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Joined: Aug 2005
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Of course all of this is irrelevant now (both to this discussion, and to computer keyboards), but the most highly publicized studies about the superiority of the Dvorak layout are dubious. Keyboard layout probably has very little to do with typing speed (good typists on QWERTY tend to be good typists on Dvorak and vise versa), and given enough training, a person can probably adapt to any layout.
What's the moral of the story? I dunno. Given adequate training, it's just as easy to learn to read the grand staff as it is the Hao staff (at speed)? You should consider the long-term benefits of a given system (QWERTY keyboards are everywhere, and the grand staff is everywhere [as well as the theoretical benefits])?
That's really interesting, buck. I didn't know that about the lack of empirical evidence for the superiority of the Dvorak keyboard. Makes me feel better about sticking with QWERTY. Your second point here is an excellent one: Given an established system, and given the inconvenience and upheaval involved in undergoing a complete overhaul of it, we should not be quick to advocate a new system unless and until it's been shown to be significantly better. And here Chris's desire to be shown a student who can play advanced repertoire well with the Hao staff becomes stunningly relevant. In fact, we could even make up a pithy little quote to sum up the whole debate, something like, perhaps, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." To be followed closely by "If it's broke, don't try fixing it unless you know the repair is better than the broken part."
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And of course as I was writing my extemely long post, plenty of other people were posting as well. Oh, Well, I hope it is of interest. (And if no one can tell, my major in college was physics. ) Rich Hey that's cool. My son just graduated from Reed College in Portland, OR at the top of his class in Physics and after taking the past year off school will be going to graduate school at CU Boulder in Physics on a full-ride scholarship. I'm quite proud of him. P.S. Yes I've been through all that Pythagorus/Greek history of music/physics stuff and understand as well as understanding the logarithmic nature of human senses (the ear in this case) and how it affects our perception of sound/tones and the influence of that on the derivation of scales. Congratulations, I hope he eventually finds work in (or close to) his field. I work in the telecom industry and I'm really not using anything from my degree. Rich
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I'd agree Monica with the idea that clearly it works, so no need to scrap it or even change it without cause, but that shouldn't stop anyone from looking to improve it. Truly that is all that is going on here, at least as I see it. But hey, I've been wrong before.
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And of course as I was writing my extemely long post, plenty of other people were posting as well. Oh, Well, I hope it is of interest. (And if no one can tell, my major in college was physics. ) Rich Hey that's cool. My son just graduated from Reed College in Portland, OR at the top of his class in Physics and after taking the past year off school will be going to graduate school at CU Boulder in Physics on a full-ride scholarship. I'm quite proud of him. P.S. Yes I've been through all that Pythagorus/Greek history of music/physics stuff and understand as well as understanding the logarithmic nature of human senses (the ear in this case) and how it affects our perception of sound/tones and the influence of that on the derivation of scales. Congratulations, I hope he eventually finds work in (or close to) his field. I work in the telecom industry and I'm really not using anything from my degree. Rich Warning! Off Topic! He has spent the last year working for the Electric Power Utility in Portland doing mathematical projections of power usage and supplies. What he wants to do is put things (instruments) in space, and should get that opportunity at CU. What comes after that is anyone's guess, but I suspect he might go into teaching/research...
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Only an Aussie Sheila could come up with a this ripe piece of logic ... "what Schoenberg was saying - that all of the 12 notes should have equal importance, ... but the result was atonality." Schoenberg’s comment CAN’T possibly equate with atonality.
When we span a piano C to C octave ... we span 12 notes ... each a semitone apart ... only a stick-in-the-mud carps the importance of the diatonic scale ... when in fact the major scale is simply 7 notes from a range of 12 notes and spaced at the familiar TTtTTTt ... where each of 5 whole-tones (for scale reasons) deliberately skips a note ... the minor scales use a slightly different selection ... though the subdominant and dominant are constant to all scales.
Anybody who has played Bach’s Prelude I (WTC I) should have become aware that JS sees fit to include all 12 basic notes ... while the Chopin masterpieces are alive with the poetic richness of a 12 note pallette.
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P.S. I keep saying that I understand the advantages of the current notation system, but that doesn't seem to come across. It's almost as if one is not allowed to criticize, not allowed to hold the opinion that there is both good and bad about any given system (for example the U.S. Political System ). Engineers always look at trade-offs and evaluate in order to choose the optimal solution. I think you're being clear, kenny, and I also think you're 100% correct. That's why I like this thread, despite the fact that in the long run I doubt the current system will change. Even if at the end of the day most of us conclude that we'll stick with the current system, warts and all, it's nonetheless helpful and useful to critique it and go through a whole bunch of "what if..." exercises.
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What he wants to do is put things (instruments) in space, and should get that opportunity at CU. Kenny, your son wants to put pianos in space!!!!!??? And you think notation is complicated.
Last edited by Chris H.; 04/15/09 09:09 AM.
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Anybody who has played Bach’s Prelude I (WTC I) should have become aware that JS sees fit to include all 12 basic notes ... But are they all used equally? Perhaps you could count up.... How many C's.... How many C#'s.... How many d's.... etc.
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Putting it bluntly Mr Hao ... you use polite Chinese diplomacy to again put your foot in the door ... but it wears a bit thin when you refuse to accept the message ... and continue with the selling of a stillborn concept.
But try to stay on the subject ... can you measure up to the Beethoven measure? About the putting foot in the door bit ... that was with your help. If you want me to stop "selling" my product, then stop making biased comments about it ... like "more difficult to read" and "stillborn". About your last question, I fail to see why I must answer it. I know time/rhythm notation takes learning and training. Is that the point you are trying to make? Then you are preaching to the converted. Or are you saying that you have a better way to do it? Then at least show me what it is. Your question does not tell me what your way is.
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Anybody who has played Bach’s Prelude I (WTC I) should have become aware that JS sees fit to include all 12 basic notes ... while the Chopin masterpieces are alive with the poetic richness of a 12 note pallette.
That is because Bach was one of the first composers to explore and take advantage of the use of chord progressions. The music is still diatonic, it just moves between different key signatures for harmonic/emotional effect.
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Bathtub and toasters sounds more like John Cage.
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I realized that a few minutes later - should have edited rather than deleted. Schoenberg, in any case, tried to get away from tonality as I recall. I wish I could find the toaster performance. It was on something like Ed Sullivan or another television show.
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Kenny, I think that I did get that you got it. And I'm still getting parts of it. The "system", in any case, starts working less well as soon as you get out of the usual major and minor scales. But that is also when you realize just how hand-in-glove it does work while remaining in that context.
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Using a staff which shows the position of all 12 notes (as if they are equal) is a more difficult way of notating it. To me, learning the position of 12 notes HAS to be more complicated than learning just 7.
Chris, the keyboard is a repetition of sets of the 12 notes. One has to learn that. Once you learned that, you learned the staff which shows the same 12 notes with the same "black and white pitch stripe" pattern as the keyboard's key arrangement. I am not sure that if you run a test with 100 students who has never come across any music notation system, the result will support your quoted statement - even for testing a piece of music strickly in C major scale. Forget about timing first (with btb's permission), I need only 10 minutes to make them able to figure out all by themselves what keys to play. You have 10 minutes with them, too. And I think you will also manage to explain how the Grand Staff works with the keyboard. Then we ask each student to figure out the same piece with both systems, and time them. I am not cunningly challenging people into doing this. I am just saying tests can be designed to test certain hypothesis. I will run these scientific tests to convince people at one point. Even if I win in the "beginner test", I remain open-minded about the "advanced player test". I hope there will come a day when we can run that test to see whether the Hao Staff really comparatively "slows down" the advance players, as keystring also suggested, due to lack of "road signs". Just added by editing: Sorry keystring. That does not mean that I don't appreciate what you have painstakingly explained to me. But we need to run tests with a significant sample size to know what works better with more people. So far all I am claiming about the Hao Staff on this forum is based on my test with an insignificant sample size (friends I know and a handful of customers who had bothered to come back). That's also not good enough I know.
Last edited by Jeff Hao; 04/15/09 10:45 AM.
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What he wants to do is put things (instruments) in space, and should get that opportunity at CU. Kenny, your son wants to put pianos in space!!!!!??? And you think notation is complicated. I'm sure he'd love it. He had many years of piano lessons when he was a kid. I'm sure he's a better piano player still than I am at the moment. As well as a much better physicist (which was my first run at a degree, then morphed to psychology for 4 years and then dropped (out) that and eventually got my Electrical Engineering degree and now I r a software architect)
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I am not sure that if you run a test with 100 students who has never come across any music notation system, the result will support your quoted statement - even for testing a piece of music strickly in C major scale. Forget about timing first (with btb's permission), I need only 10 minutes to make them able to figure out all by themselves what keys to play. You have 10 minutes with them, too. And I think you will also manage to explain how the Grand Staff works with the keyboard. Then we ask each student to figure out the same piece with both systems, and time them.
Why would you want to conduct such a test though? I'm not interested in what someone can do after 10 minutes. I want to see what they can do after 10 months or even 10 years.
Pianist and piano teacher.
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Bathtub and toasters sounds more like John Cage. I must have missed something somewhere. Reminds me of my college days where we were forced to endure the annual contemporary music festival. In one performance members of the audience were given paper bags which they had to blow up and burst randomly. That was it! During one excruciating lecture some guy came along and parped noisily into a trombone which was hooked up to several speakers positioned around the room to create echo effects. A freind of mine (a straight talking lad from the north of England) was asked what he though of it. He said, 'It does my head in!'. I couldn't have put it better.
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Here you are, Chris - bathtub and toasters - more than you ever wanted to know! Ok, preamble - I got this from my little overview book and looked up Cage after reading that section. If I have it right, he wanted music to be completely aleatory. He would write notes in the score, which meant one thing happens, and another thing happens over a course of time, but even the symbols were not to dictate the same thing each time. Tongue in cheek: aleatorically aleatorical. He demonstrates his idea: The host smoothly moves him away from trying to explain music theory: Cage - Water Walk Edit: The toasters I remembered are radios.
Last edited by keystring; 04/15/09 01:24 PM. Reason: Correction re toasters are radios.
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Hilarious!
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!!!!!!!! Thanks for that!!! Do you happen to have the score? What's interesting is how times have changed. A 6 minute build up before we even get to the performance. That would never happen now. Mr. Cage would get three red X's after 10 seconds.
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