Creatoing a new notation for untuned percussion

[Ryszard Pusz]

Thank you both OCTO & Fred for your assessments - very valid points. If I understand you both, you are saying that I should perhaps try to get my pieces out so that people can see and possibly be game enough to try them, before asking software developers.

My thinking, which developed as I experimented was based on coming up with a system that could go further than the present compositions and playing approaches go. I looked for a way of accurately denoting a greater range of sounds. To transcribe standard works I thought could happen downtrack. And to get the symbols I simply trawled through a lot of fonts, some of which I specifically bought, and then decided on groups of consistent symbols. It is a bit arbitrary, but all written language is. I worked on the basis of tying the notation to the sounds and manners of playing of the instruments, which I believe should be organised into 4 conceptual typologies.

On drums, one can elicit 3 sounds on the drumhead, 3 more on the rim, 3 more as rimshots, and 3 more on the shell - and this using one wooden beater. To that one can add more sounds by playing with soft beaters, wire brush, fingers or fingernails. Depending on what beaters are used, what if the piece was to call for quick changes within a complexity of phrase?

Then what if one wanted to play on more than one drum? It would be most readable if the notation for each drum was contained within one space.

Yes, you are right, it could take a bit of learning at first, but once learned it remains the same for all pieces. I have come up with 12 basic notehead shapes onto which I add the different articulations.

So, I have a question. In my ignorance I had thought that if I come up with the shapes it wouldn't be too difficult for a software developer to make them into a font. Am I correct in that thinking?

[Fred G. Unn]

So, I have a question. In my ignorance I had thought that if I come up with the shapes it wouldn't be too difficult for a software developer to make them into a font. Am I correct in that thinking?

Sure, that wouldn't be too difficult. You may even want to download a demo of a program like FontLab and attempt it yourself. However, if you are unfamiliar with it, there is a font specification called Standard Music Font Layout or SMuFL that specifies the font mapping of thousands of musical glyphs. Some software, like Dorico, requires a SMuFL font to be used as a music font, and this standard is supported by Finale and MuseScore as well. Here's a link to the SMuFL glyph tables, just scroll by category on the left panel:
https://w3c.github.io/smufl/latest/tables/index.html

If you are using glyphs that don't appear in the SMuFL specification, that's another hurdle to overcome for widespread adoption of your proposal, as they would likely need to be added to the SMuFL specification as well to be easily used in programs without a lot of workarounds or editing by the user.

[Ryszard Pusz]

Aha. Thank you for that. I will check through. I always feel challenged by technical matters, but clearly I need to research a little (or a lot) more. Most glyphs I found in Apple Symbols and simply assumed they could be used.

[John Ruggero]

I think that you need to design your own symbols and that the differences between them be very clear on first sight.

Music symbols that remain in current use are each very different from each other in appearance. Symbols that resemble other music symbols have a way of becoming extinct. For example, it was advocated that the standard symbol for a turn be reversed for an inverted turn. As logical as this is, it has not come into general use because the symbols are too easily confused with each other:

Turn and inverted turn.png (17.68 KiB) Viewed 7036 times

[Ryszard Pusz]

Thanks John, you are right, and well demonstrated with the turn symbol and attempted inversion. I think I have gone down that path of immediate difference, but in the light of your comment will review it. Also I have been alerted to the fact that some of my symbols were not in the SMuFL glyph tables - because in my ignorance I didn't know of its existence or importance. And it's likely that they are not in the Bravura font. So I think I'll have to download the font and check through it. I suspect I'll be asking for some additions to the SMuFL glyph tables - one step forward two steps back...

[Fred G. Unn]

If you weren't already aware, some of your noteheads are already pretty widely used to mean different things, especially in the Latin percussion world. Finale implemented their Latin Percussion plug-in in Finale 2007 IIRC. While there's obviously not complete standardization and agreement in the percussion world, they used notation that was mostly standard at the time. Of course, there's been over 15 years of use of these now, so an entire generation of musicians that have come up that are used to reading that system. If you're a Finale user, you can play around with that plug-in and see how they mapped it.

The triangle notehead is definitely already widely used to convey a type of instrument as in the below images, so I would imagine you'll have a tough time getting people to interpret that as "edge" as in your system.:

triangle.png (136.14 KiB) Viewed 6988 times

There are various positioning glyphs already too, but I don't think they really ever gained widespread acceptance:

edge1.png (17.44 KiB) Viewed 6988 times

edge2.png (20.37 KiB) Viewed 6988 times

Conga Chops is one of the best online Latin percussion educational sites. Here's the map they use in all of their notation, which includes many of your noteheads already:

congachops.png (96.06 KiB) Viewed 6988 times

I think consolidation of various percussion nomenclatures into a universally understood system is a very worthwhile project, but if you want widespread adoptation of your system, the more it can incorporate existing notation systems that are already widely used, the better chance you'll have at bringing people around to your system. Good luck!

[Ryszard Pusz]

Thanks, yes I am aware of Finale's notation. But here's the problem as I see it. If we look past the "standard" way the instruments are played and start to think of the ways in which they CAN BE PLAYED the notation has flaws. Snare drums, toms and bass drums for example have up to 20 characters of sound for each one. If the note shape can show edge, off-centre and centre, and then be added to to show fingers, brush, or other, then it can be contained within 1 space and allow for easy addition of more drums within the 1 stave for multi-percussion scores.
So I have divided the medium into 4 conceptual typologies with a set of note shapes for each of them and then added articulations that apply across the board.
But my immediate problem I think is to work out how to download the bravura font and read through it because some of the articulations I have chosen (mainly from Apple Symbols) apparently are not in it. Now it could be that the combination of, for example, brush and parts of the drumhead when shown as 1 notehead are not in Bravura. I would that combo as well as others to be noteheads for ease of notational input.

brush rolls.pdf

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The squiggly line is for a roll. Using up to 4 of them to indicate single, double, triple, quadruple rolls enables more accurate of the sound wanted. We don't have top be confined to traditional rolls. And it frees up the diagonal lines to be used as musical shorthand again.
It also seems I need to update my Finale to 27. I'm on 2014.5 as my MacOS is 10.13.6. So I may also have to update my computer...

[Fred G. Unn]

I assume you checked out the Beaters Pictogram SMuFL range as well as the Percussion Playing Technique Pictograms range? Those seem to have the current standard glyphs like those from pages 223-4 of Stone ...

223.jpg (839.13 KiB) Viewed 6978 times

224.jpg (746.94 KiB) Viewed 6978 times

or page 378 of Read:

378.jpg (892.65 KiB) Viewed 6978 times

[Ryszard Pusz]

Thank you yes I did, but i will check them out again. With the gongs on p. 223, if you write a piece for say 3 gongs, you would then have to have 9 staff lines. And if you wanted to include other instruments how many staff lines would you need?
And the playing on the rim on p.224 by striking the rim with the neck of the stick, the shoulder of the stick or the shaft of the shaft you can get 3 different sounds. I think it needs more precise notation. Rimshots also can elicit 3 different sounds, as can playing on the shell.
And then using mallet symbols, what if you wanted to write for drum(s) a piece with complex patterns that move between say stick & brush or brush and fingers and fingernails? incorporating them into noteheads and articulations would end up being easier to read.
Re the tambourine, it doesn't say which part of the tambourine to strike - skin & wood give 2 different sounds & it's possible to play on just the jingles also.
I have been thinking about the notational issues for many years and it solidified in my doctoral studies, when I wrote, using traditional notation, a work for snare drum, wanting to show a variety of possible sounds and playing approaches. The video of its 4 movements I uploaded on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giuipEvXSiw&t=13s and the legends and parts of each mvt I have attached. You can see it gets complicated. That is what I wanted to simplify in a way that would allow for a piece using some of those actions on 2 or 3 drums for example and use only 1 stave.

Suite for snare bits.pdf

(2.05 MiB) Downloaded 138 times

[Anders Hedelin]

A very interesting discussion!

An aspect that hasn't been mentioned, I think, is the desirability of a very detailed and exact notation as such. The longer back we go in music history the more the musicians had to understand and interpret themselves from a more or less incomplete notation.

Even nowadays there are differences between composers who like to prescribe as much as possible (like Mahler and Schoenberg in their time), and those who want the notation to be more open to interpretation by the performers.

Quite likely the latter kind would go for a more conventional notation system.