Music Notation Must Die

Gear & Tools Talk
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I recently came across this fantastic video about the origins of music notation, as well as some exploration of the alternatives.

The video is by Youtuber Tantacrul, who is also a composer, UI designer, and music researcher. He is probably best known for being the Head of Design for Muse Group who own MuseScore, Ultimate Guitar, and Audacity amongst other applications.

The video is quite long but is very informative and quite entertaining. It can also be watched across several viewing sessions as it’s broken into sections.

It even has a discussion relating to a topic which was recently discussed in this community, around note naming conventions.

If you are interested in knowing about score and tablature, and where they come from, as well as some of the history of alternative notation schemes, this is the video for you.

Cheers,

Keith

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Sounds interesting, Keith, keen to give that a watch. Thanks for sharing :slightly_smiling_face::+1:

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This does sound interesting - will watch it over the weekend.

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That was very interesting (though I skipped over the first 5 minutes…which inexplicably delves into the history of chess notation for far longer than I found useful).

Trying to learn songs using standard notation has always felt like trying to do long division with Roman numerals to me…possible, but so taxing on my poor brain as to be not worth the effort.

I keep thinking that there’s the potential for a much better system…in the same way that Hindu-Arabic numbering replaced Roman Numerals.

But lots of smart people have tried…it’s obviously not a simple problem!

Great suggestion…subscribed!

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Well, that was an hour reasonably spent. I feel I actually learned something and being that it is Saturday, I can with good conscious, go back to bed. :joy:

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Cheers, Keith, you do waste a lot of my time with your quirky recommendations but there’s almost always something worthwhile in the content :laughing:

  • The bonus of learning chess notation
  • Unexpected flashbacks of singing Gregorian plain chant as an altar boy for six years in a Benedictine monastery’s boarding school
  • The fantastic phrase: “a Jovian disregard of reality” :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

All to the dulcet tones of a soft Dublin accent.
What’s not to like?

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Always open to adding to my trove of useless knowledge, I made the best of my hour by baking chocolate chip cookies while watching this. Pretty interesting. Actually, the chess game explanation was the most gripping segment. These days anyone can put their doctoral thesis out to the world.