- It choose its abstractions well.
Music is not a literal physical representation of sound,
nor is it a literal description of how to produce the sound on an instrument.
It uses a set of abstractions -- time, pitch, pulse, volume -- which are based not only
in the sound and how we produce it, but how our ears hear it, and how our minds imagine it.
Roughly speaking, written music works is organized as follows:
It's interesting that music notation works to be independent of the instrument which
plays the music -- it isn't even clear, for example, what instrumentation J. S. Bach intended
for Die Kunst der Fuge, or even if he had one in mind. Where instrument-specific instructions
such as bowings, fingerings and pedalings appear, they float around the central flow of the music.
It's also interesting which abstractions music notation doesn't emphasize.
For example, music notation focuses more on pitch than on timbre and tone, and it treats pitch
as discrete, not continuous. (This is why notated transcriptions of The Beatles generally work
better than transcriptions of Jimi Hendrix.)
- Its basic set of notational constructs is simple, but not minimal.
There are often multiple ways of notating the same notes, and different notations which mean the same
thing. This is interesting -- it would not take much extra effort to remove most of the superfluities
and simplify the notation system considerably, yet after centuries of refinement, music notation is still
far from minimal. In fact, it's a big fat mess.
What can we make of this? Certainly this is partly due to the organic evolution of
the system, and partly it is due to the range of nuance which redundancy allows -- more discussion of
both these points follows below. Perhaps these redundancies have allowed music to better adapt itself
to unanticipated styles and uses, and perhaps people just like having a choice, even when no choice is
strictly necessary. Certainly music notation can afford to be messier than a programming language,
since the former receives very subjective interpretation from humans, but the latter a computer must
interpret exactly. However, a representation-independent architecture like Eidola's may be able to
have it both ways -- the semantics can be clean and minimal, but the notations can be varied and
as happily messy as suits their users.
- It is tailored to the human eye.
Music notation is quite savvy to how our brains process visual information. The ingeniously simple
technique of placing notes on both the lines and the spaces of a staff achieves readability at a fairly
impressive information density. All the visually prominent lines, dots, and arcs in a score guide the
eye to useful information.
Often, a less obvious and more complex notation communicates something more effectively.
For example, knowing that the horizontal axis of music is time, it would be reasonable to
assume that the axis has a uniform scale, and the positions of notes show rhythm.
So, for example, a sequence of notes ascending increasingly fast would look like this:
The problem with this is that human eyes just don't work that way. We are not particularly
good at judging relative visual distances. Even a very simple rhythm notated this way is
not immediately apparent to the eye:
While our eyes are not good with distances, they are excellent with shapes and symbols.
Notated rhythm takes this into account, and uses a rather involved visual system of
stems, flags, noteheads, dots, and tuplets -- all that instead of spacing -- to show rhythm.
Here's the rhythm above notated using standard notation, which makes
it immediately clear that there are five beats variously divided into two or three equal notes:
- It mixes different kinds of graphical and verbal language.
Like every mature system, music notation is a venerable historical mish-mash.
Consider the variety of symbols and language in this sample:
- The clefs (1) specify the range of notes each staff represents. This particular one,
the treble clef, originated from a highly stylized calligraphic letter G, the note which
the curl centers on. Its origin is largely forgotten, however; it is now essentially
an arbitrary symbol.
- The staff lines (2) and barlines (3) demarcate pitch
and time, respectively.
- The time signature (4) numerically specifies a rhythmic framework. Numerals also
appear in tuplets, fingerings, measure numbers, and a...uh...number of other places.
- The tempo (5) appears in Italian. (It means "very slowly".)
This is from a subset of Italian which is part of the notation, and is understandable to
musicians everywhere who don't otherwise speak the language.
- A rather unusual direction for the performer (6) appears in unvarnished English.
- The dynamic marking ppp (7) stands for pianississimo or
triple piano, meaning "very very softly". The pedal marking (8) also appears
as an abbreviation.
- Following the ppp, the hairpin (9) says to steadily get louder, as its
shape might suggest.
So we have graphical symbols -- some precise, some suggestive, some arbitrary -- mixed with
numerals and several natural languages, sometimes in abbreviation. And yet,
astonishingly, it all makes complete sense to those in the know.
- It mixes denotation and connotation.
Many features of music notation have an explicit, unambiguous meaning, but many do not.
Tempo markings (e.g. "allegro"), despite many theoreticians' attempts to place explicit
ranges on them, are thoroughly subjective, to say nothing of expressive markings
(one Beethoven sonata is marked at the beginning "sweet; lovingly"). Some markings are so
subjective it's hard to even describe what they mean. For example, slurs show breathing for
singers and wind instruments and bowing for strings, but they also appear in piano music,
where neither bowing nor breathing is involved (except in keeping the performer alive).
The long arcs in the piano music below are slurs, and indicate some abstract sense of
breathing called "phrasing", which it is up to a performer to interpret.
Even many aspects of notation which are unambiguous in theory are in practice open to
interpretation. Rhythmic notation is quite mathematical, but playing rhythms absolutely
literally makes music sound awkward and dead -- it is the tiny deviations from literal abstraction
which are the artistic life of music. Often there are multiple ways of writing something
which are denotatively identical -- signifying the same notes at the same times -- but
connotatively different. In the example above, in the top staff, some notes have stems
pointing up and some have stems pointing down. This indicates that there are two separate
melodic lines moving independently in the right hand. We could point all the stems in the same
direction and take away the slurs, and there would be no literal change -- believe it or not,
the music below signifies exactly the same notes occurring at the same times as the music
above. The only difference is connotative.
- Reading it well requires a great deal of context and experience.
A common presumption about graphical languages is that they must be intending to make things
easier for beginners, on a sort of "pictures are easier than words" principle.
It's worth noting that, as the discussion above would suggest, music notation is an extremely
complex, subtle, and nuanced system which takes year to master. It is not self-explanatory.
Music notation succeeds in spite of its complexity for two important reasons.
First, its complexity is layered so that it is not opaque to a beginner. A basic knowledge
of how time, pitch, and instruments appear on the page is sufficient to follow along with many
scores. A little more knowledge of how to read notes and rhythms is sufficient to get the basic
gist of almost all written music. You don't have to know everything to know anything.
The second reason for the success of music notation is that
it rewards the task of understanding its complexities with very rich meaning. Consider that
musicians devote their lives to music written before recording technology, which we cannot hear
in its original form. It's a successful notation indeed that can carry this burden!
- It has evolved in a very organic fashion.
Nobody just sat down and designed music notation as we know it. That's not to say there's no
conscious design behind it -- many people sat down and designed individual features, but then
others revised those features, combined them, threw some away and added others, often
unconsciously. Music notation is the result of a historical process, and it shows. There have
been various efforts to "clean up" or simplify music notation, some of them lunatic, some
admirable. Interestingly, few have caught on. Music notation is often messy, but it seems to
do the trick for people.
The moral is that conscious design has limited power where there is no room for spontaneously
emergent evolution.
|
