Yet another Hacker News

12 points jmole 1 hour ago 10 comments

I've been playing around with a new kind of isomorphic music keyboard that uses a base-12 notation, and wanted some sheet music to learn some new music for it.

The 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.

archonis 43 minutes ago | parent

Site is illegible on mobile.

jmole 21 minutes ago | parent

Sorry about that, it's fixed now.

bennettnate5 37 minutes ago | parent

It took me a while to understand what the numbers were actually trying to indicate (in part because I'm used to numbers in sheet music being suggestions of which finger should play the given note). If I understand correctly now, are you numbering zero-indexed with C as the beginning (0) and B as the end (Y), as a proxy for remembering which key notes are meant to be played in?

jmole 31 minutes ago | parent

That's right - so a major triad in C would be (0-4-7), or a B-flat minor triad would be (X-1-5).

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)

BalinKing 29 minutes ago | parent

What does "isomorphic" mean?

jmole 26 minutes ago | parent

Iso - same, morphic - shape.

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

mrob 20 minutes ago | parent

It's also easier to learn because there's one consistent mapping between notes on the page and the sound, instead of many different irregular mappings specified by "key signatures".

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.

skybrian 24 minutes ago | parent

I think you’d be better off with something compatible with an existing system. Perhaps start with nashville numbering and add accidentals?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nashville_Number_System

erelong 11 minutes ago | parent

relatedly does anyone have a tool to generate piano synthesia videos from sheet music, maybe with or without AI? They seem fun to play along with. (I'll just look it up, commenting to share the idea too though)

mrob 10 minutes ago | parent

I like the use of base 12, but IMO it's somewhat wasted on a diatonic staff. This is basically just traditional notation with special coloring to make it easier to read. To better match the keyboard, I'd rather use an isomorphic staff (a.k.a. "chromatic staff", although I dislike that name because it implies diatonic music as a default).

There's a web site you might be interested in with many examples of isomorphic notation at:

https://musicnotation.org/