Thanks a lot for watching. This video took around 8 months to produce and involved a reasonable amount of production costs. If you would like to help me finance my future videos and get a sneak look at how I put them together, please consider becoming a patron. www.patreon.com/Tantacrul. Alternatively, you can support me by signing up to view non-youtube content on Nebula: go.nebula.tv/tantacrul I'm also a founding member of a really cool Discord server too. Come check it out! Discord: t.co/a3oYi1Rbnc?amp=1

Problem: There are 15 different standards in the XYZ industry. Proposed Solution: Create a standard that unifies all standards in the XYZ industry. Result: There are now 16 different standards in the XYZ industry. Edit: xkcd 927

You did a good job of covering Medieval notation without making a 2 hour long video about how cool Medieval music is

I am dyslexic. Nonetheless, I am a published novelist (mild dyslexics often find ways to overcome their disability). I am an amateur musician who plays by ear. I watched your video because I would like to understand standard notation, but can't. In my mind, the notes actually shift their positions on both the horizontal and vertical axes, making reading very difficult. However, I appreciate your comments on ways to make the notation easier for dyslexics to read. If I was still young (I'm 71), I would have been very interested in using some of your suggestions. Even if I wouldn't be able to sight read, it would (I believe) have allowed me to achieve a better grasp of musical theory. Thanks for the lesson.

I'm a non musician who just watched a documentary lasting for over an hour on a system that I do not understand. You sir, are very good at presenting!

"Who mistake their ignorance for a kind of fresh-eyed clarity" is such a good line

tantacrul is nuts. i clicked on this video interested about hearing what he has to say about notation and ended up getting genuinely invested in a random chess game from 1590

'people would find sheet music much easier to understand if it was like the qwerty keyboard' is a level of 'terminally online' previously unheard of

Maybe it's because I'm an elite musical aristocrat who was fortunate enough to have basic musical education in elementary school and the option of formal band education through the rest of my twelve year public education (I dropped out of band after 9th grade because they weren't playing music that interested me and had policies I couldn't fit into), but to me "two notes an octave apart have the same name" is more intuitive than naming three and only three octaves. And if you need more context than the octave you're in, we have that! "G above middle C" and the like!

As a chess player who knows nothing about music, I was very impressed by your summary of the history of chess notation. Well done!

How on earth can you be the project manager for multiple music writing programs and still have time to make these brilliant videos?!?! I'm impressed

I grew up learning music in Jianpu and I think I learnt it faster that way, because it shows how notes are relative to each other rather than absolute pitches. It also lets me write music a lot faster, and I still use it when I need to write down music without a blank sheet music.

Congratulations for making this video. For my part, I think a music notation system’s reason to be is to support the musical ear. This is why standard notation still exists because it does just that. By looking at such a score, with some small amount of training and experience, one starts hearing the music.

Juggling went through a standardization of notation 20-30 years ago. It has been interesting seeing how the rise of siteswaps as the main way to describe juggling has shaped the growth of the art. The patterns people juggle most tend to be in line with the patterns easiest to describe in siteswaps. Jugglers value uniqueness and individuality so many people are intentionally pushing other areas of development, but those jugglers all still tend to have a strong background in the now standard style of juggling patterns.

For the "That's the letter G": If there is a really badly printed like orchestral sheet or something and the conductor wants to go from a rehearsal mark (the letter in a square), the G may look like another letter eg C so someone near to them may say "That's the letter G". solved

A few more observations from a fellow music history/theory nerd: - Did you describe guitar tablature as a recent innovation? It developed alongside standard notation in its own right - there are lute tablature scores from the Renaissance (and possibly earlier - my background is more keyboard-based so I’m unsure when the earliest tablature records appear). Especially in Spain. - The 5-line staff with clef became standardised because the distance between the note one ledger-line below the staff through to one ledger-line above encompasses the standard vocal range for each type of voice once you chuck in the appropriate clef (C4 - A5 for Treble; D3 - B4 for Alto; B2 - G4 for Tenor; E2 - C4 for Bass). If there are fewer lines there are more ledger lines needed; more lines just get more confusing, especially with multiple parts on the same page. 5 is the sweet spot for melodies within a human vocal range. - Figured bass notation, lead sheets, or lyric sheets with chord symbols could also get honourable mentions here. All of them have quirks that are intuitive to some and completely weird to others. - I am not a fan of the idea of going completely digital, personally. THAT idea does end up risking elitism/gatekeeping while access to technology remains uneven. It’s certainly a useful tool in the way you’ve described it, but shouldn’t be the end-goal, imo. Nothing will ever top the 1:1 human dynamic of the teacher/pupil relationship when it comes to sharing musical knowledge.

I'm sure it's been mentioned in one of the other 6,500 comments, but I'd love to see a follow up on percussion notation specifically. While often rooted in standard Western notation, it is highly unstandardized due to its necessity of flexibility. The are SOME "standards" within drumset notation, but even those can fluctuate based on recency, and a lot of other factors outside of hats/kick/snare are very fluid as not all kits are identical. Not to mention solo or chamber percussion works: instrumentation differs from composition to composition, so the noteheads, lines/spaces, and additives to notestems are highly irregular. There is no "cowbell" notehead or space on the staff, because many works require no cowbell at all. Then we have works like Xenakis's Psappha or Stockhausen's Zyklus No. 9, in which notation is entirely graphic, and sound choice/range, note durations, and tempi are all interpreted by the performer, often resulting in a months-long (or more) process of introspection. All that to say, despite being regularly left out of these conversations, percussionists have their own battles to face when it comes to reading music that other instrumentalists may never consider or experience.

Only tentacrul can take 10 minutes to finally get to the point of an hour long video

Imagine you are back in high school. You're sitting in music class, next to the foreign exchange student you are hosting. They understand musical notation, as it transcends language barrier, but they soon get confused by the name of the song. They point to it and ask what that character is. You look them dead in the eye and say, " That is the letter G."

Thanks, Tantacrul… Finding your YT site made my day; I’ve become a fan, looking forward to study your other videos❤

Very interesting. This is the first vid of yours I’ve watched and I’m absolutely sending it to my brother and dad who both wrote and arrange music regularly

something else worth bearing in mind about colour-based notation systems is that it makes it a lot more difficult to quickly jot something down on paper

Small tidbit that I can contribute from my area of expertise (psychology): around 1:08 you're questioning the chunkability of numbers - that's actually well researched! The example that came to mind for me was a study done on horse racing enthusiasts that were able to memorise stupendously long number sequences by chunking them into horse racing format (I don't exactly remember the system, but it was something like date, race number, horse number, finishing position, which would be around 12 digits per chunk). So I think it'd be perfectly viable to chunk the necessary single-digit amount of numbers that form a chord, given sufficient practice

The visualisation and animations are fantastic, and surely cost a lot of time. A joy to watch and listen. Thanks a lot!

Less than ten minutes in and this is one of the best videos I’ve seen. Liked and subscribed. 30 minutes in and it’s only gotten better.

You see this in fighting games constantly. We used to use more descriptive language, often inspired by the control decks of arcade cabinets, which led to goofy terminology like "towards forward" (hold towards the opponent and hit medium kick). There's abbreviations for special move motions like QCF (quarter circle forward) or do (dragon punch, a z-motion) but these days the 2d fighter community has mostly come around on numpad notation where the joystick is mapped to the positions of a numpad. To this day you get constant notation arguments because there's a million resources out there with their own unique way of marking things. And heaven help you if you read an old GameFAQs guide because they probably have their own awful method.

Wow, despite being utterly bizarre and impractical as a system of notation, Farbige Noten is an incredibly striking piece of modern art. I could look at those illustrations all day.

High quality and informative, kept me entertained too. Keep up the good work.

Loved the conclusion, thanks for your work Tantacrul!

I think the descriptive chess notation people really had it figured out, and that's definitely the best possible way to write music. "The viola player slides the third finger of their left hand two and a half centimeters down the D string, pressing firmly so the note rings clear," and so on and so forth, for every note in the composition. And of course we get different notations for every instrument, as all good notations do. What's not to love?

See, as a private music teacher who will figure out students’ favourite songs by ear to help them play music they already love, I am a MASSIVE fan of music notation. It’s only ever been a tool to aid memory and analysis and the fact that we can recreate music composed centuries ago shows how robust it is. So often I’ll spend an entire term teaching a kid a song to memorise through repetition that they could have learnt in a few weeks if they put the effort in to figure out how to read a score. Plus, when I figure out their favourite song in a matter of minutes they’re all like “How did you do that?!” and I just point out that I create a virtual score in my brain, and can pick it apart and analyse the key and harmony due to my ability to visualise the notes. If you can read a graph, you can read notation. It’s literally just a way to visually present music as a function of pitch over time. Then it’s your interpretation that turns it back into music.

"Once you get used to notation, you get way faster because you can read it like you read text." No sentence has ever resonated less with me. I don't doubt that this is true for a lot of people, but personally I've been playing the piano for 13 years and still struggle tremendously with the notation. It takes me ages to find the notes in a chord, i get confused by which key I'm in and which changes i have to make accordingly, and through all these years, and after visiting four years worth of weekly music theory classes, i still dont have a tight grasp on all the concepts that standard notation is supposed to enforce. And because i have never found any other notation that's intuitive enough for me to consider using it, reading music is a nightmare for me. A real shame, since i only started appreciating the intricacies and the beauty of piano music, and now find myself unable to properly reproduce them.

This is a very well-done and informative video!

Also, 59:40, if I wanted to hand my friend, who we assume is called Geoff, a written piece of notation for him to learn on his own time i would obviously first wrap it in a protective casing, potentially made of paper. Then, to clarify my intention with this package that i am handing him i would say "This is the letter, G."

This is a really great video, and as a rhythm gamer it made me happy to see you bring up guitar hero as I've thought a lot about the connections between real music notations and the sorts of notations that are made for rhythm games. I think there's a lot more that could be said about how rhythm games do "notation". Not as an alternative to standard notation, god no, but as something interesting in its own right. I've played a lot of Taiko no Tatsujin (a Japanese arcade game about playing a taiko drum) and i find the notation to be really cool. Even though it's a note-scrolling game it's closer to standard notation than tablature, in my experience. Every note is a circle, and the pitch of the note is indicated by colour instead of vertical position - red for the face of the drum, blue for rim. What brings this closer to standard notation in my mind is that the scroll speed is standardised so that one bar always takes up the same space on the screen (ignoring scroll speed effects, it is a game after all). But this means that you learn to read the timing of notes based on their relative spacing - a taiko player can, at a glance, see that some notes are played in 16ths, or 12th note tuplets, or what have you. I'm talking about this because when you talked about how notation is read in chunks, like language, that's exactly how taiko players read our notation. We read patterns of 2-7 notes, and sort of "calculate" the rhythms and pitches, and store them to be played later. I never got good enough at music notation to sightread it, but I think learning how to read taiko really helped me appreciate why musicians talk about why standard notation is better than tablature, because they can read groups of notes in a chunk by their *shape*. I find I do the same thing in Taiko, reading notes as a chunk by their shape - though, perhaps in a sillier context. But the ability that this gives some Taiko players in sightreading complex and fast songs can be honestly kind of incomprehensible. Anyway, this rhythmic information encoded in the format means that even though most rhythm games will tell you to "hit the note when it reaches this point on the screen", experienced players aren't *actually* doing that - instead we're reading ahead, figuring out the type and timing of different notes by chunking, feeling the rhythm in our mind and sort of "storing" it to be played later. Most rhythm gamers actually tend to look at the centre of the note field or even the other side of the field from where the notes get played. So ultimately I think there can be more to rhythm games' styles of notation than meets the eye here. Don't get me wrong - I am NOT suggesting scrolling notes as an alternative to sheet music, the criticism you levied to guitar hero is absolutely valid here, especially because rhythm games are about being 100% accurate to some predetermined rhythm and music is, well, more artistic than that (and of course there are many other reasons to use standard notation but this comment is overly long as it is). However, I do think there's a lot about the way that rhythm gamers read notes that's similar to the way musicians read sheet music. It's interesting! I find it amazing how us humans are able to look at these complex, abstract encodings, and in real time turn them into movements that make real music. Or in the case of rhythm gamers, make a score go up. We're a strange bunch. Anyway, I hope anyone found this interesting.

Jian Pu is quite useful for my work, as I have to transcribe lots of pop songs, standards etc. I could write down the melody pretty faithfully using numbers and symbols during the first or second time listening to the songs, then I could quickly translate the Jian Pu to music notation. I learned Jian Pu when I was playing in the Chinese orchestra

You honestly deserve millions of subscribers and billions of views. You're one of the few people who were able to make me willingly watch long-form videos! Tysm for this top-tier video!

Nice! Just yesterday I was thinking "I hope there will be a new Tentacrul video soon" and here it is.

I feel like the VR/AR piano playing stuff is mostly just a way to get someone to just start playing the instrument, like a complete beginner, rather than an actual serious notation it just shows you what to press and when, I feel like it could build a bunch of confidence for someone just starting out and get them hooked on learning the instrument properly

I don't play an instrument, have never tried, and am terrified of notation. BUT THIS WAS AWESOME. Thanks for all the work you put into making this video and explaining things so well. I'm interested in linguistics, con-langs, and how language (spoken and written) evolve. This is surprisingly right up that alley. Many thanks for the ideas and fresh perspective

I am OBSESSED with this title card. The vitriol for notation is practically gushing out of my headphones and screen i love it

Pause to comment on chromatic staves: It's not only pianos that treat "black key" notes differently. The fingering layouts for woodwind instruments, for example, are often simplest for the key of C and then become more complicated as the number of sharps or flats in the key signature increases. This means that when reading the traditional five-line staff system with sharp and flat symbols, the natural notes are simpler to finger and the sharps and flats are often played with additional keys that modify the natural notes, so an accidental is like a flag that says "hey player, you're going to be adding an additional key to your 'default' fingering". It turns out to be fairly intuitive in that way. My brain recoils at the thought of trying to read a notation system that does away with sharps and flats on a clarinet.

Martin, once again you have knocked it out of the park. An hour of captivating entertainment for musical novices and experts alike. As a fellow tech person/musician hybrid, you give us all something to look up to. (…also audibly laughed at the Epic guy’s piano roll idea; I’m glad that was not a goal of Bandcamp during their tenure in charge.)

Music doesn’t depend on the instrument you play it on. Musical composition is. So music notation solves to problem of communicating music (independently of the instrument you are playing it with) and other notations, like guitar tabs, communicate how you play the particular musical composition using particular instrument. So this fundamental difference makes standard music notation mandatory, while other strument specific notations are optional.

Bro really made me watch a chess video.

One other thing: Western music notation, especially well-engraved sheet music, is just gorgeous to look at. The staves and bar lines are sturdy and rectangular, and then this architecture is decorated with elliptical note heads, sinuous clefs, gracefully curving slurs and ties, and various other beautifully calligraphed symbols and stylized shapes. Old sheet music that has yellowed with age is especially attractive. When I was taking music notation class at the conservatory, the teacher made us write all of our assignments on manuscript paper with India ink and calligraphy pens. If we wrote a wrong note or if there was a blot of misplaced ink on the page, we couldn't use Liquid Paper to fix it; we had to start again with a new sheet. This was in the 1970s, when it was OK for music profs to torture their students.

The most astoundingly stupid part of Musitude to me, which you didn't mention, is that despite creating a notation which is meant to represent pitches on a computer keyboard, they don't FOLLOW THE LAYOUT OF THE KEYBOARD. How is anyone learning this supposed to gain any spatial sense of which notes are related to each other when they're essentially randomly distributed across the QWERTY keyboard layout? Absolutely insane.

This was so awesome! I learned all this stuff at the Conservatory but i couldnt be more entertained by how awesome you present it. You made me smile quite a few times :)

31:58 - introducting the 12 tone note system with a microtonal piece that shows how this system falls short - brilliant!

I’d say us chemists have it pretty good with IUPAC, it has its shortfalls but nobody is out there trying to abolish it but instead supplement it.

"Chromatic staff" sounds like a magic item from a D&D campaign. And "the Muto Method" sounds like something that will definitely turn its inventor into a super villain.

As a newbie to music theory, this was fascinating--thanks for sharing your knowledge!

I absolutely love this video. Amazing work.

As someone who took a music class in middle school that was all about reading notes, aced that class, and then proceeded to never get into playing any instruments, I can attest to the fact that reading the notes was not the issue. Instruments are difficult and I just didn't have the patience to work through that.

I remember returning to piano after a few years of not touching it, and trying to learn songs from Synthesia videos on KZfaq. It went alright. That was, until I found some sheet music for a piece I wanted to learn, decided to print it out, and WOW there was a huge difference. It was like coming back home after being away for a long time.

Okay, I honestly forgot I was watching a video on musical notation by the time the intro was finished. Bravo!

Ever stellar. Thanks again Tantacrul!

The "Alfred's basic piano course" book was a huge help learning sheet music. It starts off close to middle c and gradually moves you away. It also slowly introduces new notation. I suggest if you're struggling to learn pick it up! Once you learn it, notation makes a lot of sense.

One main reason that TAB is so popular is that you can write it out easily in a simple text file without the need for any complex music-setting software. And it's mainly used for popular music where the tradition is that you learn the songs by listening and there is no specific expectation that you play every note as written down by a composer. The TAB is just a help to give you a idea how to play a song, but the rest is up to you. "It's rock and roll, you can do what you want".

Oh gosh, your video just give me an idea to make notation much more easier to read but still keep the core of meanwhile notation, which is very easy to transcript. I just simplify it and done. Thank you so much!

Fantastic video, well done! The humour is appreciated.

It is really important to note that jianpu is used by professional Chinese orchestral musicians (e.g. erhu, yangqin), sometimes to the point that they struggle more with stave notation. My yangqin (dulcimer) teacher can still read stave notation, but jianpu works better in her mind (and for me as well when playing Chinese music) due to the change of scale/pattern you have to play on the instrument; and with different keys of dizi (flute), it's easier to remember a fingering=number as they work for scale degrees, rather than remembering every possible note each fingering could mean on a different key of dizi. There are whole Chinese orchestral scores written in jianpu, which can sometimes make harmonic analysis much easier as everything is written in scale degrees. There's this concept called "bimusicality" where one can swap between different methods of thinking and playing depending on what culture or style they're playing, which i think ties in incredibly well with discussions on notation. E.g. I read stave music when it's more in a European tonal understanding or on western instruments, but I will read jianpu when it is more traditional Chinese music or on Chinese instruments.

"The less you know about it, the more you bitch about it". I have found this to be so true regarding learning anything that has a system. Language, Math, Music... This problem of "it's just too difficult" arises from those who try it for two seconds, have questions, but don't seek answers or simply don't try to understand the system, and throw their hands up and say, "this is just too hard and doesn't make sense" and expect the system to conform to them. To which, given a different system, painstakingly designed just for them, they would do the exact same thing. Yes, reading music isn't easy in the beginning, it takes practice. It's the same with learning Mandarin or French (if they are not your first language) or some indigenous dialect. The problem is not the system, it's the unwillingness to do the work to understand the system. I struggled with reading music for years - why? Because I never applied myself to it! After applying myself to it I am now a decent sight reader and an expert functional sight reader. There is nothing wrong with the system. It works perfectly for those of us who have taken the time to learn it.

Such a great video! I really love it!

A really, really great and well-produced video! I really enjoyed it quite a bit, and even the thing I was going to say it should do more of it got to by the end! It might be interesting to explore modern notation in some future video from an application-driven perspective, because as the video illustrates so nicely already the demands of prior musical styles and instruments shaped the development of standard notation. I could never sight-read from piano roll notation during a rehearsal, but I certainly find it useful post-production for editing. It might be fun to interview some experts talking about how they've either expanded standard notation or used other systems for specific applications, as opposed to the Musitude set.

As once a somewhat arrogant self taught musician, I have found that after giving time and attention to learning to read sheet music, it does make more sense than I previously imagined, and seems like the best comprise possible.

What this video glanced over is that it's not clefs that the newbies are struggling with, but keys. To understand those ♯♯♯ and ♭♭♭ in the beginning, it requires understanding of scales, which, while important, are way too advanced topics for beginners who just want to press buttons and have fun. I myself started out using piano roll, and learned the musical notation later on, and this is literally a conversation I had with a newbie friend last year: - I want to play this piece on piano! - Okay, so, to start, there's this repeating pattern on piano starting from this key and ending with this, called an octave, and the keys in it are named do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-si, or, in English system, they are named alphabetically but out of order as C-D-E-F-G-A-B - Okay, got it - And you have black keys that represent steps up or down called sharps or flats respectively, depending on their relation to the surrounding white keys - Okay, weird, but go on - On that piece, you have have treble clef there, which means the notes F-A-C-E are in between the lines, G-B-D-F on the lines, respectively. Ignore the vertical lines for now - Okayyy.... - But you have ♭♭♭ in the beginning, which means it's in the key of E♭ that means you must swap those white keys with those black keys - Wait, what? Why? What's the logic here? - * A two hour lecture on how scales work* - Okay... but if the song is in this E♭ key, why do we still have ♯'s and ♭'s sprinkled all over? - * Two more hours rambling on augmentations and harmony* - Okay, let me try it *two days later* - Okay, I give up. I've spent HOURS on this thing, and I've only managed to get as far as a first quarter of a second bar - Hmm, let me think of something. Forget about everything I've told you before except octaves, let me transcribe it to something simpler. *15 minutes later* - Okay, so, here it goes, each row represent octave, rightmost being the topmost, the numbers represent key's number, left to right, including black keys, starting from C. An empty line to separate bars [A quickly re-invented Julian Carrillo notation] *30 minutes later* - HOLY HELL! I DID IT! YOU'RE A WIZARD!!! [Recording of them playing the full song perfectly] Those first steps are what musicians tend to forget and then act smug about it. I've noticed glimpses of it even in this video where author tries to remain as much neutral as possible on the topic e.g. on grasping the concept of numbers forming the chords, while guitarist do this all the time with the tabs. Or how tab is only useful for one instrument when all it takes is simple addition and subtraction to transcribe it to other (stringed) instrument, or the same instrument at different tuning.

This is an amazing video. I love everything about it. I loved the chess lesson. Human organization patterns and their issues are fascinating. I think you should make that its own video too. I love your use of color and shapes to visually match the words that are coming out of your mouth. When you introduce the problem of how much space chords take up, modern notation and say, "the need for space to read them clearly" and widen those blue and pink chunks at the bottom, it's a great way to explain. When I get music ideas and I'm not near a keyboard, I write it down in my own language and always know what it sounds like later on. Anyway I'll finish the video and talk more later.

59:00 Proposing to call notes an octave apart with a different name is no understanding a f** about how humans experiment music, then how acoustic and music works… such a dumb proposal

As a nearsighted guitarist, I've been told "That's the letter G" when trying to read chords in the handwritten font used for jazz scores. Also, thank you for showing accesible sheet music! I've been trying to help my friend who's a dyslexic drummer, and we thought the only possible solution would be playing by ear, especially because it was all he really could do in Band.

The biggest gate to learning music is that in order to do it, you HAVE to master it. It's like video game speedrunning. You have to become so familiar with situations and scenarios and patterns that you can see through what's on screen/page in front of you and do next to no interpretation, only react. So the main hurdle is getting up to that skill level. I think that's why tablature has been the only other competitor--it's readable for the intermediate player but is less useful for the master. But otherwise it's going to be almost impossible to have a smooth experience from beginner to expert in the same notation.

Wow. I really learned a huge amount in that. At the end you introduce an interesting concept that you could represent the musical information encoded in a single perfect encoding and then translate it to any format (traditional notation, Carrillo ..). There is a lot to discuss in this idea, not least of which is the conpcept of the perfect underlying music information description [I confess here I am an expert on the mathematics of information theory as well as being a music reader and the mathemetics of encoding musical information has been rolling around the back of my mind for a while]. Anyway - thank you, fascinating history and adding fuel to my thinking.

thank you Sir, this was just excellent, entertaining, educational and just hilarious...prick of perfection...had to control my laughter several times...it was a pleasure!

We also have to take into account that musical ideals, and what is considered useful in written music, changes with culture. Whereas a european composer might indicate a violin section when to apply vibrato, which nuance to use, what effects and slur to perform, in a given piece, indian ragas for example, have a huge part of self-appropriation to give the life needed for music to exist, as if the piece by itself is a mere husk, only the scaffold for what the musician intends to express. Therefore, it is not needed to write vibrati or nuances because it is up to the musician to decide while they play which gamaka to use. On another note, gamakas would be incredibly hard to notate in standard notation, if you take the répertoire of the sitar, whose strings can bend to increase the pitch by a whole 5th, it contains various pieces in which bend play will not only be prevalent but also difficult. In japanese music, taking the shakuhachi as an example, traditional music will stick to the pentatonic scale associated with the instrument, no bends or accidentals. So that would eliminate the need for excessive staff lines, armatures, and accidentals as a whole. But a substencial part of shakuhachi is playing with the right breath. Crescendi, Diminuendi, Sforzandi, Vibrati, Tremoli, all of those would have to be written down, including overblows, slowing/speeding vibrati, vibrati range increases/decreases, how would you write all of those breath plays ? (if you want to learn more about japanese shakuhachi breath play techniques, type "breath play" into google) So depending on musical cultures and doings, the standard notation always will have too much and not enough at the same time. What is really important is to get a message across, not standardise it or find a universal solution that will work for everything, because as you increase the amount of info it can convey, you also increase complexity, and vice-versa.

I would like to thank Musitude, not for doing anything actually productive or useful, but for making you go into the bit about most people not having the ability to make it through the initial learning of music. It put into prospective that my 10 years of playing music through school and college were a fundamental part of me, and pushed me to pull out my tuba and play on it for the first time in almost 3 years since I graduated. And, damnit, I loved it. Thanks for all of your amazing videos. Can't wait to see your next one

I think that at my piano skill level a regular treble and bass clef western notation is the easiest to read. I can’t sight read quickly yet. But I know it’s possible and that western notation is much much easier to look at than a piano roll.

this video has reaffirmed in me that i've never been so happy to be competent at sight reading 3 different instruments and keep going with it.

This is really fascinating. I'm very grateful to you for spending the time to make this up. I'm even more grateful to you for working on MuseScore, which i am a tireless promoter of. I have a few pointless comments. 1. A friend of mine was teaching a class of 12 year old to do a morris dance for May Day one year. Morris dancing is a kind of folk dancing designed to be equally well performed drunk or sober, though these children were all sober, i suspect. His musician was a talented classically trained violinist who had memorized the very simple tune, and was also sober, but didn't know much about folk dancing. He wanted to put the tune into the dancer's ears, so he said "Play me an A." He meant play the first 8 bars of the tune, but she played a single A note. There's an example in the wild of a note name and a letter being confused. 2. When I go to rehearsals playing the Eb alto saxophone, i am sometimes given concert music. So i have to transpose down a minor third. But sometimes i am given Bb tenor sax music, which is up a major second, because the guitar and piano players think a saxophone is a saxophone, right? So i have transpose down a fourth. But then most often the singer can't sing in the range it's written anyway. So i have to transpose another interval as will. This is all sight transposition, and it's common currency for horn players. Doesn't piano roll notation make this enormously more complicated? 3. Carrillo notation seems somewhat like figured bass. Seeing a note with 6/4 below it seems a lot like the examples of Carillo notation. Since it's numbers based, like Nashville numbers, it seems like it might be key independent as well. Both NNs and FB are notations designed by and for working musicians, so they are very efficient in what the optimize for. 4. Ireally like solfege. I've often thought it would be interesting to have a notation for modulation, so that "do" is always the middle line, but there is some way of saying "do goes down a major third here". Think of the bridge to "Have you Met Miss Jones," or the A of "Giant Steps" or all of "Joy Spring". 5. You could go further, do away with the staff entirely, and just use single letters for the solfege syllables, with lines above and below for accidentals. So the natural minor scale would be "d r _m f s _l _t d", where _m, or me, is m with an underbar. I don't know how you'd do rhythm, but it couldn't be that hard. Maybe use abc notation lengths. Good luck notating Charles Ives this way, but if you mostly play from lead sheets this would be a useful simplification, maybe. The Jerry Coker book "Readin' the Changes" use something like this all a reprise of the harmony for lead sheets. I often read and play from abc notation, though not for anything complicated, but usually not sight reading and never sight transposing. This would be similar to abc.

I think piano rolls are interesting visualization tools when listening to music, but I would never use one to perform off of!

Global score and ethnomusicology reminded me of my attempts at learning to play Gucul music of Carpathian mountains in Ukraine. I've got an instrument (a flute called floyara) and an academic book with a CD that tried to convert the music played by Guculs into Western notation (with small changes to accommodate microtonality). Notation was almost unreadable as performers use so much embellishments most of the notes become mess of 32s. But after parsing audio with early pitch detection program I've got something resembling global score with a line visually representing melody movements and that in combination with tab notation helped me start learning those tunes in simplified form and adding embellishments later as I become more proficient with an instrument.

GREAT VIDEO. So good, you inspired me to sign up for Nebula via your link. I was fortunate enough to learn to read music in school as a child. I love standard notation, in fact, I may be one of the only people who programs MIDI tracks with it, instead of a piano roll. But it has a few quirks that I'd love to see fixed. Here's where I ended up, after watching the whole video in one sitting: Use the chromatic staff. The intervals will become second nature, don't worry. Replace sharp and flat markings by making the bottom of each note a square or a diamond if it's an accidental, round if it's natural. Way more space for clarity. Yes, a chromatic staff makes it redundant, but it lets traditional readers adapt faster. (I also love the idea of the note's bottom having its letter on there, that was cool as a teaching tool). Replace clef symbols with a number for the octave represented. Logical improvements without the disruptor B.S.

Currently finishing up a dissertation on contemporary notations for improvisers that necessarily covers a lot of the same ground as you did for this vid. Needless to say I'm hooting and seal-clapping at some of these name-drops (love to hear about my man Gevaert). There's still so few people doing notation scholarship well! Thanks for your contribution 🫡

I love that Musescore is making some of these systems of notation convertible. Bring on the Carrillo conversion. With so many historical scores being transcribed to music xml and midi, the "entrenched" argument may not be valid for much longer. And if there's a free tool that can instantly convert music to your preferred notation... Wow. As a music teacher this makes me excited.

A mammoth presentation . Your coverage of other baffling systems makes the current system look refreshingly simple. A good compromise and easy to read at speed on any instrument . . I will stop whinging forthwith . Good job.

Wow! That was amazing. I've never understood music notation, but then, I've never attempted to understand it. I love music (anyone who doesn't love music is broken), but I've devoted my efforts to other areas. It was fascinating to see how something I thought was complicated could become even more complicated... and most of the time, needlessly complicated. Once again, great video.

Something I'd like to note as both a performer and a composer is the simple fact that being able to write in the margins of sheet music is the single most powerful thing that traditional western sheet music and physical sheet music in general has going for it. For instance as a performer there are dozens of notations on any stray piece of music about how the conductor and composer want this piece to be played, sometimes, no I'd even say often, being in direct conflict with one another. And as a composer not being able to easily write in the margins or add notes is the single most limiting thing about many proposed digital solutions, for example while western notation generally sucks at communicating timbre, the margins allow me to directly tell the performer how I want this to sound, although with the advent of technology I feel like this could go much farther, possibly even attaching recordings to notations in pieces so there's even less disconnect betwixt what I imagine the piece to sound like and what the performer will end up playing. Also I feel like dedicated music tablets or accessories to that effect could be potentially revolutionary in how music is performed, if properly implemented, even if all this thing did was automatically do page turns and store scores, it would be wonderful, as long as it allowed for the same aforementioned benefits of physical sheet music, like being able to write on it. So ultimately this isn't even my thoughts on notation rather the physical-digital divide as it currently stands and could stand in the near future. Also as a quick winge, tweaking the clefs to line up with each other exactly would be hell for anyone whose clef would be altered, but would be marvelous for teaching beginners and legibility in general.

if you dont have Disruptor Brain, making a personal-use notation system is a great way to understand the tradeoffs at play (especially if you're already a musician and know some theory). i made my own to suit my needs based on sacred harp shape notes, which i use for jotting down melodies while im working on songs. i very deliberately had to decide what it would and would not be useful for. lots of Disruptors and Reformers, i think, have not considered that their uses and needs are not the same as everyone's, and they'd probably be pretty happy simply using their system for their own personal notes were it not for ego getting ahead of them.

I dont think I have ever seen such awesome intro to a video anywhere, ever.

I was presently surprised when this video showed up on my page, because I am currently reading Donald J. Grout''s A History of Western Music. (An interesting, but not exciting book to read before bed.) I am in my 62d year and have been playing the piano for 3 months. I am pleased with my progress as far as staff reading goes. What mostly astounded me in the development of music (& its notation), was how long it took to develop from the Greeks to the late 16th C. I wish I could like this more than once. It is humorous, informative, & very well researched. Fantastic Job!

With regard to guitar TAB I find it really is an addition to standard notation and not a replacement. In an instrument where there can be up to three different places to play the same note, TAB can show you where it needs to be played. This is important as each different position will have a different timbre. It can also prevent you from painting yourself into a corner fingering-wise. The main advantage I find, though, is the ability to show bends, hammer-ons, pull offs etc. I must say I dislike when TAB is not accompanied by a regular stave. I find timing much easier to read in regular notation. Also once I have learnt a piece and only read the music as a reminder while playing I find I read the regular notation almost all the time. In a similar vein, I find it a little frustrating when guitar tutorial videos only ever mention fret position and never actually name the notes.

As a professional classical pianist/opera conductor, my biggest complaint with standard notation is that it puts us in rhythmic and stylistic boxes. We get that trained into us from the beginning as children because of the visual nature of the notes on the page. The Lego brick notation causes many of us classical musicians to play rigidly and without organic fluidity. For example, in Italian opera there is much rubato and variation of tempi that all comes from the text. Puccini tried to notate it but unless you speak and understand Italian, you won't really do the rubato convincingly. We classical musicians are trained as "I see 8th note, I play strict 8th note"...pianists and symphonies are notorious about that. Sure, it's an 8th note, but there are various types of 8th notes, depending on the context. I've learned much about the space between notes as well as horizontal movement from my jazz and pop/contemporary commercial music colleagues. What they do can't be successfully notated in the present system without creating a huge Jackson Pollack of markings on the page. Just goes to show that knowing the style and traditions of the music are more important than the limited info in the notation. It's like Google Maps, you get the driving instructions, but you still have to get in the car and drive it with all the subtle variations of speed.

i love the concept of ur infoblasts, its so nice to ignore the context if ur not really into that part or whatever else not. Instead of having to skip a whole section ahhhh ij ust like

When I visited China, I encountered a group singing folk songs using jianpu. What was great about it is that I could immediately join them and understand the notation, even though I had never specifically been taught it, just regular music theory. All you have to understand is the concept of steps on a scale. I could sing a melody along with them even though I had no idea what the words were, haha. Also it took me forever to click on this video (though KZfaq kept insisting I'd like it) because of how off-putting the title was. I think I'm allergic to clickbait. But fair enough, it's a really well-researched and presented video, and does a great job of explaining why music notation is what it is. As a music teacher, I'm always trying to figure out more ways to get students to understand, play, and relate to music more deeply, and while I think it's a big mistake to reduce music education down to *just* decoding standard Western notation, it is also a disservice to neglect the notation that has allowed our musical traditions to become to expansive and engaging. Also, I personally love reading standard notation myself and would hate to see it disappear completely.

When I tried learning the Guzheng (21-stringed traditional Chinese zither), we used 1 through 7 (plus sharps/flats). 1 was the root and octaves were indicated with dot(s) above/below the number, relative to middle C The cool thing about this is that it's irrespective of the key, so you can play the same melody automatically transposed wherever you want. edit: 15:40, 1:11:19 you mentioned it in the vid 😂. Jianpu 簡譜, that's exactly what we used

53:00 As someone who speaks Esperanto, I can say it is sooooo on brand for an Esperantist to invent a simplified notation system. It embodies the philosophy of Esperanto haha

Thank you for creating such an amazing video based on a topic which I have been considering seriously for so many decades. When I interviewed legendary jazz drummer and clinician John Riley as part of my Master's thesis, I expressed certain views about the limitations of our Western notation system, he simply replied with: "Does it help?". Off course I responded in the affirmative, and it really moved me to consider more deeply the kind of quite critical disposition I had about our notation system. I think certain people are wired differently and unfortunately in my case for whatever reason it has meant that though I understand music notation, how it functions, and can write and read it, I have a total inability to sight read. I can't make the connection or interpretation required to read music in real time while playing at the same time. It is a kind of left to right brain thing or obstacle that I don't seem to be able to overcome. I marvel at other drummers that can read in this way. It has impacted my music career quite profoundly, because I know that being the musician that I am I could have gotten so many gigs (whether live or session) had I been able to overcome this inability to sight read and therefore would have moved so far ahead in the industry than I have been able to date. In fact one of my lecturers pointed this out to me when I was doing my bachelors in college, telling me that if I really wanted to get ahead which I should, due to my musical ability, I needed to become a proficient sight reader, that was twenty years ago. I remember as a teenager when I first started taking drum lessons and began learning to read, it took me a little while to realize that where a note happens in time is based on the length of the note that preceded it. That the note symbol itself did not define or dictate where the note was in time. Initially I thought that single eighth notes always started on the "and", it took a while for it to register that any note symbol can be anywhere in time and that the whole structure of the notation system as it relates to rhythm is based on note lengths, and therefore where the note sounds is dependent on the length of the note which came before it ad infinitum. Well what is first or comes first in a piece of music, what is primary, pitch or rhythm? That is really interesting to consider and depending on the answer, it could define the direction that any notation system heads in. Off course the fact that our notation system seems to have come into being in order to facilitate the dissemination of choral chant, it is obvious in that context that note pitch and length would be a primary consideration, and since the rhythmic structure of Gregorian chant is not dense, it is completely logical that the notation system started out not considering whether rhythm or pitch and its relative length should be taken as the primary context for developing a notation system. In fact at the time there was no way of anticipating that music would evolve in such a way that rhythm would become so important in our Western pantheon. If we look at other cultures, like India for instances, their approach in the context of an oral tradition of pedagogy treated the rhythmic and melodic components that make up music with equal importance, as did the African traditions, but not in the West. So as a young drummer concerned with rhythm, I did not initially register and I guess my first drum teacher did not take the time to explain to me, or realized I had not understood how the notation system functioned. So what about answering my question above, what is primary in a music score pitch or rhythm? I strongly lean towards rhythm, because prior to any pitch being assigned to any notes in a musical work, those notes arise in time and create a rhythm, even if no formalised pitch is assigned to them, a rhythm is created first and foremost, it exist prior to pitch, melody or harmony, it is foundational and that rhythm will exist irrespective of the note length, since if we clap out the rhythm all notes will fundamentally be of equal lengths, defined by the very quick attack and decay of each note, the attack being the place where the note arises in the time line. So if rhythm exist prior to pitch in musical works (though one could argue a handclap has a pitch, but even than it would be just one pitch of pretty much equal length), would it not make sense to have a notation system in which the symbols used define where the note is in time, before it defines the pitch and the length of the note. This adjustment using dedicated symbols could easily be made using our current notation system by changing the meaning and orientation to the note symbols we already use, and in doing so, in my view would make the reading of music so much simpler, because with one glance at any bar of music one would know immediately where the notes are in time, and using such dedicated symbols would mean the need for rest symbols could be eradicated by 95%. Here is another issue considering the kind of contradictions within our notation system and music theory and how they interrelate or are interdependent. Let's think about time signatures, which are also based on note lengths, looking at the most common time signature in contemporary Western music 4/4 time, that signature means four notes in a bar with each note having the value of a quarter note, so what is the value of a quarter note? Well that is a dependent measurement that only achieves definition or comes into being once a tempo has been decided upon. What is tempo? Tempo is the arising and creation of consistent manufactured time created within an infinite silent space, based on the speed of repetitive consistent pulses arising in equal measured distance from one another thereby creating a "feeling" of time, based on repetition. Is there perfect time? Can time even be perfect? What is the source from which it arises? Is the feeling of time a human creation, merely conceived in our human limited universe of perception, based on the uniqueness of the mechanisms of our human nervous systems, or does it exist objectively? Therefore, do non humans experience pulses and time similarly to humans beings? When a cock crows does it experience its crowing in a rhythmically and melodically identifiable repeatable way, as a human being does? Getting back to our humble quarter note it becomes obvious that the quarter note has no inherent definable existence, it is a dependent conceptual construct, which needs to be underpinned by a variety of other constructs such as pulse and rhythm, which makes a pretty strong argument that note length is an overlay on structures that must already be in existence, interpreted and felt for a quarter note to have any meaning, and for it to become a conduit for musical communication. In that sense the way we conceive of time signatures or more precisely the conceptual symbols we use to be communicative about what they are, are completely untrue or at least quite ambiguous, since there is no actual difference if we were to clap the pulse in any time signature, with cycles of four pulse for example such as 4/4, 4/8, 4/12, 4/16, 4/20, ect, irrespective of the tempo, if clapped they will all sound the same, and even with a melodic instrument that can sustain notes. There it is so many unanswered questions and ambiguity exist in our notation system, yet it works. It is a representational communication about music, not music itself which is so mysterious, because for one obvious thing, music is a series of event moving in linear time, but music itself is actually experienced as a totally. So of course music being such a mystery, any symbolic representation is bound to be limited. However, I think it could be simplified by changing the foundation orientation on which it is based. Keep its symbols, just re-interpret them such that the note symbols themselves communicate explicitly where they start on the timeline without being dependent on the previous note symbol, and negotiate the symbolic communication of how long the note is afterwards, this could be done by having the head of the note coloured in or not to define its length. Maybe I am just a complainer because I have difficulty making it work for me, while millions of others have had no problem making it work for them, and it would be an almost impossible experiment to create in order to determine which system most people find easier, so I guess I will never know, but my intuition tells me that using dedicated symbols for where a note exists in time relative to the pulse would be easier to read than the system we have in place currently.

I had the opportunity to learn an instrument when I was young in a student band program. During that time, I learned and ingrained standard music notation. While I’m currently not pursuing music in any serious capacity, I still consider myself fairly music minded. A few years back, I decided it would be fun to learn some piano. I looked for online resources, and the vast majority of those places used piano-role-like notation instead of traditional notation. While I was able to “learn” songs quicker, I felt completely disconnected from the piece and the technique needed to play it. Standard notation is less accessible than its alternatives, sure, but that increased difficulty encourages you to not just learn how to play the piece but internalize it as well. I’m really glad I got the opportunity to learn music the way I did, and while I recognize the difficulty in learning music, I heavily recommend you put the effort into learning standard notation.

Outstanding video, as always. I'm fully expecting that after Braille and Jianpu notation compatibility in MuseScore we will get the ability to convert our scores into Farbige noten.

I forgot this video was about music 5 minutes in.

I was watching a video on the history of chess notation and a music lesson broke out!!! Great & wonderful stuff!