traditional  Music  notation  is  part  of  the  problem

To make Traditional Music Notation (TMN) easier to learn, I put on my User-eXperience (UX) designer hat, and began whittling away the elements of it which would get a UX pro fired from their job.  I was left with nothing.  I had to re-build it from scratch.

No training

I had to work through the 5 stages of grief to accept the fact that most people will not ever learn traditional music notation.  And that meant that whatever I designed, it had to be intuited merely by watching it get used; no formal training session.

No training meant no symbols to memorize, so all of the symbols of traditional music notation went out the door.  flags, ovals, b's and #'s, stems and flags, clef signs, everything.   There could be no implicit lists, no arbitrarily-assigned notes to staff lines, and no implicit intervals of the scale, and no note names.  There could be no instructions.  It seemed like my skills at iPhone app design would shine, until I realized that being on a screen in front of everyone meant no feedback, no interaction, no "first-time instructions" or other "on-boarding" experiences.  Everything had to be direct.

It has to lead

"Leading" is many things, but one thing it must be is to "show someone the way ahead of time", with emphasis on the "ahead of time" part.  When a worship leader performs in-time with the music, they are very specifically not ahead of time.  The visual cortex can predict motion, and it works best with constant linear motion, and if that part of the brain does the time predictions, then the frontal cortex can do other things, like focus on the meanings of the lyrics.

​But should the 

Redundancy

In TMN, many concepts can be achieved in multiple ways each, so viewers have to learn multiple ways of doing the same thing.

A note's duration can be extended by a dot or by a "tie".  A viewer must learn both.  And by the way, "ties" looks exactly like "slurs".  And "extend the duration by half" dots look just like "shorten the duration by half" dots, they're just in ever so slightly different places.

Notes can be marked as accidentals by either flats or sharps.  Heck, notes in the key signature can be marked as either sharps or flats.

Triplets can be indicated either by a square bracket with a "3", or by compound time. 

One lesson we learned when moving apps to the iPhone from the Mac is: if there's only 1 way to do something, instead of 4, then 75% of the clutter is just gone.  So a good musical user-experience would have only 1 way to notate any particular feature.

Double  negative

TMN makes up for redundancy by leaving out other information entirely.  Most hymnals, for instance, don't have repeats at the ends, even though they have multiple verses.

​Unable to change their layout once printed, hymnals can’t communicate the rest measures or modulations inserted by the music ministers. Causing the hymnal to fail at its primary purpose: unambiguously communicating when to sing what.

Anti-proportionality

When there is more of something, we typically see more of it.  So when we see more of something, we think there is proportionaly more of it.  However, for the durations of notes, the amount of ink spent on the note is inversely proportional to the duration of the note.  I.e., the more ink: the shorter the duration; the less ink: the longer the note.  Whole notes have half as much ink as half notes, but double the duration.  Quarter notes again, approximately double the ink, but half the duration.  Adding a flag halves the note duration, but adds more ink.

​For people to intuit how much of something there is, as the amount of the thing increases the visual indicator needs to increase, not decrease.

Don't  repeat  yourself

Researchers were stunned to learn that there are brain cells (neurons) in the retina of the eye, which compress the data that's sent to the brain. One of their functions is to detect repeating patterns. To the brain, they only send the image of a single element in the pattern and the extent of the region occupied by that pattern. Our brains literally never get all the image data. Depending on the person, the limit of the number of repeating elements to trigger this pattern filter is between 3 and 5.

This means the 5 staff lines of the traditional music staff are at the limit of human perception.

Attempts at 'chromatic' musical notation systems which use 6 or more lines can't even be seen by humans.

Hocus  Focus

The human eye has a tiny region in the middle called the "fovea" where visual acuity is best.  It's only 5 degrees wide.  Near the edge of this region, the sharpness of our vision falls off rapidly, and continues falling off rapidly in the (surrounding) parafoveal region.

The result is that for average vision, people literally cannot read the fourth line of the lyrics and see which line of the musical staff a melody note is on at the same time.  Professional singers are taught to look at a point half way in between, but chances are your congregation hasn't heard that....  if they even have hymnals.

A new music notation would not only have to account for legibility of content on the big screen for folks in the back, but also for the fact that not all the information on the screen can be seen in full resolution at the same time.

​​PERFECTLY  USELESS

Only a handful of people have 'perfect pitch'.  Most other folks only have 'relative pitch' which allows them to kind-of carry a tune.  But if you played them a note, and five minutes later played a note 1 step different, they wouldn't know.

Notating music for instruments in perfect pitch makes sense: an E♭ is played in the same position on a trombone or the same fingering on a trumpet regardless of whether the key signature is A♭ or B♭.  But to the human ear, the 4th and the 5th chords sound very different.

A well-designed user experience places emphasis on what most people use, and deemphasizes advanced features.  While TMN concentrates on presenting information that almost no one in the congregation can make accurate use of, even if they can read it.

Setting  the  mood

I don't believe in re-directing the congregation's attention from the content of the lyrics to a psychedelic background video on the screen during worship, but I do believe carefully-crafted artistic content can help set the mood for a song, or section of a song.  But traditional music notation is stuck in black and white with Baroque styling.  And worse yet for projecting on a screen, it isn't designed to have an image background.  With only 1 pre-defined color (black), when laid over a background image TMN can't guarantee legibility by providing internal contrast.  It can't be themed to feel at home or stand out from the background content.

A new music notation, designed for a projected screen, would have to take into account the artist's use of color & background imagery to set the mood.

the  courage  to  change  the things  I  can

I thought I was the only one who admitted we have a problem with TMN.  It turns out that almost everyone figured out there were major problems in music notation.  In the last 400 years, more than 391 documented attempts have been made to fix TMN.  It's just that no one has been able to fix them...  Until now.  (Although, 4 of those guys had good ideas.)   TMN's founding principles are based in a technology that is obsolete: pen & paper, and on a complete lack of any expertise in visual communication or user experience.

The problem with slide shows is...   slides

And it doesn't stop with the music notation.  I had to figure out how to solve those pesky presentation-software program problems: like when the volunteer is half a second late and the slide doesn't change and suddenly nobody knows what to sing.  Yeah...  I solved that one.  Going into this, I did not expect that the problem with slide show software was the slides.  I used to be the guy running the slides.  But it was.  So I got rid of slides.  I know that sounds crazy...  but after you see this app in action, you're going to think slides are crazy.

Many, many musicians have spent many, many years learning traditional music notation.  Others haven't, such as many lead guitarists who can only read guitar tabs.  I have, in the past, even used the phrase 'musically illiterate'.  However, when I took a dispassionate & professional look at the user-experience of TMN (as I was taught to while getting my Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering), I discovered that it is truly very poorly designed.  And it couldn't be tweaked.  Decades of research of dozens of international researchers have gone in to trying to tweak it to make it better, and their results were zip, zero, nada.  They had little to no expertise in User eXperience (UX), and they believed in the same fundamental problems that had lead TMN to be so bad in the first place.


But kids could still play 'Guitar Hero', so there had to be a solution...