Musical Notation

Music has notation, and has had it for 1000 years. Here are some examples from the 9^th, 11^th and 12^th centuries.

A Benedictine monk named Guido introduced the idea of the staff notation, with a mark (called a note) for each sound, with vertical position giving the pitch, with decorations indicating the duration. There is more to it, of course, but the essential point was that musical notation allowed one to write down a recipe for a piece of music that

• provided for multiple sounds (including words) at one point in time
• made harmony natural (there is some science in this)
• provided for many different instruments
• could be played as it was read from the page.

One can debate the details, but the result is incontrovertible. Music took off. Without Guido's idea, no Mozart, no Beethoven.

Curiously, after a time, the church rejected its own invention. The Pope reasoned that the beauty of the music was distracting his flock from the saving grace of the mass. And so, polyphony was forbidden within the Roman church. But the breakaway Lutheran church adopted the rich new music as its own. It became an audible signature for protestant celebrations.

This is a peculiarly Western view of music. Neary every culture has a similar story to tell.

Project suggestion

From a technical viewpoint, how does musical notation "work?" It is relatively easy to invent other equivalent ways to write down music. The desire for computer input in recent years has spawned a number of ascii-based notations.

The project is an examination of musical notation to determine what it is that has made it win the Darwinian battle for the minds of a millenium of musicians.

Project suggestion

One can write a program to transform ascii-based notation into sheet music. Here is a primitive example. Can you do better? Note: this applet will hang netscape if you refresh the screen. Bug? I think so. I don't catch the close event.

References

1. ascii-based notations
2. rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet-by-group/news.answers/music
3. The Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (see Notation I-III and see also Guido of Arezzo).
4. The Golden Encyclopedia of Music, Normal Lloyd, Golden Press (see Notation of Music and History of Musical Notation).