Introducing Form a New Music Language
Pt. 1 Color and Shape
What is Music Notation?
A long time ago a group of what I can only imagine were men in powdered wigs figured out a way to record music ideas in a concrete way. Using nothing more than a pen and paper they were able to convey the intricate relationship between sound and time.
This is inarguably one of mankind’s greatest inventions. Every song you know and love stems from this discovery. There’s only one problem with it. The majority of people looking at this right now can’t read it. Hell there are even musicians that get paid to make music that can’t read this. Just think about that for a second.
Imagine any other field where a professional in said field didn’t understand the most fundamental tool associated with that field. Imagine a surgeon that didn’t understand a scalpel. Or an architect that can’t read a blueprint. Or a president that’s never been a public servant. That would be an unmitigated disaster. 😅 (BTW Vote)
With vibe and feel playing such a major role, music creation is different because you can get a lot accomplished without having a full grasp of what you’re doing. No one would deny that The Beatles are a great band or that hip hop producers and rock musicians make incredible music. However, when you compare them to someone that deeply understands music composition, take Quincy Jones for example, it becomes very clear that understanding those lines and circles unlocks an entire new dimension of creativity. We can do better though. We can give everyone the ability to read music and I’m going to show you how. Let’s get started.
Clefs Indicate Note Position… Poorly
Some of these symbols you’ve seen, most you probably haven’t, or even had a clue they existed. But the point of each of these is simply which notes we should be playing currently. Each clef you see above shifts the notes relative position some based on the kind of instrument you’re playing.
Don’t worry about understanding any of this. It’s irrelevant. This is just the bare minimum explanation necessary for what’s to follow.
A More Vivid Solution
ROY G BIV to the rescue! Instead of differentiating the positions of notes with cryptic symbols how about we do it with light? More specifically the wavelengths of light in the visible spectrum or as hipsters like to call it “color”. In making this one change, note positioning becomes drastically simplified. No more notes shifting around on a grid. If green is indicated that’s where your notes are.
But that’s only one part of the equation. You now know the general vicinity but what about the specific notes?
Notes Are Unique, So Let’s Make Them Unique
So far we’ve got our colors to indicate note position and we could use that here. But we quickly run into another problem. Differentiation. If you look above you’ll see we’re representing 8 unique values. But what happens when we remove the letters?
It quickly becomes apparent that those unique values all look the same. On a staff, the lines or lack there of, are supposed to represent the different note values. Meaning the lines are the unique identifiers. There’s just one thing wrong with this.
It’s really (and I can’t stress this enough) terrible design.
No offense to the original innovators because they did an amazing job with the tools they had at the time, but our brains just do not function like this. It’s a homogenous mess. There’s no reason for us to continue using this system. Times have changed and we have far better tools available now. So let’s use those tools and start to build a better language.
Things Take Shape
You know what’s a better unique identifier than dots on a staff or letters? Shapes. They’re some of the first things we learn as children and they’re perfectly suited to this task because they’re instantly recognizable. I’m willing to bet you’d have a hard time finding C-notes on a treble clef but if I asked you to find a Circle you’d instantly know at the very least what to begin searching for. By the way Circle represents the same note as C. Keep this in mind. 🟢
All we have to do is give each individual note it’s own individual shape and suddenly magic happens. No more sharps and flats, in fact the concept of enharmonic notes disappears entirely. Hooray for simplicity.
Now let’s see what happens when we combine these two systems.
Shape + Color = Magic
Just in case it isn’t immediately apparent, when you combine color and shape together you get all the information you need to locate a specific note. So let’s try a little thought experiment.
Which one of the notes on this staff is middle C? … Give up? Trick question middle C is on here twice. If you know the answer to this great. If you don’t it honestly doesn’t matter.
Now let’s try the same experiment using Form with some minimal information. We already know all C-Notes are Circles so it has to be a Circle. Right? I wonder what color is in the middle 🤔
Looks like green! So what note is middle-C?
Did everything just suddenly click for you?! If so congratulations you can now read music! And yes, it really is that easy. If you can discern shapes and see color you can read this language. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. There’s a lot more to cover in part 2 of this 3 part series. In that part we’ll introduce a practical application of this system.
This isn’t just about sheet music and composition this is about actual instruments, new ways of learning and software systems that don’t exist yet but will. So in the next article I’d like to introduce you to the first instrument that utilizes this language: FormKey
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