Goals of the WYSIWYP design

“After centuries of being forced to eat in the servants' quarters and to use the back entrance to the castle, this may just be an invention by musicians to make nonmusicians feel inadequate.... There is no reason for the system to be so complicated, but it is what we are stuck with."

While I have not found solid research statistics on dropout rates, there is a lot of anecdotal reporting from music instructors as well as beginning students themselves that indicates it is indeed a problem. (As an adult beginner myself, I would include my own personal testimony.) One of the anecdotes I have run across is that music instruction publishers sell 100 first-year books for every 10 second-year books; and 10 second-year books for every third-year book.

Of course, there are many factors contributing to a student giving up learning to play an instrument. But I believe that one of them is the difficulty of learning to read sheet music. And learning to read music is made more difficult by trying to learn the physical techniques of playing an instrument at the same time. But if the former were simple and intuitive, wouldn’t it be easier to concentrate on the latter? Wouldn't learning be accelerated, so they could start playing the music they know and love sooner? And as a result, students found that learning to play an instrument was fun and not drudgery? Maybe that would get us unstuck from traditional notation.

And how about adults who have never had music lessons. Many adult instruction books would have these students plodding along playing child-like tunes for a long time within a very limited range of notes. (I can vouch for this too.) It is not fun nor motivating. But adults should not be limited in their acquisition of playing skills simply because of the difficulty of reading sheet music. There is in fact evidence that adults learn to read music faster with a simplified notation. And with that said, it may be worth revamping instructional materials for adult learners using a simpler notation while we're at it.

The main goal of WYSIWYP is to make the reading of music as intuitive as possible. Thus, the consistent octave format maps directly to every keyboard octave. Notehead shapes make recognition of naturals, sharps, and flats explicit. Note duration doesn’t have to be translated from various combinations of symbols but instead is visually intuitive. And it is easy to see the relationships of noteheads to the beat as well as the interrelationships among them in time across staves.

One of the other goals of WYSIWYP is to change only the minimum necessary to address the 3 main challenges of reading traditional notation. All other notational elements (e.g., slurs, dynamics, articulation marks, ornaments, repetitions, etc.) remain unchanged. By avoiding straying too far from traditional, there is less of a barrier to learning it by students who decide later to do so. There are many other proposed alternative notations that, while successful for some, so radically depart from traditional that transitioning to traditional would mean a complete reset in learning. But hopefully by WYSIWYP preserving the same diatonic format with overlapping noteheads on a horizontal time axis, there will be less difficulty in learning to read traditional. And when the student is ready to accept that challenge, there is a 3-step approach described here that will hopefully make that transition easier.

Because there is no inventory of WYSIWYP sheet music in either paper or digital form, a device display app has been created that converts scores in MusicXML format files to virtual sheet music on the screen. It is a cross-platform browser-based app called the Simplified Notation app (SNapp). At this time, it is a beta version that implements the solutions to the challenges described herein. But, there is more work to be done to get it to full function. However, it is at least sufficient for a first-year student of the piano and perhaps beyond. It is also sufficient for a research evaluation with actual beginning adult students. But the long term goal is to make it functionally equivalent to traditional notation.