I've long held a fascination with the myriad ways humans have invented for writing things down. Sites like Omniglot [1] get a semi-regular visit from me. In a side quest, I spent a little while looking for alternative systems for representing math and music and came up unbelievably short. There are remarkably few alternate systems for them.
Wondering why that was, for fun I decided to try and come up with some different approaches to representing math and music to see if I could better understand why there's so little variety.
It turns out that it's incredibly hard. With math (at least basic arithmetic and algebra), after you mess around with the basic symbols, there's not really many other places you can go with how actual equations are structured without losing lots of the easy-to-use mechanical features that modern notation supports. In a few ideas I essentially recreated a parse tree, which made reducing the sides of the equation relatively simple, but moving things across the equals turned into a nightmare.
With music the obvious alternatives fall into a couple categories:a system for each instrument, something that can succinctly capture the expressive bits of a given instrument (fingering, bowing, vibrato, etc.) and throw out bits that don't work on that instrument (vibrato on a piano, pizzicato on a wind instrument etc.), but it gets impractical stupidly fast. The other alternative is a universal system like we tend to use today, but you end up with all kinds of space wasting piano roll-a-likes or hard to read while playing encodings like A2--B#2--C2--
This will probably not replace current notation, but it represents quite a bit of creativity and at least a noble attempt at doing something which most of the people on earth haven't managed to do (almost all musical traditions in history essentially exist in a state of verbal transfer). I think it's cool and has lots of great ideas.
Wondering why that was, for fun I decided to try and come up with some different approaches to representing math and music to see if I could better understand why there's so little variety.
It turns out that it's incredibly hard. With math (at least basic arithmetic and algebra), after you mess around with the basic symbols, there's not really many other places you can go with how actual equations are structured without losing lots of the easy-to-use mechanical features that modern notation supports. In a few ideas I essentially recreated a parse tree, which made reducing the sides of the equation relatively simple, but moving things across the equals turned into a nightmare.
With music the obvious alternatives fall into a couple categories:a system for each instrument, something that can succinctly capture the expressive bits of a given instrument (fingering, bowing, vibrato, etc.) and throw out bits that don't work on that instrument (vibrato on a piano, pizzicato on a wind instrument etc.), but it gets impractical stupidly fast. The other alternative is a universal system like we tend to use today, but you end up with all kinds of space wasting piano roll-a-likes or hard to read while playing encodings like A2--B#2--C2--
This will probably not replace current notation, but it represents quite a bit of creativity and at least a noble attempt at doing something which most of the people on earth haven't managed to do (almost all musical traditions in history essentially exist in a state of verbal transfer). I think it's cool and has lots of great ideas.
[1] - http://www.omniglot.com/writing/alphabets.htm