12 Comments

Keith Handy

I think Music Thing recently had a poll to see how many of their readers could read music… I’m curious to see if you have many interested commenters on this post. I also wonder if a lot of musicians have negative associations with sheet music… like, if it brings back bad memories of being coerced into learning an instrument they weren’t interested in, for example.

I downloaded Finale Notepad 2008 for the Mac, which is free, but apparently limited in some way that would make me want to upgrade if I used it more often. For most of what I do, I’ve become pretty good at “reading” MIDI piano rolls, so sheet music would be an unnecessary extra step.

February 26, 2008 @ 7:52 pm

MonksDream

Keith,

I, for one, read and write Western music notation. Reading written music notation is not a necessary precondition to making music, just as reading written English is not a necessary precondition to speaking English. However, being able to read and write makes learning and sharing ideas *much* easier in both cases.

If you make music in isolation, or only with others that use the same tools you do, standard music notation may not be important. But, when you hire someone to play on your session, handing them a written part can be a session-saver.

I think a lot of musicians use notation but don’t call it that. The basic structure of a song and how long the chords last scribbled on the back of a pizza menu qualifies as notation too..

The “negative connotations” toward written music that I’ve run into are usually from people that are making excuses for not doing the work, AKA the “reading makes me less creative” crowd. Those that don’t read and don’t feel they need to don’t make those kind of excuses. And even those people often have their own ways of writing down tunes so they can remember or share them. A good example is Luciano Pavorotti. He didn’t “read music” but had his own written notation system.

February 26, 2008 @ 8:38 pm

Keith Handy

MonksDream: all good points. I think I’m a little less frustrated with people’s aversion to sheet music (which I think has its strengths and weaknesses), and more frustrated with their aversion to basic theory, like intervals, the circle of fifths, etc. I often wonder if people could “see” those relationships better if notation was somehow chromatic, so that minor thirds actually appeared smaller than major thirds, and so on. Once we realize the tonality of music folds up into a neat 12-sided origami-like ball, it becomes more magical, creative, and powerful, not less.

February 26, 2008 @ 9:05 pm

Peter Kirn

Interesting points all around here …

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.

February 26, 2008 @ 10:29 pm

Rozling

You mean like IanniX?
http://iannix.la-kitchen.fr/index.html
(one day I will learn how to post bloody links here!) apparently this is UPIC’s successor.

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…

February 26, 2008 @ 11:30 pm

jordan colburn

I personally feel that reading sheet music does stifle creativity a bit. Granted my piano sight reding skills ar a little lacking, but whenever I learn a piece off music I’m much less likely to experiment, improv and change it up. I just end up playing the piece like it was written, and that makes me more of a typewritter than a musician. I can see the other side of the story too though, as I played sax in jazz and concert bands, written music is obviously neccesary for quickly learning and communicating the different parts.

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.

February 27, 2008 @ 10:10 am

MonksDream

Interesting, Jordan

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.

February 27, 2008 @ 2:27 pm

MonksDream

Another thought just occurred to me: the other reason reading may suppress creativity is that it requires attention, which leaves less for being creative.

February 27, 2008 @ 2:51 pm

jordan colburn

MonksDream, your point is the best argument I’ve heard for written music, nice to think about. For me though, if it’s not all memory, I just fumble through it and don’t really play, but it could be that I just don’t spend enough time reading to begin with.

February 27, 2008 @ 2:59 pm

Keith Handy

Written notation can only say so much, too. “Play this note for this many beats”. Beyond a few dynamics markings, staccato/legato, and a few other things, there isn’t really an adequate written language for the universe of expressive nuance.

February 28, 2008 @ 11:42 pm

Create Digital Music » The Real AI Jazz Factor: Think Different

[...] part of your brain actually has to work harder to proceed. Readers noted earlier this week that music notation can be musically distracting — not surprising, given many musicians make the effort to memorize a piece for exactly this [...]

February 29, 2008 @ 12:36 pm

Stewart Greenhill

I am a big fan of Myriad’s Harmony Assistant, which at $85 easily makes the budget. I mainly use it to do acapella arrangements and for this it can’t be beat. It handles lyrics in the score with ease. Plus for only $25 you can buy the Virtual Singer plugin which will sing all of your lyrics for you. It even has a web plugin that plays the music notation and
audio in real-time, so you can distribute your finished product to all and sundry.

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.

March 15, 2008 @ 4:51 pm

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