love this: https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2013/hip-hop-transcriptions/ pretty nice (seems obvious after you see it!) idea for a way to combine time box units with standard notation

Does nicely include the advantages of each. A disadvantage of piano role notation is that it throws out the symbolic, context free quality of standard notation.

Ethan's blog is very good in general. 🙂 Btw, my favorite rhythm notation method is Godfried Toussaint's Euclidean necklace: https://jackrusher.com/journal/drum-circle.html ... working example (though only in Chrome these days, because of WebKit audio changes since 2014): http://proscenium.rusher.com/drum-circle/

What, in particular, do you like about Euclidean rhythm @Jack Rusher?

@wtaysom I consider repeated rhythms a bit clearer when pictured in the round rather than as a line that jumps back to the start, and find it way better for polyrhythms. Note that the you can slide the sliders at the bottom of that toy to easily get fairly exotic effects that would be painful to transcribe in either standard notation or on a piano roll-style grid.

Yes, I noticed. Anything that doesn't fit cleanly into subdivisions of 2 (or to a lesser degree 3), ends up requiring extensions to standard notation. Glancing at Euclidean rhythm on Wikipedia, "generating almost all of the most important world music rhythms,[2] (except Indian).[3]" can't help but crack a smile having gone to a Zakir Hussain with no real frame of reference.

I enjoyed Toussaint's book, but also enjoyed Kofi Agawu's take on it - he talks about these diagrams as 'paper rhythms' in the pejorative, for example he discounts the process of rotating rhythms as meaningful, because that only makes sense on paper. His argument is that if you rotate a rhythm, you end up with a totally new rhythm, which is obvious if you dance to it, but not if you only look at it on paper.

@yaxu and not just dancing! 😊 Many cultures have very physical ways of retaining and transmitting rhythms, including traditional African and Indian music. (I'm sure you know this, and suspect you've read Agawu's Representing African Music.) It's interesting to me that while we teach using phonations like "1 2 3 4" / "*1* and 2 and 3 and 4 and" / "*1*-e-and-uh 2-e-and-uh" / "*1* trip-let 2 trip-let", we don't carry those things forward to the degree that orally transmitted musical cultures do. In any case, it does turn out to be worthwhile to also have a written/drawn notation for situations where direct instruction is not available, in which case one ends up with some form of "paper music" (or in your case "screen music") more-or-less by definition. Maybe ubiquitous video instruction will change this in the future? 🤷🏻‍♂️

@Jack Rusher It's interesting to compare contemporary dance, where I think there isn't an accepted notation, and video is used a lot

I find the plethora of dance notations quite lovely, but it's quite telling that -- as you say -- none of them has become standard. As for composition and synthesis, I enjoy algebraic transformations as much as the next nerd, but it would be nice if the languages we used to write rhythms had a prosody that also conveyed those rhythms. I've not seen that done in a computer music context, have you?

I've always thought the Reactable was way ahead of its time in combining spatial arrangement with symbols, which feels like a nod towards prosody

Since this conversation is continuing, I listened to this today https://overcast.fm/+DCqY3Wc/26:30. A few seconds before the linked time, we have a good quote about the importance of, let's call it, oral culture in approaching jazz. In a way, the rest of the episode examines how the Real Book fills a hole left by oral limitations — perhaps to overflowing. Another tidbit is the suggestion, repeated a few different times in different ways over the episode, that in jazz the chords are a thing you want to vary contrasted with classical music, as practiced, where chords and their sequence are roughly fixed. Now, to digress, I'm thinking of my own choral culture growing up in which there's roughly a fixed set of lyrics, a fixed set of melodies. (They're paired up, but you can mix them on occasion.) Everything is sung in four part harmony, but you can (and perhaps should), within reason, make up your own part as you go. When done well (not the default), it makes for a thick harmonious probability distribution over pitch space. And, again when done well, singing in time with tight attack and release is important.

@wtaysom Fake books and the Real Book are an interesting case of super schematic notation, lacking almost everything that's involved with performance, but nonetheless useful (enough context to sit in and "play the head" or to serve as a starting point for writing out more complete arrangements). In comparison, the charts I'd write for my old NYC early jazz project involved much more structure and formality, even though there was loads of improvisation going on: https://vimeo.com/17852041