Modern musical notation

Modern ...a likely story! The notation which today, through a graphic symbolism, represents the music we listen to, goes back, in its original version, to the beginning of the second millennium, thanks to the benedictine monk Guido d’Arezzo (991-1050). The Guidonian musical notation underwent some changes, yet its essence is still the same: as to their pitch, the notes are represented, by the position of a point (square, rhomb, full, empty, etc..) within a space defined by lines and spaces; as to their duration, they are represented by their graphic aspect. Furthermore, a large quantity of symbols, secondary but important for the complete and exact interpretation of the piece, enriched the musical score which have been utilized by several authors and in different styles.

All the musical symbols and their different and exact use cannot be represented by other expressive forms such as the various spoken and written languages. 

Writing music: composers and copiers

Reading music requires a specific technical background, while writing a musical score requires a complete mastery. Similarly to any other spoken and written idiom, expressing is more difficult than understanding, writing more difficult than reading. A further distinction must be made among those who write musical score: composers and copiers. A copier simply reads a manuscript and writes down a fair copy of it; a composer needs a deep knowledge of the symbols of musical notation in order to translate a musical thought with its acoustic and expressive complexity, into words. Composer and copier have a problem in common: choosing the means for writing. Before musical software, one had no choice: a composer wrote by hand (pen, pencil and eraser), and the copier was nothing but the printer who patiently, little by little, composed the musical page. For practical and immediate needs (i.e. the scores in an orchestra) the copier  wrote the manuscript by hand and in fair copy. So, writing by hand was, for both categories, the only economic available way. Time required for transcription? Critical for the composer, who needs to favour the creative stream, and critical for the copier, who needs to reduce the costs.

Software came twenty years ago, and we think it is now time to assess the real contribution that modern information systems can make to the music, as for writing and score production.

Musical notation and computer: current systems and transcription costs

 In the wide survey of softwares of musical notation which have been created till now, musicians and composers, professional or not, focus their attention particularly on two softwares which for a number of years have been in much demand. These are Finale by MakeMusic and Sibelius by Avid Technology. Without going into details of the technical characteristics, we notice that both systems are striving to make the inclusion of musical notes easier and to speed it up, so as to optimise it.

Despite said efforts, we think that the inclusion of notes through the traditional input device (keyboard and mouse) represents the “bottleneck” vis-à-vis those who would be interested in the use of an information system for writing their own and others’ music. Let’s try and compare the type-time in terms of note/minute of a composer with the one of a typist (word/minute) using an alphanumeric typewriting keyboard. They are incomparable. The problem is not the musical language, but simply the lack of a device of dedicated input. In other words: he who writes a text in Italian has got an alphanumeric typewriting keyboard with Italian characters; he who needs to write a text in Chinese has got a typewriting keyboard with Chinese characters; and so on, but he who writes music has not a typewriting keyboard with musical characters!

Let’s welcome the musical typewriting

 The current situation, from the point of view of those who use a computer to write music, highlights a large gap between software and the input hardware system. The software provides with everything, as for the system of input “one gets by” with the mouse, the alphanumeric keyboard, the midi keyboard, and so on… We believe that, as happened for the written and spoken language, the development of a “musical typewriting” created by a hardware device of input dedicated, would improve the relationship between musicians and information systems, reducing times (and costs) of transcriptions that would help the elimination of that “bottleneck” owing to which, at present, the users of the notation software are very few.

There is plenty of musicians who, after the first failed approach to the musical software, went back to the dear, infallible “pencil and eraser” and who would warmly welcome the coming of “musical typewriting”! “.

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