Re: Custom music notation?

[Carl Sorensen]

On 2/4/21, 3:50 PM, "lilypond-user on behalf of Karlin High" 
<lilypond-user-bounces+carl.d.sorensen=gmail.com@gnu.org on behalf of 
karlinhigh@gmail.com> wrote:

    On 2/4/2021 4:36 PM, ebenezer wrote:
    > If someone came up with a notation system that enabled teenage girls to 
    > be able to sing a song just by simply looking at it, well, within a 
    > decade or 2 it's use would be global.
    
    Where I live, that notation system is the Aiken shape notes seen here:
    
    
<https://lilypond.org/doc/v2.22/Documentation/notation/note-heads#shape-note-heads>
    
    There are church communities here where people seriously do not know 
    that the rest of the world uses "unshaped" notes. And with pretty 
    minimal music education, a never-before-seen hymn can have full SATB 
    harmony by the second verse.

Yes, and this is because each visible note carries two important pieces of 
information:
1) the absolute pitch of the note (given by the height on the staff)
2) the relative pitch of the note in the given key (given by the shape of the 
note)

This means that both intervals and absolute pitch are easily processed by the 
eyes.  Those who have training in the shape notes and their meanings related to 
intervals can quickly hit the appropriate interval.

Anything that makes it harder for me to know the relative and absolute pitches 
makes it harder to process/learn the music.  For all its potential complexity, 
traditional music notation conveys that information quite well.

Carl