afterwards did I begin research and found out about the MNMA and MNP and the many other ideas and proposals already out there. I was gratified to find that the same problems I saw with TN are well recognized universally. At the same time, I was disappointed that many if not most of my ideas were not totally new. On the other hand, I think some of them are in fact original and that all of them combined together result in a unique and comprehensive solution. Therefore, I believe they may have merit for my target audience, beginners and dilettantes, and so I have decided to forge on and put my ideas out for review.
motivation and intent
My goal is to make it easier for new students of music to read music and spend more time learning to play, and enjoy playing. It is not an attempt to define a new standard to replace TN nor to compete with proposals described on the MNP website. I see those proposals as excellent solutions to the logical problems of TN and allow experienced musicians and musicologists to visualize tonal relationships on a chromatic scale. For my part, I simply want to propose an alternative approach that will be as simple as possible to read by beginners. I want the notation to be visually intuitive requiring a minimum amount of mental gymnastics to get from notation to fingers.
To encapsulate this concept I coined the name WYSIWYP, "what you see is what you play " (note 1). As far as I can search I think this is original although I was still disappointed just to see a number of occurrences of the standard term WYSIWYG on several alternative notation websites. Musicians who are, or aspire to be, "serious" musicians will have no interest in this proposal (unless they'd like to make the musical lives easier for their kids and grandkids). And, certainly I am not trying to convert anyone who has already learned TN. However, I believe many beginning and amateur musicians would be thrilled to be able to quickly learn to play the music they love. After learning the joys of playing music, I would hope and expect many students would indeed want to become more "serious" and would want, and need, to learn to read TN. For this reason, some design choices were made to avoid unnecessarily veering too far off course from TN.
Without further delay, the following is a brief summary of my proposal.
WYSIWYP Simplified Notation
For this discussion, I group the essential design elements into three main areas: staves, key signatures, and rhythm. A sample of a simple tune in the proposed notation is shown as a reference in the following brief description of the essential elements of the design. Note that it's not as nicely presented as I think it could be but this is the best I could do with a spreadsheet. As a budding piano player, there is clearly a keyboard slant to this discussion, but the approach should still work for other instruments.
<She loves you - combined example small.jpg>
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Joseph Austin
Sent from my iPad
> On Apr 11, 2019, at 3:43 PM, Joseph Austin <drtec...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Stuart,
> For WYSIWY
>
>
John Keller
I have hesitated to post on this forum since I am only a recent beginner to music. But after seeing Martin's recent post ("New notation for an old beginner") and how graciously received it was, I am emboldened to chime in. Similar to him, I am 70, retired from a job in technology, and recently started to learn to read and play piano on my own. And, no surprise, I found traditional notation (TN) to be neither very logical nor intuitive. So as a retired engineer with some experience in human factors design of user interfaces, I of course decided to try to re-design it.
I did so without any research to see what other work had already been done in simplifying notation since I did not want to be biased in my design. Only afterwards did I begin research and found out about the MNMA and MNP and the many other ideas and proposals already out there. I was gratified to find that the same problems I saw with TN are well recognized universally. At the same time, I was disappointed that many if not most of my ideas were not totally new. On the other hand, I think some of them are in fact original and that all of them combined together result in a unique and comprehensive solution. Therefore, I believe they may have merit for my target audience, beginners and dilettantes, and so I have decided to forge on and put my ideas out for review.
motivation and intent
My goal is to make it easier for new students of music to read music and spend more time learning to play, and enjoy playing. It is not an attempt to define a new standard to replace TN nor to compete with proposals described on the MNP website. I see those proposals as excellent solutions to the logical problems of TN and allow experienced musicians and musicologists to visualize tonal relationships on a chromatic scale. For my part, I simply want to propose an alternative approach that will be as simple as possible to read by beginners. I want the notation to be visually intuitive requiring a minimum amount of mental gymnastics to get from notation to fingers.
To encapsulate this concept I coined the name WYSIWYP, "what you see is what you play " (note 1). As far as I can search I think this is original although I was still disappointed just to see a number of occurrences of the standard term WYSIWYG on several alternative notation websites. Musicians who are, or aspire to be, "serious" musicians will have no interest in this proposal (unless they'd like to make the musical lives easier for their kids and grandkids). And, certainly I am not trying to convert anyone who has already learned TN. However, I believe many beginning and amateur musicians would be thrilled to be able to quickly learn to play the music they love. After learning the joys of playing music, I would hope and expect many students would indeed want to become more "serious" and would want, and need, to learn to read TN. For this reason, some design choices were made to avoid unnecessarily veering too far off course from TN.
Without further delay, the following is a brief summary of my proposal.
WYSIWYP Simplified Notation
For this discussion, I group the essential design elements into three main areas: staves, key signatures, and rhythm. A sample of a simple tune in the proposed notation is shown as a reference in the following brief description of the essential elements of the design. Note that it's not as nicely presented as I think it could be but this is the best I could do with a spreadsheet. As a budding piano player, there is clearly a keyboard slant to this discussion, but the approach should still work for other instruments.
<She loves you - combined example small.jpg>
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Stuart Byrom
Hey John,
Thanks for responding to my post. My “teacher” is my wife who plays quite well. After inventing my notation, I created sheet music for a number of tunes (with a spreadsheet) to try out my new scheme. I found it worked well for me but the transcription was way too much trouble. This is why I am pursuing an app for it.
I created WYSIWYP partly as a mental exercise to keep my brain active in my retirement years. But without the app, I decided to bite the bullet and learn TN. Now that’s a mental exercise. I’m using Alfred’s Basic Adult Piano course which starts off on white keys. I’m happy with it but my progress in learning to map the treble and bass notes to the keyboard is very, very slow.
I have indeed looked at Express Stave during my look around at alternative notations. I think it does a great job of solving the keyboard mapping with its chromatic scale. As described in my post, I decided to go the diatonic route while also trying to remedy the rhythm problems I see with TN.
I read on the MNP page for ES that you made a small design change to accommodate Finale. Can I infer that you have a working software solution for presenting ES ? Maybe it's out on the web and I just can't find it. By the way, I’m curious to know if you are a professional musician, or musicologist, or music teacher, or all of the above ?
Regards,
Stuart
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John Keller
- Liszt: Liebestraume
- Liszt: Waldesrauschen
- Liszt: Gnomenreigen
- Liszt: La Campanella
- Liszt: Un Sospiro
- Liszt: Mephisto Waltz No 1
- Liszt: Rakoczy March
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