Show HN: XY Music Notation
music.xy.devThe idea is to represent each note in 12-TET as a number, so N ∈ (0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,X,Y).
I used codex to build a music score rendering backend based on MuseScore with custom note heads that display the pitch class of each note.
I've found it pretty helpful for learning how to play my own instrument, so wanted to share in case anyone else was interested.
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)
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.)
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.
It doesn't because it only has a single row of keys. Piano music is full of awkward finger crossings that could be avoided with multiple rows of keys like on the Jankó keyboard.
>or feeling
You can texture or raise/lower the keys on any keyboard as you please. No layout has an advantage here.
>the range for one hand is smaller than the guitar's
True, but the traditional keyboard is even worse.
>there's no bending/sliding/vibrato
Exactly the same as a traditional keyboard.
It's IMO crazy that going up seven scale degrees makes an "octave".
There's a web site you might be interested in with many examples of isomorphic notation at:
Irregular spacing is a feature, not a bug, unless you're playing Schönberg and friends, because being able to quickly separate thirds, fourths and fifths is much more important than being able to grab octaves and even more important than identifying individual notes.
Your brain anyway doesn't have to work on "it's on a line therefore it's one of C D E F# G# A#", it very quickly learns to work on "it's on adjacent lines therefore it's a third apart" when you read sheet music. Two notes both on lines or both on spaces are part of a triad; "two notes very far apart, one on a line and one on a space" is almost always an octave, and you can grab that intuitively in standard music notation even without reading the two notes one by one; whereas smaller intervals are simply too far apart on isomorphic notation.
Same for understanding when your scale is changing or you're deviating from the normal fingerings (key signature vs. inline accidentals). And all this ignores the fact that G# and Ab aren't even played the same on some instruments, at least at an advanced level, and chromatic notation cannot capture that.
The problem is "a third apart" means different things depending on where on the diatonic scale that third is. What I actually care about is how many MIDI note numbers apart it is, because that's what corresponds to the finger positions on the instrument.
>G# and Ab aren't even played the same on some instruments
Seeing as we've freed up the sharp and flat symbols, we can repurpose them to mean adjustments by whichever comma is relevant.
Maybe you read sheet music different than how I do, but when I play euphonium or trombone, I translate from note position+features to finger+mouth position without needing to think about the note letter. More like, "I see the note located here with an accidental feature in the context of the clef and key signature therefore I use this finger position and mouth position". I would love to simplify it down to "it's located here therefore I use this finger position and mouth position".
Keep the accidentals to notate alternate finger positions for enharmonics (and microtones), but eliminate the global variables, the clefs and key signature. Heck, keep the key signature to reduce the noise of alternate fingering symbols, but PLEASE eliminate the clefs. I would also love to play treble clefs at the same sight-reading speed as bass clefs. Also, staff notation should visually repeat every octave, but it doesn't.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Sometimes you need G and the note to its right, so you want to call the latter a variation on A (A-flat). Sometimes you need A and the note to its left, so you want to call the latter a variation on G (G-sharp). They are the same note but they have a different function. It's not an idiosyncrasy, rather, when it works it's more efficient because it describes two things at the same time. It doesn't work perfectly for many cases: Misirlou, the Simpson's theme, anything in whole-tone or octatonic scale, but those are the exceptions in practice, just like some things compress better than others.
It is suboptimal even for the blues scale, but not too much and in fact that shows another benefit of giving two names to a note. The blues scale is mostly a variation on the pentatonic scale; the A#/Bb note in a minor E blues scale is used mostly as an intermediate note. So if you're going up to a B you can write that note A# because it is working like an A, while it you're going down to an A you will write it Bb because it is working like a B.
Likewise for chords. If I see E Ab B, E-A points me at a suspended chord, not a major chord, which would be wrong. Whereas if I see E G# B, it is clearly a triad.
Having to learn a different notation system for every key is IMO no longer a good tradeoff.
They are the same pitch in well-tempered tuning, but that’s a small part of the picture. They are not even the same pitch if you’re singing or playing a fretless instrument, like a violin.
The reason is that the pitch changes slightly based on harmonic context, and the notation communicates the context.
G# typically conveys a tension in an ascending movement (assuming the key is Am or one of its neighbors). Ab can convey tension in a descending movement.
It just adds the numbers inside the notes.
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.
It is if you're singing with a piano or fretted instruments. Which is most singing.
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).
Roman numbers mostly came up in the traditional music theory lessons, they didn't often appear on charts we played from, either. We mostly played from charts from the Real Book (which usually are written in the recorded key and use named chords, rather than numbers). In college, it was all Roman numbers, but the school didn't offer jazz or popular music classes, it was traditional music theory.
Anyway, I think jazz players probably know the Nashville number system, but probably don't play from them often, unless they do session work or make their own charts. In the session case, they're almost certainly playing from Nashville number charts sometimes.
I think most jazz players play more by ear than from charts, though, and transposition of a memorized song is different from transposing from a chart. The reason the Nashville number system is so common in session work is it makes it much easier to transpose to a different key on the fly and see the relationships in a song you've never heard. It's also very concise. Roman numbers also mostly have the same transposition/relationship benefit.
I have seen jazz charts with both Nashville numbers and Roman numbers (but mostly actual chord names) above the melody, so I don't think anybody's really wrong here (except the person who thinks the Nashville number system is just music theory for dumb people, which completely misses the point). It's pervasive in Nashville, but it spread around the world since its invention.
It's not for dumb people, it's only for people who insist on reinventing music theory from 300 years ago from first principles without actually adding to it.
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?
Having to read notes that are up in the ledger lines outside the clef kind of sucks. You just have fewer visual landmarks to hang off of.
This is partly a consequence of the physical instruments we have and their natural ranges, but clefs as a general concept are annoying to deal with when you have to juggle them constantly.
IMO it doesn't do a good job of communicating dynamics and expression. The notation used is vague (accelerando... okay how much faster, over how many measures, etc).
Maybe I'm holding it wrong, but recently I transcribed some of my friend's songs and managing repeats that don't neatly fit into a rigid song structure is difficult without writing very "WET" music that takes up a lot of space.
In a more meta sense, most sheet music is garbage. There is no inherent pit of success when it comes to creating sheet music, and writing a very good, readable score is something only well-trained musicians and composers can do. Look at free sheet music or read notation written by amateurs, you'll see missing key signatures, misspelled chords, etc. Sheet music doesn't make any concessions for people who understand music as sound first, you have to adhere to tradition and theory to produce good sheet music. Lots of musicians with decent ears cannot do this.
IDK, this is me trying very hard to come up with reasons to hate on sheet music.
The fundamental problem, as I see it, is that music notation was designed for a 7 note system and modern music is a 12 note system. They managed to get all 12 notes in there, but it is more awkward than it should be, needing to notionally classify some notes(or bars, that's fun to wrap your head around) into a sort of second class status(flat or sharp).
Note for them like me learning this stuff. All 12 notes in common music are equivalently spaced and valid, The normal way to work with them is to pick a subset that sounds good together(a key) and mainly use those. then because the notation only naturally supports 7 notes you annotate the bars to shift their meaning around to match the key notes and for items that still don't fit annotate the displayed note to shift it.
But, this is the system we are stuck with, it works well enough and as I learn I fully expect to overcome then forget about the awkward parts.
Update: This just occurred to me as I was thinking on the subject. The only reason for a flat to exist(they are unneeded and redundant otherwise) is for when you shift a bar up, with a sharp, you need a way to shift the note back down, with a flat.
I suppose for me, some of the time I'd be thinking about start/stop times rather than durations, and I'd find it unintuitive that when a note starts is determined by the way the notes before it look rather than the way it looks, but fixing that would be a much bigger change with more downsides.
Because the two clefs are symmetrical around middle C. Line "6" of the bass clef is line "0" of the treble clef. They are not two different clefs, the are two halves of the same 11-line staff.
> some of the time I'd be thinking about start/stop times rather than durations
It's actually a combination of both. Bar lines give you a bigger multiple, beams give you a smaller one (typically 1/4 or 2/4). Only within each 1/4 or 2/4 do you have to think in deltas.
This is actually another reason to use an isomorphic/"chromatic" staff. If you prioritize data compression (traditional notation), you have 7 notes per octave + modifiers. If you prioritize linearity (isomorphic/"chromatic" notation), you have 12 notes per octave.
12 is an even number, meaning you can stack octaves and have consistent notation for each one. With traditional notation, you always have to keep track of which octave you're reading and adjust accordingly.
Well yes, but I don't see why it's better to be symmetrical around middle C vs symmetrical around the B below middle C. Make them two halves of the same 12-line staff instead where the middle two are invisible rather than the middle one.
Even if there truly is an advantage, I doubt that it would overcome the disadvantage of arbitrarily making someone learn a different mapping between what they see and notes for the different hands. On top of that, for piano, I think it's an additional advantage to have a lower low clef - keeps common chord bass notes closer to the staff, and cuts back a bit on the ledger lines.
It goes through the history of music notations, explain the choices made by the current system, the criticism, and then compare it to a variety of alternatives.
It is essentially as you said, but with 1h16 worth of detail.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eq3bUFgEcb4 The video is excellent.
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.
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.
I'm thinking back to when I was in band as a kid, and the idea of having to recognize tiny number inside the notes seems to make it more difficult to read, not easier. Even if not trying to read them, the visual is noisier.
Is the idea it offers help to new musicians, but experienced musicians can ignore it? Someone good enough to sight-read sheet music can disregard the new noise?