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:
Wow, I wish I had this when I learned to play. Keys, clefs, and accidentals felt like a hazing ritual, completely accidental (hah!) complexity. I always hated that I couldn't read the treble instrument parts at sight-reading speed simply because the sheet music used a different clef.
This is a system that indicates the lack of information about why the current system (which, admittedly is a mess) is the way it is. This is removing Chesterson's fence without understand why it's there.
A point: one improvement to this system is if the tonic note is always 1. I don't hate the idea of number inside the notes, but as it is currently, its not only useless, but actively making things more difficult to parse.
Having the tonic, the 3rd, the 5th, the 7th... that might make things easier to sight-read. Might.
The current notation is a hodge-podge of compromises of rhythm, legibility, page to music ratio (efficiency of page turns), pitch range, and dynamics. Nothing in music can ever be 'perfect' (the cosmic joke). And without the history of how any why the current system came to be, 'disrupters' are just people who don't know their own ignorance. Even still, sometimes there is value added. Rare as that is.
People who know Nashville system are gonna struggle with that.
Am I understanding correctly that it always starts on C (C==0)? Seems like key changes will be hard without computer assistance, I mean, you could have your chart update on the fly if you're using a tablet, but paper charts will be hard to transpose on the fly.
I do think now is a prime opportunity to get away from traditional notation for folks that want it, since transcription to a new notation is trivial now, even for paper charts, where it once required a lot of human effort. And, isomorphic is very appealing.
But, this feels like it doesn't come from the perspective of a musician who plays from charts? Musicians think in relationships, not absolute notes, and this kind of obscures those relationships. I'm not really arguing that traditional notation is optimal, it takes a lot of knowledge and practice, and I've never invested enough time to be good at it, but I don't think this really resolves the pain (you still have to know traditional notation to be able to read it) and adds something that isn't based on musical relationships and maybe even makes those relationships harder to see for a trained musician. To a musician the numbers they know are scale intervals; a "7" here is a "5" (perfect fifth) to a trained musician and a "4" is a "3" (major third), but only in the key of C, otherwise it's not a relationship you can memorize, you gotta do math.
It's fun to tinker, of course, and I'm not trying to shit on your idea. Just pointing out why I wouldn't find it helpful. As a musician, who isn't all that great at reading traditional music notation, I find the numbers distracting. It adds to an already noisy and difficult to read thing, one more thing my brain is trying to translate into something my fingers know how to do.
lol, what? Far better musicians than you or I use Nashville number charts every day. In country and some gospel, rock, and pop, session musician circles, it's extremely common.
What do you think working musicians are using? I mean, other than classical (traditional notation) and jazz (fake book style charts, probably).
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 really enjoy all the alternative music notation projects that popup on HN. Based on the comments, I think this one could use a page explaining the notation and instrument before diving into sheet music. Also looks pretty difficult to use with pen and paper but I'm probably in the minority there
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 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.
It didn't take more than one month of solfege practice to be able to look at any chord or note on the grand staff in traditional western notation and be able to say what the chord is, what the intervals are, etc.
I still practice the piano 2 hours/day most days. The challenge of playing music isn't reading the notes, it's getting from one note to the next one. 99% of what I practice is simply hand positions, grouping notes, fingerings, voicings. Reading notation is such a trivial part of musicianship, mastered easily with just a few months of study.
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)
I love this video and it's explanation of music notation, attempts to improve music notation, and a long history of failure. TL;DR Efficiency, high context, and compact notation.
Can we make a simpler thing: staff and durations same as before, but put solfege syllables (relative to current key signature) inside the note heads?
Edit: it seems a bunch of people already had this idea, it's even in Musescore. It might need some more work to make it readable at small sizes, though.
Go to fucking college for music theory or leave it alone. Dilettante shit at correcting all those snobby college boys about their passion has always been fated to fail. Congrats you really showed those first year conservatory students what's what. Thank god they are the real elite of the US or else this would come across as pointless bullying
Just learn to read music dude. It's not "your own instrument" right now if you can't fucking sightread the first mvmt of the Moonlight Sonata. Detach yourself from AI horseshit and woodshed a bit.
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:
> If you're referencing everything to C you'll never understand the scales and their different fingering patterns.
If you watch someone play a Janko keyboard (1) then you'll notice that there is only one fingering pattern for each tonality or chord, you just shift up or down based on the tonic. Kind of like a guitar, where there are a handful of scale/chord/arpeggio shapes that are picked for efficiency (aka, "economy of motion") and aren't tied to the particular key.
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.
> 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).
I feel like those are idiosyncrasies that feed into eachother i.e. you need to have 2 notations for same sound just because other decisions made it so there is no extra info passed other than in b vs #
So alternative notation could still make it clearer/"mathematic" but would essentialy need to include all of that, and for that as you said, you need people with wide experience about music and for them, they already are fine with standard notation so for them it wouldn't be an improvement because nicer learning curve doesn't matter once you learned it.
Classical keyboard layout is kinda similiar in opposite way here; beginner can just slap some white keys and get something musical and they can learn from there, while various chromatic keyboard layouts might have some nice benefits (chords being "same shape" regardless of where you play them), it is harder to start on it.
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.
Yeah, that's basically it, and I guess it's called "Modernist" in Dorico. I'm not in front of my music workstation, and am striking out on finding a link to the documentation right now, but it's available from I think it's called the Notation Options Library. There are a few more Modernist options available having to do with courtesy accidentals. I've yet to get one of these scores in front of an actual group to get feedback, so obviously use your judgement.
Okay, that makes sense. I play bass in a Big-Band, and some of our newer charts are this way, including some Metheny arrangements.
I'm fine with it, and might even lean towards saying it's easier to sight read, but on the other hand, I've spent decades reading traditional, so I'm used to that too. And on a jazz chart, I can ad-lib if needed to keep the show going if I get confused by something. My hands will usually gravitate to the right place even if my brain is wrong.
Tab for a harmonic table layout instrument would be pretty nice.
I would think the reason for keys on staff notation is to have less accidentals to write by hand so it seems like getting rid of this makes perfect sense in 2026.
This main post though I don't really understand without seeing the keyboard.
>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).
> 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.
Lifelong musician here and I agree. New standards of music notation are the equivalent of Esperanto: cool, but ultimately not super practical. That being said, I enjoy alternative ways to think in terms of music theory, so I still think this is a neat project from an abstract point of view.
I think about this any time a software engineer thinks they're helping Deaf people when they build some AI thing to see/speak finger spelling thinking they're interpreting ASL. Like just ask your customers what they want
Came here to say this but top comments got to the point. It’s funny how non musician programmers think they can just reinvent things without realizing centuries have gone into this. Might as well reinvent Arabic numerals and calculus notation.
There's a web site you might be interested in with many examples of isomorphic notation at:
https://musicnotation.org/
A point: one improvement to this system is if the tonic note is always 1. I don't hate the idea of number inside the notes, but as it is currently, its not only useless, but actively making things more difficult to parse.
Having the tonic, the 3rd, the 5th, the 7th... that might make things easier to sight-read. Might.
The current notation is a hodge-podge of compromises of rhythm, legibility, page to music ratio (efficiency of page turns), pitch range, and dynamics. Nothing in music can ever be 'perfect' (the cosmic joke). And without the history of how any why the current system came to be, 'disrupters' are just people who don't know their own ignorance. Even still, sometimes there is value added. Rare as that is.
Why is the current system a mess?
Am I understanding correctly that it always starts on C (C==0)? Seems like key changes will be hard without computer assistance, I mean, you could have your chart update on the fly if you're using a tablet, but paper charts will be hard to transpose on the fly.
I do think now is a prime opportunity to get away from traditional notation for folks that want it, since transcription to a new notation is trivial now, even for paper charts, where it once required a lot of human effort. And, isomorphic is very appealing.
But, this feels like it doesn't come from the perspective of a musician who plays from charts? Musicians think in relationships, not absolute notes, and this kind of obscures those relationships. I'm not really arguing that traditional notation is optimal, it takes a lot of knowledge and practice, and I've never invested enough time to be good at it, but I don't think this really resolves the pain (you still have to know traditional notation to be able to read it) and adds something that isn't based on musical relationships and maybe even makes those relationships harder to see for a trained musician. To a musician the numbers they know are scale intervals; a "7" here is a "5" (perfect fifth) to a trained musician and a "4" is a "3" (major third), but only in the key of C, otherwise it's not a relationship you can memorize, you gotta do math.
It's fun to tinker, of course, and I'm not trying to shit on your idea. Just pointing out why I wouldn't find it helpful. As a musician, who isn't all that great at reading traditional music notation, I find the numbers distracting. It adds to an already noisy and difficult to read thing, one more thing my brain is trying to translate into something my fingers know how to do.
Is there anyone still using this who hasn't realized they remade grade school intro to music theory? Or has no one told them?
What do you think working musicians are using? I mean, other than classical (traditional notation) and jazz (fake book style charts, probably).
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
I still practice the piano 2 hours/day most days. The challenge of playing music isn't reading the notes, it's getting from one note to the next one. 99% of what I practice is simply hand positions, grouping notes, fingerings, voicings. Reading notation is such a trivial part of musicianship, mastered easily with just a few months of study.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eq3bUFgEcb4 The video is excellent.
Edit: it seems a bunch of people already had this idea, it's even in Musescore. It might need some more work to make it readable at small sizes, though.
In a similar vein, I sometimes line the root of the scale with a red felt tip pen if I am struggling reading a piece.
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
If you watch someone play a Janko keyboard (1) then you'll notice that there is only one fingering pattern for each tonality or chord, you just shift up or down based on the tonic. Kind of like a guitar, where there are a handful of scale/chord/arpeggio shapes that are picked for efficiency (aka, "economy of motion") and aren't tied to the particular key.
(1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_POoaGecU9w
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.
I feel like those are idiosyncrasies that feed into eachother i.e. you need to have 2 notations for same sound just because other decisions made it so there is no extra info passed other than in b vs #
So alternative notation could still make it clearer/"mathematic" but would essentialy need to include all of that, and for that as you said, you need people with wide experience about music and for them, they already are fine with standard notation so for them it wouldn't be an improvement because nicer learning curve doesn't matter once you learned it.
Classical keyboard layout is kinda similiar in opposite way here; beginner can just slap some white keys and get something musical and they can learn from there, while various chromatic keyboard layouts might have some nice benefits (chords being "same shape" regardless of where you play them), it is harder to start on it.
I'm fine with it, and might even lean towards saying it's easier to sight read, but on the other hand, I've spent decades reading traditional, so I'm used to that too. And on a jazz chart, I can ad-lib if needed to keep the show going if I get confused by something. My hands will usually gravitate to the right place even if my brain is wrong.
I would think the reason for keys on staff notation is to have less accidentals to write by hand so it seems like getting rid of this makes perfect sense in 2026.
This main post though I don't really understand without seeing the keyboard.
It just adds the numbers inside the notes.
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).
Lifelong musician here and I agree. New standards of music notation are the equivalent of Esperanto: cool, but ultimately not super practical. That being said, I enjoy alternative ways to think in terms of music theory, so I still think this is a neat project from an abstract point of view.