Pitch bracket notation

[corygledhill]

Hello all, happy new year!

I hope I'm posting in the right category. I invented a new music notation called pitch bracket notation. Rather than writing notes on a staff, notes are written on a melody line and the pitch of the melody line is changed by writing pitch bracket. Many interesting patterns and symmetries became apparent when writing a melody in pitch bracket notation. I am eager to receive your feedback and I invite you to read more about pitch bracket notation at the official website.

http://pitchbracket.com

[OCTO]

Thank you for that.
That looks VERY exotic. What would be the main purpose/idea of that notation?

I wanted a notation that visually captures the intricate mathematical processes and patterns at play in classical music.

Is that something you need for visualisation?

[Fred G. Unn]

From your link:
"The pitch of a note, however, is not relative to the pitch of the previous note. Rather, it is relative only to the staff lines. Musicians learn to recognize common pitch intervals between notes but only by referencing the staff lines. So you might say that the pitch dimension is note-to-staff relative.
...
Consider for a moment what music notation would look like if the pitch dimension were note-to-note relative."

I'm not sure how that is in any way an improvement or something desirable. To figure out the pitch of any note, you have to go back to the beginning and calculate the pitch from there. It would make sightreading, rehearsals, heck even practicing a piece virtually impossible. Perhaps for an ear training exam where you aren't penalizing the students without perfect pitch as long as they get the intervals right, or maybe a short excerpt that is intended to be played through all 12 keys, but I'm not sure of other practical applications other than mathematical curiosity, and as you point out, there is not yet a way to convey rhythms.

I'm also assuming that there is no way to convey a key signature, correct? So your Beethoven's 5th example shows G-G-G-E natural?!

f6-300x111[1].jpg (3.49 KiB) Viewed 23840 times

As an aside, wasn't SCORE input in DOS note-to-note relative? I can't remember exactly.

[Schonbergian]

I agree with the misgivings suggested above. I haven't always liked graphic notation, but it's always seemed like it's sprung out of an inability for traditional notation to represent the genuine wishes of the composer. This doesn't seem to do that, and merely complicates matters without providing much in the way of extra insight. Most of us can understand the melodic line visually, and traditional notation provides us with additional information on top of that, available at a glance--so how exactly would this be an improvement?

In fact, looking back on the examples on the site, I'd almost say that it makes it more difficult to understand a melody, rather than less. With current notation, the rise and fall of any series of notes is easily perceptible to the most un-musical viewer, whereas it's simply unintuitive here.

I'm also assuming that there is no way to convey a key signature, correct? So your Beethoven's 5th example shows G-G-G-E natural?!
f6-300x111[1].jpg

Not to mention cautionary accidentals. It's almost like this system fights diatonicism inherently.

Pitch bracket notation does not yet attempt to represent rhythm or timing. The author has explored many possible solutions but at this time none are satisfactory. Another problem which will need to be addressed is polyphonic music. Music with multiple monophonic lines in parallel (i.e. symphonic music) can be represented with multiple parallel melody lines. But for complex polyphonic music such as piano music, a new solution will be necessary.

This is the biggest problem, though.

[OCTO]

I guess that the original poster wants to explore something behind music, not merely by just finding a new notation as a replacement.

Being a composer, musician and engraver for my entire life, I firmly believe that in the extended-'western' notation (EWN) it is possible to notate almost everything in domain what we call music.
I have a long and ever-going discussion about the Byzantine notation, which in my opinion is fully rewritable in the EWN. Still some people don't believe it is possible, even with the provided facts.

The only moment where EWN lacks its power I see with the electro-acoustic music, where timbre or distance are hard to be defined.
Well, still we have timbre defined in the classical music, as well distance and panning.

OTOH, anyone interested in mechanics of music and want explore just numbers, should check SuperCollider, CommonMusic or similar (I guess the OP is aware of them). Out of that numbers one can create the visualisation of any kind. But the opposite way, to create first a visualisation than to get the insights, for me seems to complicated.

[John Ruggero]

This system flies in the face of Western musical notation starting with neumes. Since the 1200-year interaction of our notational system with the development of our music has made the two inseparable, all attempts to severe them have and will fail.