Most of the musicians I work with don’t read music, though many of them like to have “the dots” anyway. Timing is pretty easy to convey without the score, but pitch is more difficult. If there are several parts in close harmony you need some sort of map to tell you where to go. Especially for mid parts, the obvious harmonies are not always the correct ones. Even without knowing the notes, the score visually tells you how far and in what direction your part is moving compared to the others.

Of course, the score is not the whole story but it gives you something to work from. Once you know the basic parts there’s usually plenty of room for creativity in the interpretation.

The issue may not be the act of reading but one’s expectations of it. When an actor is reading a script they are, of course, looking for springboards to their creativity. However the whole point is to learn the text well enough to “lift it off the page” and make the reading unnecessary. The same is true of written music IMO. The reason reading may stifle creativity is because it’s not meant to be a creative act, merely a learning tool or memory aid.

I also just installed the music notepad on my vista/xp tablet, seems to work well(although it crashed a couple times loading the demo). Writting music is really easy and once you learn the gesture system it comes really fluidly.

The last I heard of UPIC it was mentioned in an Aphex Twin interview as a tool he uses - I actually thought UPIC was a joke and checked out this old Music Thing post about the interview to be sure: http://musicthing.blogspot.com/2006/07/aphex-twin-interview-in-future-music.html if you scroll to the bottom of the comments (avoiding the spam) there’s also reference to http://highc.org/ as a similar type of system, looks pretty sweet.

- IanniX seems to have implementations for a fair amount of languages (including Processing) which might make it a good candidate for further interface exploration.

I’m looking forward to trying the music notation software on my tablet - I find there’s something oddly comforting about learning a piece off a page, but would definitely welcome and have long hoped for new ways of representing music visually. I find myself flitting back and forth between programs to get a better sense of what I’m doing visually…

I guess I’m a bit more pragmatic about the whole thing. If I need to communicate with other musicians, I use notation. If traditional notation isn’t the right tool, I’ll use alternative notations. If the music lends itself to working rote, then I go there.

I know from past mentions that there’s a goodly number of people who do work with notation (and Music thing’s poll shows they do, too…) But yes, there are plenty of cases — for solo artists in particular — in which notation may not be necessary.

The ideas about visualizing harmonies origami fashion are interesting, indeed. There have been lots of attempts to show these relationships with color, but making them three-dimensional could be more interesting.

This gets into the whole question of what musics become possible when you get past traditional score notation … but there are still people who want to use it as a way of modeling various ideas that do fit it.

I suppose you could get a lot more interesting than what I’ve got above — perhaps a tablet PC as an interface for something like Xenakis’ tablet-based UPIC system, for which notation, graphic model, and resulting music were all one.