A History of Music Notation
Musical notation is <i>really</i> interesting, a bit like mathematical notation. There&#x27;s really only one standard way of doing it, both relatively recent, and both having histories going back thousands of years.<p>There&#x27;s a few oddball variants that survive, and almost all ancient systems just used strings of characters from whatever the local writing system was to represent the music, but did so imprecisely. Few of the systems even provided absolute pitch guides or timing and provided more of a sketch of the tune than a high precision description.<p>For fun, try to come up with your own system from first principals without arriving at something that&#x27;s kind of like what we use today and can still compactly describe just about any kind of music. Try the same with math notation. It&#x27;s both hard and fun!<p>I&#x27;m glad that they put in the avant guard entry, but a few musicians also have various kinds of shorthand. Here&#x27;s an entry on Yanni&#x27;s.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.quora.com&#x2F;Is-it-true-that-Yanni-cant-read-music" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.quora.com&#x2F;Is-it-true-that-Yanni-cant-read-music</a>