Goals of the WYSIWYP design

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 it is indeed a problem.  That would include me.  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 it is believed 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 wouldn’t it be great if students found that learning to play an instrument was fun and not drudgery?  And wouldn’t it be great if students continued to play music for a lifetime?

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 on a very limited range of notes.  I can vouch for this.  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 evidence that adults learn to read music faster with a simplified notation.  As a result, they can focus more on playing technique and thus learn to play the music they love sooner. 

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 straightforward.  Note duration doesn’t have to be translated from combinations of various symbols but instead is visually intuitive.  And it is easy to see the relationships of notes 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 TN.  All other notational elements (e.g., slurs, dynamics, articulation marks, ornaments, repetitions, etc.) remain unchanged.  By avoiding straying too far from TN, there is less of a barrier to learning to TN by students who decide later to do so.  There are many other proposed alternative notations that, while successful for some, so radically depart from TN that transitioning would mean a complete restart.  But hopefully with WYSIWYP preserving the same diatonic format with overlapping noteheads on a horizontal time axis, there will be less difficulty in learning to read TN.  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, there exists a device display app that converts scores in MusicXML format files to virtual sheet music.  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.  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. 

WYSIWYP is unproven.  Thus, one of the goals is to conduct some basic evaluations of it.  If it looks promising to pursue, then the next step is to implement a development project that would further develop SNapp, develop new training materials, and promote WYSIWYP on the internet.