[Woodduck]

Music is a physical as well as an intellectual phenomenon. We hear tones as having duration (short and long) and pitch (high and low). Both of these dimensions are represented by the physical position of notes on the staff. Our common notation thus gives us a physical image which parallels both of music's primary physical characteristics. It makes music visible through the phenomenon of perception neuropsychologists call "cross-domain mapping."

When I look at your notation, I don't see music. I don't see something with physical characteristics parallel to the sound and feel of music. I don't see something that appeals to my body as well as my mind. How is that an improvement?

 

[Woodduck]

Lol, what? :lol:

Just think about it.

No, feel it. That's the point.

(You too, hpowders.)

 

[Woodduck]

In mathematics, one learns arithmetic first, then algebra, and then calculus. Each level builds on the previous, adding new abstractions and concepts. No one would argue that algebra is more basic or easy to understand than arithmetic. But the benefit to learning algebra or calculus is that one gains more powerful tools for expressing mathematical relationships. The same is true with pitch bracket notation. This notation is not as basic or obvious as the 2D layout of standard sheet music, but it provides new tools and ways of understanding the pitch relations in music.

One final comment. I never intended pitch bracket notation to someone replace standard music notation. Rather, I adore standard notation which miraculously combines so many different elements of music into a single visual representation. No new notation will rival that. My notation focuses on one particular aspect of music, pitch. As a result, more sophisticated concepts about pitch and pitch relationships can be expressed, relationships that might get lost in the multitude of elements expressed in standard notation.

It's reassuring that you don't think of your notation as replacing the existing system, but it isn't clear to me that it has any needed purpose at all.

I know of only one function of notation: it enables music as conceived by one person to be realized as sound by another. Can your notation system fulfill that function efficiently, or at all?

What does it mean to "provide new tools and ways of understanding the pitch relations in music," and to "express more sophisticated concepts about pitch and pitch relationships"? What concepts about pitch do we need notation to represent beyond, e.g., "this is middle C and this is the G a perfect fifth above it"? That statement gives us an absolute pitch (assuming A = 440hz or some other standard) and an intervallic relationship. Isn't that all there is to it?