Music theory for nerds
&gt; Also, this notation has a <i>slight</i> problem. That problem is that sheet music is terrible.<p>&gt; This has got to be some of the worst jargon and notation for anything, ever.<p>I hear it bandied around in these articles that music notation is awful.  Can someone explain to me why?  I&#x27;m not much of a musician, but I can work my way through sheet music if necessary, or write it when I want to.  I don&#x27;t remember what it was like to learn to read and write music so I&#x27;m not going to understand why it&#x27;s so bad just by thinking about it.<p>First of all, the lines and spaces make a ton of sense to me.  When you&#x27;re playing, reading, or writing a piece, you spend most of your time in a key with a diatonic scale.  Maybe you&#x27;re thinking about the chords: I, vi, ii, V7.  The lines and spaces are great for giving you that kind of information.  I guess this &quot;completely obscures the relationship between the pitches&quot;.  I guess that&#x27;s the case if you forget what key you&#x27;re playing in.  The alternative would be to make the staff fully chromatic, but that sounds like it has a bunch of disadvantages for most music.<p>The chromatic staff (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;musicnotation.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;musicnotation.org&#x2F;</a>) looks terrible to me, since it spreads out the notes farther.  I&#x27;ve already memorized all of the diatonic scales, and now the diatonic scales are jumping around, and the staff covers a shorter interval so you get more of those 8va or 15ma.<p>Hummingbird (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hummingbirdnotation.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hummingbirdnotation.com&#x2F;</a>) seems like classical notation, just with more redundancy and the symbols changed around a little bit.  Maybe it&#x27;s better but it&#x27;s a minor improvement at best.<p>Clairnote (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;clairnote.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;clairnote.org&#x2F;</a>) looks the worst of them all, with half-steps being half-way between lines and spaces.  It looks like a recipe for making mistakes and misreading music.<p>I&#x27;m not about to say that it&#x27;s easy to read music notation, just that the notation seems to have a reasonable amount of logic to it.  The idea that somehow it&#x27;s the <i>notation</i> that&#x27;s terrible and music itself would be easier to understand or play if we just had better notation--I don&#x27;t buy it.  Maybe someone could convince me.<p>(Addendum: If you think the chromatic scale is the &quot;right&quot; scale for notating most music, as in &quot;Chromatic staff&quot; or &quot;Clairnote&quot;, as an exercise... why do you think that the chromatic scale is correct?  Is it because it represents both sets of keys on the piano or the frets on a guitar?  Is it because of the mathematical relationship between the notes?  My counterargument, against the chromatic scale, is presented by Bobby McFerrin: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ne6tB2KiZuk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ne6tB2KiZuk</a>)