This is a very interesting video on musical notation. If you aren't a musician, the topic probably seems, shall we say, empty. If you are a musician and you read music in the standard Western notation, then it's likely a topic on which you have some possibly quite strong opinions. Of course, you might be quite a skilled musician, but also unable to read music. In that case you might not care, or you may be ticked off, or something else.
I'm a musician and I read written music. But I can improvise as well and, on the whole, would prefer not to be bothered with notation. Alas, I can't avoid it. For one thing, I've often performed in situations where I had to read music. Beyond that, I've also written some music, and so had to struggle with the practical difficulty of figuring out just how to notate the music.
Beyond even that, I know quite about about cognition and perception, so I'm interested in the perceptual, cognitive, and neuro-psychology of the problem. This video gets into those issues when it discusses the practical problems presented by various notation conventions, but doesn't discuss them in the terminology of the relevant psychology disciplines. That's fine. I have no complaint on that score. But, as I listen to the video, I'm translating it into those terms, and that's what I find fascinating. One could write a book about that, and perhaps someone will do so one day.
From the YouTube page:
921,423 views Nov 3, 2023
Many people feel that western notation makes it unnecessarily hard to read music. If we want to sight read, learn music theory or just practice an instrument, surely there's a better way? Right? This has been a hot topic for almost 1000 years... AND I PUT IT TO BED RIGHT HERE!
00:00 - Setting the stage*
09:26 - Notation must die INTRO!
15:12 - Ancient Greek notation
19:40 - The history of western notation
31:57 - Chromatic staves
36:15 - The piano roll
42:54 - Clefs (and resistance to change)
44:42 - Muto method
46:45 - Notation & the aristocracy
48:25 - Tablature
51:40 - Guitar Hero
52:51 - Klavarskribo
54:08 - Other types of keyboard notation
55:47 - Musitude!
1:01:18 - Dodeca
1:03:01 - Accessibility
1:04:31 - Farbige Noten
1:06:49 - Jullian Carrillo's system
1:08:26 - The best of the rest
1:11:52 - Where can we go from here?
*Note: This opening section is about chess notation. It serves to introduce the problem of notation, though we aren't told that at the beginning. Unless chess notation actually interests you, you might want to skip over this.
Learning the notation of medieval Japanese noh music was fascinating. So much was suggested rather than pinpointed.
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