Other Alternative Notations vs WYSIWYP for Beginners

“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."

Some history. The search for a simpler system has continued for centuries. Gardner Read’s Source Book of Proposed Music Notation Reforms (here on Amazon) lists hundreds of proposed reforms dating from 1702 up to 1987. Most proposals focus on the issues of inconsistent staff lines and key signatures. Fewer proposals address the issues relating to rhythm.

The Music Notation Modernization Association (1985 – 2007) mainly focused on the first two challenges with Traditional Notation: inconsistent staff lines and the use of key signatures. Almost all of the designs featured on their website are chromatic wherein all twelve notes in the scale have an equal position on the staff. Hundreds of other Alternative Notations past and present have been examined, catalogued, and presented on their website for public review.

What is clear from these collections though is that the difficulty of reading sheet music has been recognized for a very long time and that new proposals continue to this day. I have reviewed them all and in general they have consistent and logical designs for octaves that may appeal to some musicians. However, in my opinion, none would be good candidates for beginners either because either are not intuitive or because they are chromatic (for the reasons described below). Unfortunately in my view, very few address the challenge of symbolic rhythm elements. This is not to say that someone won’t find their perfect system in there somewhere though. But even if you wanted to try them out, almost none of them have an inventory of sheet music available.

The major exception to the rule is Klavarskribo which is only one that has succeeded in attracting a wide audience (Klavarskribo).

Klavarskribo. This is the exceptional case that demonstrates Alternative Notations can indeed be viable if properly designed, promoted, and supported.

Klavarskribo solves the three main challenges with Traditional notation. Its staff lines represent the black keys of the keyboard and the spaces in between represent the white keys. Thus, like the keyboard, every octave is consistent. Since there are staff positions to explicitly define all twelve degrees of the chromatic scale, there is no need for key signatures to implicitly define sharps and flats. In stark contrast to Traditional Notation’s horizontal timeline, the Klavar time dimension is vertical. This permits the sheet music page on the piano stand to line up visually with the keyboard. Note duration is indicated by the placement of noteheads on a true timeline. Each element of the design is intuitive and easy to read although obviously targets keyboard players.

However, it is my opinion that Klavarskribo’s vertical timeline orientation is a barrier to its wider acceptance. In the domains of math and engineering, a timeline is usually depicted horizontally from left to right. And Western cultures read text likewise. In addition, people tend to think of tones as going up and down, not side to side. Due to Klavarskribo's chromatic staff the sheet music can be quite wide for scores with increasing numbers of octaves. I believe this leads to a confusing number of staff lines to interpret by a beginner.

In spite of that, at its peak, Klavarskribo had tens of thousands of adherents and was taught in the Netherlands’ public schools. Perhaps had the internet been available during Mr. Pot’s lifetime (he died in 1977), it might have more widely spread to other regions. Nevertheless, the project is ongoing today, after nearly 100 years, and has an active community on Facebook. There are many lifelong users of this alternative notation. This is proof that many players want a simpler approach.

From a project standpoint, I believe Klavarskribo is a model to be emulated. For Cornelis Pot, getting Klavarskribo into the music mainstream was a lifelong project and dream. Being a wealthy industrialist in the Netherlands, he had the financial means to fund a project staff to develop correspondence courses (starting in the 1930s) to teach students how to play keyboard instruments. Mr. Pot was a tireless promoter of his design for decades. His project also set up a printing facility to produce a large inventory of piano and organ sheet music for sale by mail.

To date, it is the only Alternative Notation to be adopted by a significant audience (over 10,000 mainly in the Netherlands and Northern Europe). But the story of Klavarskribo is proof that with great dedication, promotion, and financing (or I hope, by enthusiastic volunteerism), an alternative notation project can be successful. And the three essential elements for project success are:

1. Availability of sheet music

2. Instruction

3. Promotion

WYSIWYP Many other alternative notations solve at least two of the three main challenges of reading TN. And virtually all of them offer a consistent and logical solution to the challenges of traditional notation. So why is WYSIWYP easier to read than these? I would suggest it's because:

There are fewer lines and spaces on the octave to interpret.
The staff lines map to the keyboard.
Rhythm is visually intuitive.

The vast majority of alternatives are based on a chromatic octave staff design to remove the need for key signatures. Like WYSIWYP, they also have the same format across all octaves. This approach would seem like the obvious fix to a problem caused by not expanding the diatonic system of the Middle Ages to a full chromatic system where all twelve scale degrees have an equal place on the staff.

But how do you best define staff lines to make note recognition possible on this wider staff? This is the focus of most chromatic designers. There are hundreds of different proposals (as laid out in the sources cited above) with every imaginable combination of lines, legers and spaces. But in my own experience, I found 12 lines and spaces too much to quickly process for even a single octave. There is even some cognitive research that indicates that the optimum number of objects an average human can hold in short-term memory is seven plus or minus two (see: The Magical Number Seven Plus or Minus Two).

And once you start stacking up octaves to accommodate the entire range of a score, I think the number of lines and spaces can feel overwhelming to a beginning student. In contrast, WYSIWYP's diatonic octave has only two lines. The red and blue lines map to the C and F keys on the keyboard. Naturals, sharps and flats are indicated by notehead shape. In my view, making the real-time playing adjustments for sharps and flats on a 7 position diatonic octave is a better tradeoff than reading a more complicated octave with 12 dedicated staff positions.

As with Klavarskribo, WYSIWYP uses of a true timeline so that distance between consecutive noteheads in time indicates note duration. But I believe the distance is more clearly seen by the use of “stripes” which are visually intuitive.

Thanks to Cornelis Pot, Klavarskribo had a fully funded project and an enthusiastic promotor. Alas, WYSIWYP has only the latter but this barrier could be solved with some enthusiastic volunteers.