Notation Must Die: The Battle For How We Read Music

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Strong rec PaulDavisThe1st · 2024-02 · on “Analysis of Bach's information-dense music”

[this video] "Notation Must Die" ... excellent deep-ish dive into music notation by the inimitable Tantacrul

Recommends james-revisoai · 2023-11 · on “Minimalist Affordances: Making the Right Tradeoffs”

I really like the points about symbols to the end, but am not sure the Music notation hits the right note. The symbols - besides Quarter note - for a rest/not playing are intuitive to almost every learner. They are just so different, so square, so alien compared to the notes in melody, that you don't make the mistake of playing a rest note in general. Yes, it's hard to learn the symbols that involve playing something (especially clefs and timing not being linear - see: [this video] for an amazing "documentary" on notation systems), but often finding the pitch/right note is the larger challenge (for beginners) than understanding the meaning of notes. Is this because we do not teach people to play

Recommends oriolid · 2024-01 · on “Apple Vision Pro review”

The problem is that once you get past the very initial stage, you want to read ahead of what you play at the moment. At that moment Synthesia-style falling blocks notation becomes difficult to read because the blocks don't have any position reference besides the keys and no time values. Even the scrolling sheet music or tab is distracting compared stationary black and white. With guitar there's the additional problem that you can't see both hands at the same time, and usually you won't be looking at your hands at all. And if you ever want to play without help from the app, you need to learn to find the notes anyway. This is by the way a great explanation of all the attempts to make music eas

Recommends PaulDavisThe1st · 2024-07 · on “Musical Notation for Modular Synthesizers”

Obligatory (long-form) watch if you're going to continue wondering about this: [this video] "Notation must die" by Tantacrul

Recommends javier123454321 · 2024-07 · on “Playing guitar tablatures in Rust”

Super cool, great job. Looks like a really fun project. This really highlights why sheet notation is so much better at describing music than tablature. The advantage of tabs is that they tell you which version of the same note to play (You can play the same note in up to 6 places in the guitar). However, sheet notation tells you precisely the duration of each note, and can often include the intended articulation. Writing music is fascinating, here is an excellent breakdown of different systems which have been developed, and how they came to be: [this video]

Recommends midenginedcoupe · 2025-11 · on “Show HN: See chords as flags – Visual harmony of top composers on musescore”

Pro jazz trombonist here. All there is to usefully say about piano roll notation, with or without colours has pretty much already been said. And if you want more (much more) detail, then Tantacrul (designer on MuseScore) has done a great video. [this video] The only useful head's up I can give is the current position marker on your playback is quite a long way behind the audio, around 1-2 beats on the one piece I tried.

Recommends Slow_Hand · 2026-06 · on “Ear Training Practice Exercises”

If you want an excellent explanation of why proposals for new notation systems like you’re suggesting have been developed (and failed) Tantacrul has made an excellent video describing the history and tradeoffs that lead us to our current system: [this video] He’s product lead at MuseGroup developing notation software and his expertise lies at the intersection of music composition, UX design, and programming.

Cites QVVRP4nYz · 2024-01 · on “Notation Must Die: The Battle for How We Read Music [video]”

I watched it before and the thing that I will forever remember from it was the "jubilate": [this video]