Clairnote: An alternative music notation system

At a glance, this is a neat concept, but doesn't seem to come at the problem from the perspective of the most common users of music notation (experienced musicians); rather, it appears to have been written by somebody who was frustrated by trying to learn to read music. For experienced musicians, the priorities are a) legibility for sight-reading and transcription (which this system, with indistinguishable sitting/hanging notes and pervasive ledger lines fails) and b) musical context for expressive decisions, such as information about key, mode, modulation and harmonic content as hinted at by the key signatures and accidentals (which this system downplays as unnecessary).

I hate to be too much of a downer as there are some nice ideas here, but I can see at least three problems with this:<p>1) First and foremost, of course, the massive entrenched investment in traditional notation. It&#x27;s like trying to replace the QWERTY keyboard.<p>2) More risk of transcription errors in written music. The difference between &quot;sitting just above the line&quot; and &quot;sitting on the line&quot; is quite subtle.<p>3) This is strictly tied to the 12-note equal temperament scale, with enharmonic sharps and flats. Traditional notation works fairly well with many alternate tunings, e.g. 19-note equal temperament (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;19_equal_temperament" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;19_equal_temperament</a>) <i>Edit to add:</i> looking more closely, it does include a notation to distinguish between e.g. G# and Ab, but as it&#x27;s optional for most music it comes across as an afterthought that most people won&#x27;t learn; and as in the previous point, it looks ripe for transcription errors. # and b are a little weird but at least they look very different!<p>I really like that this tries to be a more general-purpose system without being biased towards western classical diatonic music, but it looks significantly worse for that style of music (point 2) while not necessarily being significantly better for other styles (point 3).<p>Easy transposition across octaves is nice, but not exactly a killer feature. That&#x27;s already one of the easiest things you can do on most instruments.

&gt; In traditional music notation notes an octave apart do not resemble each other.<p>This is what I&#x27;d emphasize. To sight read, the mapping from sign to note has to be so automatic it&#x27;s unconscious. In standard notation this mapping looks different at every one of the middle four octaves, which nearly quadruples the size of the &quot;multiplication table&quot; you&#x27;re installing in memory. Since your exposure in practice to the further ends of that range is less frequent, you&#x27;re still slowed down by some notes even once the middle ones are automatic to you. (And there&#x27;s probably some &quot;cross talk&quot; for a long time -- at least, that&#x27;s how it felt to me.)<p>It&#x27;s strange to me when people are like &quot;eh, what&#x27;s the big deal&quot; about a UX failure that seems this big.

Interesting, well thought out, and well-presented. Just not sure that it solves a problem. It certainly isn&#x27;t <i>radically</i> easier to learn than traditional notation. And despite other comments here, huge numbers of young people learn traditional notation all the time, with little stress. Maybe, as is true with spoken languages, it becomes harder to learn musical notation as we get older?<p>All the &quot;problems&quot; that this notation &quot;fixes&quot; are essentially non-issues for musicians who already know traditional notation.

Tantacrul made a really interesting video about how <i>incredibly</i> difficult it is to make a notation font that might be a good watch[0], and I say that to say this:<p>I see an issue here that left me confused for several minutes: the little bit of overlap when a note is attached to a line but not intersecting it looks like an alignment mistake and leaves ambiguity. My recommendation would be to have <i>no</i> overlap, with the top&#x2F;bottom pixel of the note head in line with the top&#x2F;bottom pixel of the staff line, like traditional notation.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=XGo4PJd1lng" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=XGo4PJd1lng</a>

To my eyes this is way harder to read than traditional notation, which really isn&#x27;t hard to learn and works well for most music (and non-12TET music). It&#x27;s hard to see if a note is on a line or just above&#x2F;under it.

The main &quot;problem&quot; I see this notation style as trying to &quot;solve&quot; is that the standard 5 line western notation is built around a very strong affinity and &quot;default&quot; of the western diatonic scales. For any key&#x2F;mode, if you&#x27;re within that pattern then relationships of notes and notation is very clear. This is also enforced by the note names themselves, with A to A being a Aeolian&#x2F;natural minor scale that fits into this same pattern.<p>It&#x27;s interesting (and useful) to step outside of this default, but IMO in for a penny in for a pound; there really should be a commitment to a complete separation, at least as a &quot;default&quot;. The examples are trying to connect a notation decoupled from the diatonic scale back to that same diatonic.<p>Even if you do stick with the other &quot;assumptions&quot; made here:<p><pre><code> - 12 equal tones per octave - octave-equivalent - divisive rhythm </code></pre> IMO you should change the note names. Numbers would be preferable to me, although maybe confusing given the use of numbers in western music analysis. Perhaps O-Z?

This is interesting!<p>As weird as the standard notation system is, it works pretty well for tonal music. If you know how to play your instrument within a given key, music takes the same basic shape on the staff, even if it&#x27;s transposed. It also keeps most pieces pretty compact, even if they have a wide range.<p>However, standard notation is also notoriously difficult to learn, to the point that many virtuoso players never actually learn it (especially guitar players).<p>Clairnote appears to respect most of the most useful properties of standard notation, except maybe efficiency with vertical space. Maybe some day I&#x27;ll give it a try.

I am of course sceptical whether this notation system will gain a bigger following, but I really appreciate their nice website and how they clearly communicate their idea. They even have a nice interactive online tutorial: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;clairnote.org&#x2F;learn&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;clairnote.org&#x2F;learn&#x2F;</a>

Music major and vocalist here. Seems like the problem is framed as “mapping dots to pitches,” which is a pretty good reduction of what notation does but glosses over some things I value in standard notation.<p>C4 and C5 are not the same. Singing them well requires different techniques, as would playing them well on some instruments. So it doesn’t really bother me that they’re “different” in relation to staff lines (8va and 8vb notwithstanding).<p>More importantly, knowing which scale degree you’re on (in relation to the key) is valuable for interpretation; it has implications for where the harmony is going. Likewise knowing how you function within a chord. If you’re on the third in a diatonic triad, much less volume is required for good balance with the other parts on the root and fifth. Even more so for sevenths, seconds, sixths.<p>You could argue that just listening carefully might allow you to achieve a similar balance by adjusting on the fly, but one advantage of being a skilled music reader is that you can make interpretation decisions before you execute them, even if you’ve never performed the music before.<p>Edit: clarified difference between scale degree and function within chord.

This is interesting. Growing up, I had 8 years of music theory, so reading standard notation is second nature. In high school and later on in rock&#x2F;metal bands, I never actually used it. It was far more common to use guitar tablature (even though I was the drummer). Tab is more of a short-hand system, giving you fret markings and measures, but usually omitting rhythmic notation.<p>To me, this system is actually more confusing. The spacing is kind of hard to see. Maybe it&#x27;s because I keep trying to read it as if it were standard notation. I wonder if it would help someone starting from scratch.

I like it. As a kid (and well into my 30s[1]), any time I tried to learn &#x27;music theory&#x27; I was put off by the feeling that what I was learning was more about the goofy and confusing standard notation than it was about music. By fixing the notation that barrier could be removed and students could get straight into the interesting stuff sooner. At least I think it would have helped me!<p>[1] I eventually came to understand a lot of the concepts about scales&#x2F;keys&#x2F;etc by ignoring the notation and just horsing around on my MIDI keyboard a lot.

I&#x27;m not entirely sure who&#x27;s the target audience of this new notation. I&#x27;ve been reading music for 40 years and don&#x27;t think I&#x27;ve once needed the vertical gaps between notes to tell me whether an interval was a major or a minor third. In fact, I think in terms of steps in the scale, not whether those steps are flattened or not. So equi-distant vertical spacing for the notes in a major scale better fits my mental model.<p>But that&#x27;s just my own preference&#x2F;habit. The real sticking point for me is the ambiguity of whether a note head is exactly on a line or just below. Sight reading needs that decision to be immediate - picking out whether the note is just below the line inamongst some large and rapid intervallic jumps is going to be almost impossible.<p>Also, I&#x27;m not sure the author has understood one of the key rationales for these other clefs - that the number of ledger lines can be minimised. E.g. Playing in the upper register of the trombone is an exercise in parsing 4-6 ledger lines, which can get tricky especially with rough hand-written charts. Switching to tenor or even alto clef keeps everything nicely within the stave and easier to read. Where in the staff the &#x27;C&#x27; sits is just a detail, and it&#x27;s surprisingly quick to get used to different clefs with different centres.

At first I thought the “missing” line in the middle of each stave would help me. My myopia, astigmatism and nystagmus make traditional notation incredibly difficult to read, on top of its inherent complexity. The “missing” line actually clarifies the top and bottom two lines. However, the multiple positions notes can sit relative to a line, and the seemingly arbitrary number of optional lines make this system completely unworkable, for me.

I&#x27;m a still learning guitar player (I think I&#x27;ve been taking lessons for ~8.5 yrs and did some piano lessons as a kid and was in school bands).<p>I usually work on solo style arrangements of popular songs but sometimes dabble into learning solos, different parts of songs, etc.<p>I try to transcribe what I&#x27;m working on in standard notation generally. For me the hard part isn&#x27;t writing down the pitch; it&#x27;s the rhythm and timing. Trying to document vocal parts and&#x2F;or solos is hard, because they float all around.<p>As others have mentioned, different genres of music document their music differently. Standard notation is probably actually pretty rare.<p>I don&#x27;t think the pitch notation system in standard notation is harder than learning the underlying concepts (scales are 7 notes, there are half steps between the 3rd and 4th degree and 7th and 8th degree (the octave) of the scales, etc.). It&#x27;s an interesting approach but I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s solving the harder problem.

Top search result for &quot;alternative music notation&quot; is <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dodekamusic.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dodekamusic.com</a> which looks like it has the same ideas, plus a rectangular rhythm design which makes it all _look_ different at a glance (for better or worse)

Applause for the effort but I doubt that this will become popular. Music notation has been a certain way for hundreds of years for musicians around the world – a notation with the universal legibility of mathematics.<p>However, as someone who sight-reads all of his piano music, I&#x27;d be interested in experiencing if this makes sight-reading any easier or harder. It&#x27;s taken many years of experience to be able to spot and predict patterns several measures ahead of where I&#x27;m playing, and I wonder if future musicians could get to advanced sight-reading levels more quickly using an alternative notation.

I think Clairnote is pretty neat. There are more alternate musical notation systems at <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;musicnotation.org" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;musicnotation.org</a>.<p>The current system we use because it is the one experts know and music is written in. I&#x27;m sure it could be worse, but I feel like it has a ton of backwards-compatible features as add-ons that would be so much cleaner with a rewrite. The very simplest change that could be made would be to have a grand staff that uses the same clef, so people don&#x27;t need to learn two of them.<p>I don&#x27;t think we&#x27;ll actually see a change until such time as you could put on a pair of AR glasses, which could recognize&#x2F;OCR your music, and then, on-the-fly &#x27;transnotate&#x27; the song into a sane notation. (Perhaps the same could be said for making English more phonetic; and, perhaps it will never happen; in the meantime, I can&#x27;t help but feeling that hundreds of hours are needlessly spent learning this system that wouldn&#x27;t be needed with a simpler one, many people who&#x27;d like to learn it never do, and, oddly, plenty of singers sing better because they can&#x27;t read the written notation!).

There&#x27;s also <i>Hummingbird</i> notation:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hummingbirdnotation.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hummingbirdnotation.com&#x2F;</a>

I couldn&#x27;t figure out the justification for middle C being on a ledger line, and then the D above it being higher up, but on the higher of two ledger lines.

I like the idea with the octaves. I&#x27;m not as sure about the chromatic stuff; the key signatures are there for a reason and I&#x27;m not sure it reduces the cognitive load in an expert. It would in an novice, sure. Possibly said novice would then move on to prefer it as they become an expert, so it&#x27;s hard to tell. On-the-fly transposition would probably be a bit harder, but perhaps that&#x27;s a skill level already so high that it&#x27;s hardly worth optimizing for in the notation anyhow.<p>But definitely there&#x27;s too much dependency on where note heads are versus the staff. Even in the typography used in the example, the note heads seem to noticeably hang below the line. I&#x27;m not sure the vaguely elliptical blobs really work with this system and I&#x27;d consider pushing another step away from conventional notation and distinguishing with something more visually clear, e.g., normal heads on the lines, squared-off heads if they are a half step away or something. Something that makes it completely unambiguous whether a note is on or in the line. (&quot;Unfortunately&quot; conventional notation that this is trying to be compatible with has already consumed whether the head is hollow.)<p>I would also like to see something less trivial on the intro page. In HN terms, visual programming <i>always</i> looks awesome as long as you&#x27;re demonstrating something drop-dead simple like simply traversing a linked list or something. Show something with a bit more crunch in it, like even something as simple as a quicksort, and the vast majority of visual programming pitches suddenly look a lot less compelling. All the PDFs on the bottom of the page 404&#x27;d for me, but I&#x27;d like to see something inline.<p>Still, some interesting ideas here. The standard system is definitely a bit wrapped around a piano. I could see how this could simplify teaching any instrument that makes one tone at a time; all the rules for reading music become &quot;this note -&gt; this fingering&#x2F;position&#x2F;valves&#x2F;etc&quot;, which would smooth over the first couple of years nicely.<p>One of the tensions of the current system is the learning novice vs. the expert. The current system is heavily tilted towards an expert. At the time it was written, that was appropriate. Building some more novice-friendly features in might be more appropriate in a more democratized era. (Though how one gets past the switching costs here for <i>any</i> alternate notation I have no idea.)

[I don&#x27;t read music.] From stories&#x2F;videos I&#x27;ve watched on the topic, musician&#x27;s don&#x27;t so much read absolute notes but notes of a scale. A trained one knows their scales and can represent them with the letters A-G once each, using sharps or flats as necessary. I&#x27;d also expect them to know exactly where each note name&#x2F;sharp&#x2F;flat is on the instrument they play.<p>There&#x27;s also an affinity for piano being a sort-of reference instrument pertaining to mapping of scales as it has the least idiosyncratic placement of notes compared to other instruments.<p>What about a scale that has lines for the white keys of the piano and larger spaces where black keys appear would be 1:1 with piano, but there would be too high a density of lines.<p>So how about we make the black keys the lines and we can have single spaces for single white keys and double spaces where two white keys intervene the black ones? That almost makes sense as the lines are black and the page&#x2F;spaces are white.

I get the same feelings whenever somebody comes up with a &quot;better&quot; flavor of SQL that is &quot;more logical&quot; or &quot;more expressive&quot;.... I know SQL well, it does what I want, and I think its <i>great</i>. When people &quot;solve problems&quot; with it, they&#x27;re complaining about things they never tried to understand.<p>This is a lot like that. I wish I was better at music.... I wish I had more skill etc... but the barrier is not my ability to read music....<p>a multi-note instrument like guitar&#x2F;piano is much harder (in my personal experience) than a single note like trumpet&#x2F;saxophone... and guitar tabulature exists for that reason... but its guitar specific and is probably a bridge for most in the beginning of their learning (not unlike a saxophone fingering chart).... but I don&#x27;t see general use music notation being revolutionized anytime soon.... mostly because it does not need to be.

Very cool. Every domain is always in need of fresh ideas. Even if they don&#x27;t directly take off, they still provide valuable perspective and help bolster the process of slow, constant improvement.<p>It would be interesting to see how this, or a similar system, could be extended for any X-TET system, not just 12-TET.

I&#x27;ve struggled with reading music despite years of piano lessons, years of church and school choirs, and being the main arranger for my college a cappella group. Watching the video of the Blue Danube Waltz on that page was amazing. I felt for the first time like the shapes of the things on the page actually corresponded well to the musical concepts in my head.<p>I know it&#x27;s an extremely uphill battle to actually get anything like this adopted, but I think it would do wonders for teaching and working with music. How many musical concepts would suddenly be obvious to people if they could actually see them directly on the page without layers of translation in between?

I don&#x27;t like it because it&#x27;s not backwards compatible with traditional Western notation. This will cause problems with anyone transcribing Clairnote work without being an expert. What looks like G, actually notates G#. Major problem imho.

I’m a musician who can’t read music notation and found it hard to pick up when I’ve tried. I assume I’m the target demographic for this system. At first glance I can’t for the life of me understand why I’d put the time into learning this. For one, it doesn’t appear to make anything that I personally struggle with any simpler. For two, the entire point of learning to read music is to communicate with other musicians. If I am writing my ideas in some bespoke system that no one else knows, what’s the point?

I play both piano and chromatic button accordion (a little). One thing that seems a bit harder on button accordion is going up the scale playing thirds or sixths, because you need to be aware of which are major versus minor thirds (or sixths) in the diatonic scale you&#x27;re using. With a piano, the keyboard mostly takes care of this, at least in easier keys.<p>It seems like this notation has similar issues in emphasizing the chromatic scale over diatonic scales maybe a little too much?

As someone who has a difficult time reading music, at first glance this looks like it might help.<p>My main issue is that note in the middle of the stave are essentially unknowable for me. middle c-f is doable. but in the middle it get very fuzzy, too many lines.<p>I thought this notation might solve that, but instead of having notes with lines through them to indicate notes on a line, they are slightly above&#x2F;below. That for me makes it very hard, even though most of the stave has been removed.

While standard notation already seems optimal to me for performing music, it does leave something to be desired for analyzing harmony and composing, mainly because things like major and minor thirds look exactly the same. So I would love a notation system that made harmonic relations easier to see. I&#x27;m not sure yet if this is it, but I definitely like the idea!

I suspect the younger generation of (self-taught) composers rely heavily on the grid or matrix modes in popular DAW&#x27;s -- they visually represent the 12-tone chromatic scale in an intuitive and accessible way that reflects both how we hear music, and how the notes lie on a fretboard or keyboard.

This music would be extremely hard to sight-read. The only aspect of it that I like is that it is key-agnostic. It would be cool to see atonal music written in this notation system. But for professional musicians this isn&#x27;t worth learning.

It&#x27;s really hard to see the difference between sitting on top vs inside the line.

Is there a rendering SDK available? If you integrate it with <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;parture.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;parture.org</a> you&#x27;ll get the whole existing sheet music ecosystem for free.

The problem with something like this is that it&#x27;s basically the musical equivalent of the artificially constructed language Esperanto. It will NEVER gain any significant traction in the existing world of musicians.

Has anyone tried turning the entire grand staff 90 degrees counterclockwise and animate the notes toward the player, Guitar-hero style?

I’m a guitarist and I can’t understand either.

reminds me <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Dodeka_music_notation" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Dodeka_music_notation</a>

All the example PDFs are 404.

Electric bass player here. Oh and I&#x27;m quite mediocre too.<p>I think a musical notation system should not be driven by edge cases, which is what a bunch of HNers pointing out where this system falls short (microtonals, equal temperment sucks, etc, blah blah). Second, I think standard notation is designed for piano soloists, not for bands.<p>I&#x27;ve found the most effective system for sharing musical ideas with a band is the so called &quot;Nashville Numbers System.&quot; Why is this? Well because you can&#x27;t apply a capo to a vocalist. Every time I play with a different vocalist, there&#x27;s going to be a key change. When we talk in terms of scale degrees &quot;hey guys play 6m, 5&#x2F;7, root&quot;, rather than &quot;oh hey play a Em, D, G, wait j&#x2F;k, that&#x27;s too low, can you play G#m, F#, B? oh wait, earl over there says playing G#m on acoustic is impossible, go another half step up&quot; everything is easy.<p>What does this require? Every musician needs to memorize scales, which isn&#x27;t very hard. The process is: decide on the root as a band, then jam. And you handle accidentals as they come up as edge cases, rather than have them drive the bus off a cliff.<p>So how can we take this successful concept and apply it to notation?<p>I think there are two main issues with standard notation: First, the key signature is embedded into the notation. This was like HTML before CSS: the presentation should be separated from the content.<p>Here&#x27;s the hill I&#x27;ll die on: given that you&#x27;re going to be playing in equal temperament, we don&#x27;t need to have _any_ information about the key in musical notation. The only thing that matters is intervals. 99.95% of the audience doesn&#x27;t have perfect pitch and they don&#x27;t care either. All notes on the staff should be relative to some arbitrary root.<p>Which brings us to the second problem: Standard notation does not represent octaves consistently. This is the dumbest UX failure that annoys the absolute shit of out me as a bass player. If I want to mirror the melody line in a song for a section, I have to switch my brain from reading Bass clef where I live, to fumbling through Treble cleff notes, and they&#x27;re all in the wrong spots.<p>Looking at the link, there are some improvements on the above two points. I do think there is still a leaky abstraction about the key signature. Given that I write things down as relative scale degrees anyway, I&#x27;d take this over standard notation any day if I learned to read it.

I don’t like it!