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Kenny, altho it's sobering to have an idea of just how oversimplified what I put there really is. When I read stuff about real-life acoustics, and what happens when you have to take into account not only the properties of the actual strings on the instrument and other physical properties, but the ways that the human ear/brain actually deals with sound waves - well, it makes me really appreciate my tech

Levitin's book is really good, huh. I just sort of wished I had a broader knowledge of popular music so I could have appreciated a lot of his examples more.

Cathy

Great book! I have it too. The chapter on what makes a musician - genetics, age and environmental factors - is very interesting, if somewhat depressing.



I thought I'd leave the just intonation/equal temperament issues out of my post, since that's a whole other kettle of fish, but I suppose it's useful to keep in mind in the context of the historical development of our system of notation. Have you heard back-to-back comparisons of various historical temperaments? It's a "fun" exercise.

A few examples:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teVlrYJGKAE

Buck just wanted to say thanks for that link. That'll consume a good part of my day I'm sure. Very interesting and intriguing.

BTW I think the Grand Staff and the reading of it resulted from centuries of work/change/adaptation/evolution and I suspect it is optimal and that is why we use it and will likely continue to, but the thing that comes to mind for me is that working scientific theories have at various points been totally replaced by new theories so certainly it's possible there may be a better way at some point that could revolutionize music theory.

As far as the Hao Staff, I think it's great for piano, but what about all the other instruments?

Yes, ten years - 10,000 hours of practice makes my fingers hurt.



Of course (to be on-topic) I'm sure one would be able to read music well before that.

Oh, sorry Thorium - I thought when you said something about the musical mysticism of a key's inherent emotional content that you weren't aware that key signatures actually sounded quite different than they do today, even aside from major or minor. So I sort of over-responded Unequal temperaments may not have inherent emotional content, but they're kind of vanilla today.

Yeah, it is fun to listen to historical temperaments. A friend of mine builds harpsichords and we used to play fiddle/harpsichords duets. He'd tune it in different temperaments and sometimes the music would just come alive in a particular temperament - 1/6 comma meant tone or something. He also had several cds in different temperaments. Thanks for the youtube link - I'll go have a listen.

Cathy

Seems much of this discussion is about music theory as opposed to the O.P's question about reading music. Perhaps there's a better place/thread to discuss this? Which by the way it totally fascinating to me.

Heh, I was alluding to an article I read a few years ago about a musical theorist who ascribed very precise and elaborate emotional states to each key, rather like how modern sommeliers and eonologers describe wines in the most outlandish terms ("a faint hint of leather and peat, perhaps discarded on the moors, after centuries of being trampled by horses", etc). I wish I could find the article. It was funny.

I would like to thank Mr HAO for introducing a dymanic to this thread that brought out much comment very useful to me. Some of the posters on this thread posted also on mine regarding the chromatic keyboard. If I could be so bold as to ask each of you (that did not earlier) to look at my comments and those of the other posters as it ties into the very heart of this thread.

That is, why is music so hard for so many. Most of us can whistle, hum, sing, drum, etc but with layer upon layer of evolved methodology, we find the piano so counterintuitive and daunting that it becomes (for a multitude of reasons) beyond our ability.

This very post has brought out a good amount of data regarding the fact that people now and before have worked to implement a simpler way. Surely for them as for us now, it is born of a love for the piano and the desire to see more people enjoying what we have found.

A slight update on my project. I have found a shop near that has a computer numerical controlled (cnc) router and I think I will be able to have a set of keys made that will clean up what I did so crudely to my experimental piano.

Please PM if there are other comment to me. I do not wish to hijack this thread. I have nothing to sell but am happy to discuss my project.

A genuine Thank You to all and especially to PW.

James McPherson

If you can take a piece of simple music and figure out how to play the song with nothing but that paper and the piano in front of you it doesn't matter how long it takes, if you had to write the letters next to the notes or even keep thinking "every good boy does fine" while you did it. If you play the song the way it should be and it was the piece of music that told you how fast, what notes, how long and when you should leave quiet space between the notes you've read the music. When someone asks if I can read music I tell them "Yes, but not very well."

Wow! Did this thread evolve. I hope the Op did not run screaming into the night. Hopefully he is in for the pound.

As I see it- reading music is a means to the end. Understanding music is the tangent to the journey.

I do have a question. Why is it that as technology has evolved we are still seeing music written in black and white? Color could certainly be used in Jeff's proposal to indentify octaves. The brain processes color so much better and I suspect stores and recalls more efficiently in color - provided you are not color blind of course.




Absolutely! Lunch would be a small price to pay for a hour of conversation with you two.
Kennychaffin- I am still considering the pros and con

With the grand staff as it is today:


L5_____________________
L4_____________________
L3________________________(3rd line is the "center" middle line)
L2_____________________
L1_____________________

It doesn't matter if the Middle Line is the Treble Clef or the Bass Clef, you can do this "trick" to find notes on the keyboard without having to assign them names.

Treble Clef Middle Line is the B above Middle C.
Put your thumgs shared on the B with one finger of each hand on a white key. Play fingers 5-3-1-3-5 starting with LH 5, and ascending to each next line from L1 to Line 5. You get EGBDF. Do the same thing from S1 to Space 4, Fingering 4-2-2-4 = FACE

In the base clef,the same exercise starting with Middle Line D can be repeated exactly, but the names will be (lines) GBDFA and the (spaces) ACEG.

If you go to Middle C, and do the same exercises, you will find (lines) FACEG/5-3-1-3-5) and GBDF (spaces).

By holding your fingers in position on the keyboard you can determine where the alternating notes on the keyboard are spaces and where there are lines. Remember a quick find with the thumbs on the 3 keyboard locations specified above.

You can't do this with the alternative staffs being proposed.

The playing out of the notes wants to be done from Left to Right.

I hope this makes sense from paper and ink descriptions, it would be fun to make a video tutorial of it. Would anyone be interested?

Betty

Sorry Betty, I'm not making any sense of that. Or why it's important. I'm also thinking that maybe would not be necessary with an alternate staff/type of notation.

Maybe a video would help.

Carl Mc, Color is very much part of my keyboard and notation. C is red, D is orange, E is yellow, f sharp is green, g sharp is blue, a sharp is indigo, b sharp is violet. These are all BLACK keys and the corresponding written notes fall on lines. White spaces between the lines are for the white keys. Any tune once learned can be played on ANY whole tone variant of the original with IDENTICAL FINGERING.

There I go again and I must apologize for hijacking. I have GOT to post a picture.

James

Thank you for bringing this thread back to my level! Whew, I was getting worried. I might just steal your reply to that tricky question.

Kenny,

It's a thinking tool.

Fingers are placed on the keyboard with thumbs at a particular location, the middle line, then each finger touches a white key (I am not trying to account for accidentals, so we are using the white notes of the keyboard only.)

LH 5-3-1 (1's are shared thumbs on the middle line piano note) the RH (1)-3-5. All are lines of the staff. The LH 4-2 and RH 2-4 are the spaces. This is the relationship regardless of whether it's treble clef B (the middle line) or bass clef D (the middle line) or Middle C of the grand staff. There are only 3 locations you can refer to Middle Line. Do you see why we would call them middle line?

Hubby said it would be nice to have a digital video, not use our old model. I don't know a thing about posting a video, but this "lesson" would be a good one to start with.

By the way, do you use www.etheory.com where there are great trainers and explanations?

I have never seen anyone mention the center line approach that I am describing here. I may have missed it, but really, I've been looking for it in pedagogy and methods and theory, and over a long period of time. If you've seen it somewhere, I'd like to know where and who is the creator of the idea.

Cheers!

Betty

Chromatic Keys,

I like the (Mr.) "Roy G. Biv" - Red/Orange/Yellow/Green/Blue/Indigo/Violet (rainbow colors), but I don't understand why you went from white notes to black notes, unless you are thinking in whole steps. Is that it?

I've got to get myself to the piano in order to test drive it.

Betty

That helps my understanding. Thanks. I guess it's a way to correspond the keys to the lines/spaces (at least in the key of C), right?.

P.S. I'm not getting to a music website (just a holding page or something else) when I use that url you gave

OH, I'll bet you meant http://www.emusictheory.com
right? Yeah, I've been there and it's even done in Java, my favorite programming language.

Betty.... I don't know if I understand the purpose of your middle line discussion, and it seems interesting, so I don't want to miss anything.

Isn't the initial problem reading music (just the note identification part) two fold for most of us beginners?

First step is to convert the note to a letter value from A to G, and then secondly to locate the specific key on the piano depending on where on the grand staff (inc. ledgers) the note is? I think, but am not sure, that your middle line idea is geared to helping someone associate a letter with a specific key on the piano... is that right?

As a very new beginner, Ive been using http://www.emusictheory.com/practice.html (best drill site on the web IMHO) the past couple of weeks to work on seeing a note and then hitting the correct piano keyboard key using a mouse. Sometimes I find my self thinking the letter value, sometimes not. At this point I can do the Piano Notes drill of about 100 notes (treble staff only, no accidentials) in about 200 seconds (using the mouse to click on the keyboard image) with perhaps 4-6 mistakes.

So would your middle line exercise apply to someone like me who usually sees the note in the treble cleff and then hits the right piano key?

/Scruffies

PS: I am just talking about note identification... nothing else.

As I am working on learning to "read music"....

One of the things I find myself doing during the day is to just visualize a specific note on the staff and then identify it in my mind. So I "see" a note in the space just above the treble cleff, and think "G", and then see the next three notes, 1st ledger line, space, and 2nd ledger line, and think "A" and then "B" and then "C". It's amazing how just spending time "thinking" music notes helps one remember them.

For me, getting over the hurddle of "reading music" is huge and I have not started lessons because I am not sure how committed I really am to the task.

I think my Casio has 76 keys so there are 7 ledger lines above the treble staff. I am not sure how much of that I am going to bother with trying to memorize. And, very candidly, it's tempting to blow off the bass cleff completely following the "fake book" path which reduces the note reading and memorization in half!

Tempting...., since I can play by ear and have some comfort level with left hand chording. But.... reading music does open up all the thousands of pieces one could play IF they could but read it!