So many software nerds get nerd-sniped into trying to invent their own music notation. I have almost succumbed to that temptation myself. Someone should make a version of https://www.mcmillen.dev/language_checklist.html for this.
I like the technical fun of it, but no musician is ever going to give a crap about this. We have hundreds of years of the evolution of music notation and it is pretty comprehensive. Just because there are only 12 unique notes in western music doesn't mean base-12 to notate it makes sense....that completely strips out context of what you are playing.
For example...in the key of aminor when you make the five chord major to create a resolution back to i (aminor) you raise the 7th scale degree. That means the G becomes G#...Ab is the same pitch but writing it that way is wrong. An EMajor chord is spelled E G# B, not E Ab B. Now if you spell that as 9 0 4 you have stripped all context out of the music. Musicians aren't just player pianos, they analyze the harmonic structure of the music the inform phrasing, shape, tone, volume, and pacing (acelarando, decelerando, ritardando, etc).
Whenever I see something like this trying to reinvent standard notation I feel like it is usually from somebody who can kind of play an instrument but can't read music or can't read it well because they haven't put the years of work it takes to be a proficient sight reader and they haven't studied harmony/music-theory.
One of the most important things about musical standard notation is that it is - standard - you can hand it to any musician on any instrument and they can make sense of it quickly. It is a skill that takes a lot of practice but it is what allows musicians who have never met each other to be hired for a gig and show up and play together without ever rehearsing.
This approach won't teach you to "see" music either. It forces pure mechanical number memory....you won't see harmony and be able to quickly notice that - for example - a line is just moving the chord up in inversions and since you know harmony and your chords you can sight read that part without ever even reading every individual note.
I actually was typing up a similar response -- as a very basic example, if I'm playing and I see a ii-V coming up, that's communicating information about what scale I'm likely going to be choosing from to inform my playing. By just giving me tuples of data disconnected from key centers I'm losing all the harmonic information about a tune, which honestly is the most important information for me as a piano player.
The notation isn't just showing me what buttons to press and when -- that's almost the least important part of the notation. What it is showing me is how everything is moving in a tune, which allows me to make decisions inside of it, and I'm not sure a base-12 notation like this is even capable of expressing that.
It's totally understandable for a beginner to want to make something like this though, because that context of harmonic analysis doesn't really come into play until years later.
>An EMajor chord is spelled E G# B, not E Ab B. Now if you spell that as 9 0 4 you have stripped all context out of the music.
True, but it's not a fatal flaw of the notation, because you can annotate it with written chord names above the notes. This is common in guitar tabs (which are almost isomorphic in standard tuning, and fully isomorphic in regular tunings).
I give a crap about it. It looks like tablature for an isomorphic keyboard, which seems kind of useful for learning, assuming you have like a Lumatone or a Janko Piano keyboard. There's similar keyboard challenges for instruments like Bandoneon that benefit from learning apps like, like https://bandoneon.app/. For my own current work, I've switched from Classic to Modern Notation in Dorico because there are so many alterations in jazz voicings with a constant stream of key changes that it just seems easier to wipe the key signature clean and alter everything. Also, I've heard that's what they do in movie scores where it's important to get things right in as few takes as possible. Blargh, now I'm rambling. I'll allow it.
I like the use of base 12, but IMO it's somewhat wasted on a diatonic staff. This is basically just traditional notation with special coloring to make it easier to read. To better match the keyboard, I'd rather use an isomorphic staff (a.k.a. "chromatic staff", although I dislike that name because it implies diatonic music as a default).
There's a web site you might be interested in with many examples of isomorphic notation at:
It took me a while to understand what the numbers were actually trying to indicate (in part because I'm used to numbers in sheet music being suggestions of which finger should play the given note). If I understand correctly now, are you numbering zero-indexed with C as the beginning (0) and B as the end (Y), as a proxy for remembering which key notes are meant to be played in?
That's right - so a major triad in C would be (0-4-7), or a B-flat minor triad would be (X-1-5).
It's not required that the pitch notation is absolute though, e.g. you can transpose the numeric notation to any key (e.g., use A == 0 instead of C ==0)
I was working on a similar idea, I grabbed 2x PartyKeys and I was going to map each key to a finger ( left-pinky = orange ), but the API is such that -- if you have two boards (72 keys) and send a msg to a single board ( 1st key = orange ) -- it lights up both 1st keys (there's no way to address a single board). Was disappointing.
relatedly does anyone have a tool to generate piano synthesia videos from sheet music, maybe with or without AI? They seem fun to play along with. (I'll just look it up, commenting to share the idea too though)
It's also easier to learn because there's one consistent mapping between notes on the page and the sound, instead of many different irregular mappings specified by "key signatures".
But traditional notation is more compact, and for music based around diatonic scales, implies information about the harmonic function of notes that could be useful for interpretation.
It's harder to learn because fingerings are based on key notes and transpositions around that.
If the key is G you don't start with your hand on C and move it up to G, you start on G and move it relative to that root.
This matters because over/under moves usually happen at certain scale points. So if you learn the scale you have good chance of defaulting to the most efficient movements with muscle memory.
If you're referencing everything to C you'll never understand the scales and their different fingering patterns.
Anyway, here's Martha Argerich playing Prokofiev's Toccata. (What happens around 3:14 may be illegal. But here we are.)
But on an isomorphic keyboard you can just move your hand up or down and use the exact same fingering. You only have to learn how to play the scale once, not a different way for each key. You don't reference it to "C", you reference it to the first degree of the scale, and the key doesn't matter. IMO, the traditional keyboard has been obsolete ever since the Jankó keyboard was invented:
For example...in the key of aminor when you make the five chord major to create a resolution back to i (aminor) you raise the 7th scale degree. That means the G becomes G#...Ab is the same pitch but writing it that way is wrong. An EMajor chord is spelled E G# B, not E Ab B. Now if you spell that as 9 0 4 you have stripped all context out of the music. Musicians aren't just player pianos, they analyze the harmonic structure of the music the inform phrasing, shape, tone, volume, and pacing (acelarando, decelerando, ritardando, etc).
Whenever I see something like this trying to reinvent standard notation I feel like it is usually from somebody who can kind of play an instrument but can't read music or can't read it well because they haven't put the years of work it takes to be a proficient sight reader and they haven't studied harmony/music-theory.
One of the most important things about musical standard notation is that it is - standard - you can hand it to any musician on any instrument and they can make sense of it quickly. It is a skill that takes a lot of practice but it is what allows musicians who have never met each other to be hired for a gig and show up and play together without ever rehearsing.
This approach won't teach you to "see" music either. It forces pure mechanical number memory....you won't see harmony and be able to quickly notice that - for example - a line is just moving the chord up in inversions and since you know harmony and your chords you can sight read that part without ever even reading every individual note.
But still a cool idea from a hobby perspective.
The notation isn't just showing me what buttons to press and when -- that's almost the least important part of the notation. What it is showing me is how everything is moving in a tune, which allows me to make decisions inside of it, and I'm not sure a base-12 notation like this is even capable of expressing that.
It's totally understandable for a beginner to want to make something like this though, because that context of harmonic analysis doesn't really come into play until years later.
True, but it's not a fatal flaw of the notation, because you can annotate it with written chord names above the notes. This is common in guitar tabs (which are almost isomorphic in standard tuning, and fully isomorphic in regular tunings).
There's a web site you might be interested in with many examples of isomorphic notation at:
https://musicnotation.org/
It's not required that the pitch notation is absolute though, e.g. you can transpose the numeric notation to any key (e.g., use A == 0 instead of C ==0)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nashville_Number_System
Basically it uses a regular pattern of keys, instead of staggering keys into pentatonic and diatonic scales, like a piano does.
This makes it harder to "find" the diatonic scales, but easier to transpose between different keys.
You can see an example here: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/kMD1qXtDAdg
But traditional notation is more compact, and for music based around diatonic scales, implies information about the harmonic function of notes that could be useful for interpretation.
If the key is G you don't start with your hand on C and move it up to G, you start on G and move it relative to that root.
This matters because over/under moves usually happen at certain scale points. So if you learn the scale you have good chance of defaulting to the most efficient movements with muscle memory.
If you're referencing everything to C you'll never understand the scales and their different fingering patterns.
Anyway, here's Martha Argerich playing Prokofiev's Toccata. (What happens around 3:14 may be illegal. But here we are.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0fv5HKYn7k
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jank%C3%B3_keyboard