Comments on: More thoughts on Klavarskribo, and refactoring music

By: Evan

Evan — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 18:43:07 +0000

Hi Sam,

Thanks for the reminder, and for re-focusing attention on how these otherwise-idle ramblings could be redirected to serve the needs and enrich the lives of others. I can definitely see how Klavarskribo could make learning piano easier and more fun for young students.

Evan

By: Sam Goede

Sam Goede — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 18:30:28 +0000

Hello Evan,

It has been a while, but I have something to add.
I think that Klavarscribo can have a very positive impact in music lessons
on primaty school or later.

Sam

By: Russell

Russell — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 11:22:33 +0000

Evan, I noticed you have had a look at keyPlay music notation in 2007. (keyplay.co.uk). See also my ebay listing:-
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT&item=330303145365
I have advanced it a lot since then and would appreciate your comments on it compared to klavarscribo. I would also be interested in having a DDR game written. If you give me some ideas on how it would work this would be helpful, regards Russell Ambrose

By: Evan

Evan — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 17:01:02 +0000

Hi Sam,

Thanks for your comment!

It’s inspirational to hear stories like yours and it makes me want to continue get moving on my video game project for Klavarskribo (PianoNinja), to open up this way of learning music to an even wider variety of people.

By: Sam Goede

Sam Goede — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 18:38:19 +0000

Hello everybody.
Interesting comments on klavarskribo.
I am reading and playing klavarskribo on the piano for over 40 years now.
When I started at the age of 15, I mastered sight reading in a few months.
Half a year later I played Beethovens Moonlight sonata on a piano tournament for young musicians whre I got a second place.
Many of my relatives who are really gifted in playing the piano did this the hard way, meaning studying music from the traditional notation. A piece is rated as difficult the more pre signs are used in the key.
The ultimate trick is the fact that a traditional note reader has to perform two
steps before the corresponding tone can be played.
At first the reader has to interpred the symbol from the given harmonic context,
from there he has to find the corresponding key on the key board.
When you are trained in this discipline at a very young age (6 year old) and you practise reading and playing every day for at least four hours, you might end up playing a respectable piano concerto.
Most of the amator musicians never get there, unless they discover the benefits
and advantages of klavarscribo.
If you like to play the piano or organ o.i.d. klavarskribo is the way to go.
Virtually any piece of classical piano music is available in klavarskribo.
Looking forward to comments and reactions

By: Evan

Evan — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 04:41:30 +0000

Hi Matt, thanks for your response. I keep re-writing my comment in response and then thinking I’ll write another blog post instead. I want to put some more thought into this.

I see regular Klavar notation as being the lowest-level of a set of representations. (However, that really does depend on the piece. Some pieces may not warrant a higher-level representation, e.g. short atonal pieces or pieces in C Major that don’t have any repeating structure.) I agree with DRY in engineering, but I don’t think of the Klavarskribo notation of a whole piece as something you would “hand code”. Rather it would be the final result that gets generated from your higher-level representation (which perhaps contains snippets of Klavar notation). DRY isn’t an injunction to the compiler; it can repeat itself all it wants. In my higher-level representation (which I actually do hand code), I would definitely follow the DRY mantra. For example, if a melody appears twice, once in E Major and once in A Major, I might first represent it in Klavarskribo in C Major and then just refer to it later, noting that it should be transposed to E and A, respectively…

But what I’m a little stuck on and what’s really going through my head right now are how the use cases vary in contrast to software engineering, the static nature of composed pieces (no maintenance issues), and the fact that a computer isn’t necessarily involved (no syntax errors, need for a standard language).

I think examples are the way forward. The notation will emerge naturally from that in my mind. I’ll try to pick a piece to look at for a blog post.

By: Matt Constantine

Matt Constantine — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 01:18:15 +0000

I couldn’t agree more with your description of traditional notation as assembly language for music. As you know, I’ve had many of the same issues with and complaints about traditional notation. It is far too cluttered, obscuring even the simplest relationships.

In the last couple of years I’ve taken an interest in the Ruby on Rails web development platform. The mantra for Ruby developers is Don’t Repeat Yourself. DRY for short. I spend much of my days finding the DRYest way to write code, a process that almost always leads to remarkably simpler and clearer presentation of the code.

So in the spirit of DRYing up music notation, Klavar might be improved by introducing a shade of grey that denotes phrases that have already been introduced. So where you have two phrases that are identical, except for a little riff, the second phrase would be greyed out with the little riff standing out in black.

I’d love to see what the DRY mentality looks like when taken even further.