• Drop-down navigation menus to make it easier to get around the site
• Better use of the space provided by wide screen monitors, for example…
• Full-size chromatic scale images in the Gallery (previously it had smaller thumbnails)
• Better support for smaller mobile and tablet screens
• Slight reorganization of the Notation Systems section (each system now has its own page) and the MNMA section (pages were combined to consolidate older material)
• Better integration of the AudioVisualizer into the site
• Image of a staff with a bass clef and key signature with five sharps in the header (better than the previous treble clef at subtly indicating what we are about)
• Various other minor enhancements…

Wiki Also Now Using WordPress

One of the most significant changes is that the Wiki has also moved to WordPress (instead of the MediaWiki software that ran it previously). The way the Wiki works will remain much the same, but it should now be easier for contributors to edit the Wiki and upload images, PDFs, and other files to it. On the back end, it will be easier to maintain as well. All of the Wiki content has been moved over from our old installation. If you have edited the Wiki in the past, and would like to continue doing so, or would like to begin contributing to it, you will need a new account. Please contact us so we can set one up for you.

Previous Designs

Here is a screenshot showing the previous home page (for posterity):

The previous design. (Click for larger size.)

And the (incrementally different) design before that:

Two designs back. (Click for larger size.)

And one more before that, for good measure:

Three designs back. (Click for larger size.)

The post Website and Wiki Revision (Now Powered by WordPress) appeared first on The Music Notation Project.

• Easier navigation: on any page click the [+] next to any category listed in the left hand column to reveal links to all pages in that category.
• More user-friendly editing tools that make it easier for anyone to edit pages on the wiki.  For example, it is much simpler to add links, images, tables, etc.
• The search box now suggests pages you may be searching for, as you type.
• Pages generally load faster.

We are pleased that the wiki now contains 26 content pages.  That is an average of more than one page added per month since we launched the wiki in November 2009!  To keep track of new pages and changes to the wiki, see the New Pages and Recent Changes pages.  Each of those pages also offers an Atom feed that you can follow using your favorite feed reader.  Any of our forum (Google group) members are welcome and encouraged to help add and/or edit pages on the wiki.

Head over to our wiki to try out the new changes and check out any pages that you have not seen yet!

Technical details:

We recently upgraded our wiki software to MediaWiki version 1.17. We previously upgraded to version 1.16 about this time last year when we also began using a customized version the Vector skin which is now the default for Wikipedia and other Wikimedia sites.  These changes have made it possible to offer the improvements listed above, and will allow us to take advantage of future improvements to the MediaWiki software.  See the MediaWiki website for more information.

Follow us on Twitter

In other website news, you may have noticed the icon on our website that lets you follow the Music Notation Project on Twitter. When we post something new on our blog we will now also post to Twitter (as well as Facebook).  This provides multiple ways to follow the news covered in our blog, in addition to news feeds (RSS or Atom) and email subscriptions.  Our Twitter handle is @MNPupdates.

The Twitter, Facebook, and other icons were added earlier this year as part of a minor revision of our site’s appearance.  Recently the site went through another minor visual refresh as we continue to improve it.

The post Wiki Improvements appeared first on The Music Notation Project.

Wouldn’t it be much better if you could also see major and minor scales from any key, all the different intervals, some typical melodies, even melodies that you play yourself, and also be able to hear the notes that you are seeing?  Now you can with a fun new tool we are introducing called the “AudioVisualizer.”  You can find it under the Music Notations heading on our site.

The AudioVisualizer is still a work in progress, but it can already display 23 of the systems shown on our Guided Tour and Gallery pages.  (However, in some cases it does not fully represent every aspect of a given system, as described here.)  It also lets you experiment with variations on these systems by altering their notehead pattern (i.e. black/solid and white/hollow noteheads) or by shifting the vertical position of the staff up or down relative to the pitches of the chromatic scale.  We plan to add additional notation systems as time permits, but we wanted to go ahead and put it out there so people could start taking advantage of it.

We could tell you more about its various features (like its three-octave range, auto-scrolling staff, or use of HTML5 audio), but it would be better to just give it a try yourself.  (For best results with the audio, we recommend using the Firefox web browser, although most other browsers should work adequately; see this note about HTML5 audio).

Please help us out by sharing it with anyone who might be interested, and let us know what you think in the comments below, or on our Forum!

The post More Scales, Intervals, and Melodies with the AudioVisualizer appeared first on The Music Notation Project.

Chromatic Lyre Notation by Jan Braunstein

Braunstein’s system has two lines per octave, with lines a major third apart, and uses hollow and solid notes to indicate pitch in a 6-6 pitch pattern.  He designed it with his Chromatic Lyre instruments in mind, but it could also work as a general purpose notation system.  See also the documentation on his website.

Reverse-Color Express Stave by John Keller

An experimental version from Keller that reverses the solid and hollow notehead pattern so that the solid notes are the more commonly occurring notes (ABCDEFG). This provides greater continuity with traditional notation and other advantages.

TwinNote and TwinNote TD by Paul Morris

Morris redesigned TwinNote so that it uses only triangle-shaped notes, offering more consistency in the appearance of intervals.  While the standard version of TwinNote uses hollow and solid notes to indicate pitch, another version, TwinNote TD (for “traditional duration”), uses them to indicate duration, as in traditional notation.  Read more about the redesign on the TwinNote Blog.  (The original version of TwinNote remains on our site, now called “Black-Oval Twinline.”)

The following notation systems have been added to our More Music Notation Systems page:

Black White Notation by CJ Wang

Like Equiton, Wang’s system uses a six-degree staff rather than either a pitch-proportional twelve-degree chromatic staff, with hollow and solid noteheads to help indicate pitch.  Two lines per octave, a major third apart.

Dodeka  by Jacques-Daniel Rochat

Dodeka uses a four-line chromatic staff, with lines a major third apart. Rather than more traditional noteheads it uses solid bars to indicate notes, resembling a piano-roll notation.  There is also a Dodeka chromatic keyboard to match.

Hass Notation by Peter Hass

Hass Notation uses a five-line chromatic staff with lines a minor third apart. Three noteheads shapes are used: ovals and downward and upward triangles. This corresponds to the three rows of a chromatic button accordion and its isomorphic layout.

NoteTrace by Enrique Prieto

NoteTrace radically rethinks music notation, doing away with staff lines entirely, and representing notes by horizontal line segments (called note traces) whose length is proportional to a note’s duration, as in a piano-roll notation.

There are currently a number of notation systems that we have not yet documented on our site.  Follow our blog to read about them when we do.  You can follow our blog by email, RSS feed, on Facebook, and now, on Twitter.  Use the icons at the bottom of the column on the left hand side of any of our web pages to follow our blog posts.

The post Chromatic Lyre Notation, Reverse-Color Express Stave, TwinNote, and More appeared first on The Music Notation Project.

LilyPond

Back in 2007 Kevin Dalley was working on adding support for chromatic-staff notation systems to LilyPond, a free, open-source music notation application.  He got busy with other things and we assumed that the code that he had finished had not made it into the official LilyPond application. Since then Mark Hanlon and Andrew Wagner pitched in to help work on this.

But fast forward to a month ago when Paul Morris stumbled upon the fact that much of Kevin’s code had already been included in the official LilyPond application by the LilyPond development team (particularly Neil Puttock and Han-Wen Nienhuys, our thanks to them!).  This means that LilyPond has the feature set to support chromatic-staff notation systems (and has had it for some time).  It is possible to remap the pitches on the staff chromatically, to change the staff line pattern, to customize note head shapes, and various other alternative notation tweaks.  Read more about it and see where things stand on the MNP’s LilyPond wiki page.

One of the patches that Kevin submitted to LilyPond just needs some refactoring and documentation before it can be added to LilyPond.  It provides support for custom ledger lines that appear inside the staff, which is needed for many alternative notation systems. If anyone has the programming skills and would like to contribute, this would be a great way to do so! The patch is being tracked here as part of LilyPond development on Google code.

MuseScore

In other free, open-source music software news, MuseScore recently reached its 1.0 release. Although MuseScore does not really support chromatic-staff notation systems, Jan Braunstein worked out ways to use it to create sheet music for his alternative notation system (Chromatic Lyre Notation).  He posted some tips about how he did this on the MuseScore forums, and with his permission we have edited them and put them on the MNP’s new MuseScore page.

MuseScore is progressing quickly and already has support for percussion staves, so perhaps a future version will have the features needed to really support chromatic-staff notation systems.  See these feature requests: (1) Standard note entry and editing for percussion staves, (2) Customizing staff line positions, (3) Customizing note head shapes.

VexFlow and Belle, Bonne, Sage

VexFlow and Belle, Bonne, Sage are interesting new open-source projects with the potential to be used with alternative music notation systems. VexFlow is a web-based API (in JavaScript) for rendering music notation and guitar tablature in a website or web application.  Belle, Bonne, Sage is a vector-graphics library for music notation. They are listed on our Software page.

Ambrose Piano Tabs Music Editing Program

This free-to-download (but not open-source) application for Ambrose Piano Tabs came to our attention.  It is also listed on our Software page.

Lost Email

It recently came to our attention that our email provider was not delivering some legitimate email messages because it was being too aggressive with its spam filters.  We have changed our settings so this should no longer be a problem in the future.  If you emailed us and did not  hear back, then this is probably why.  Our apologies, and please contact us again.

Look for future posts on the notation systems added to our site this past year (and some other systems that still need to be added), as well as some other things we have yet to blog about!

The post LilyPond, MuseScore, and More Software News appeared first on The Music Notation Project.

In other software news, a third application for Klavar notation has been brought to our attention.  It is called  KLAVAR!, and has been added to our Software page where it joins  KlavarScript and Klavar Music Writer.  KLAVAR! was originally written in GFA Basic for the Atari ST.  Marco Mascioli has started work towards porting it to MS Windows, Apple Mac OS X, and Linux.  He is affiliated with the KlavarScore website.

Website News

We have moved our blog from Google’s Blogger software over to WordPress.  The reason is that Blogger will be dropping support for FTP publishing on March 26th. While working on the blog, our webmaster was inspired to give our site a visual refresh in terms of its design/layout.  Here is a screen shot of the old layout just for the record:

A screenshot of the old site layout.

In addition to the revised layout, our site’s Intro (home) page has been streamlined and improved.  The text in each section is now more concise, but with the option to reveal more discussion on each topic, according to the visitor’s interest.  An audio clip has been added to let viewers hear the chromatic scale illustrated at the top of the page. (This uses the new HTML5 audio tag in browsers that support it, or reverts to Flash for those that do not.  We will be moving to this approach for all audio on the site, reducing compatibility issues and making it more accessible for our visitors.)

The Music Notations section of the site has also received various refinements including making it clearer that the notation systems are ordered primarily by line spacing, and then by the number of lines per octave.

Community News

Our new wiki is off to a good start.  It now has eleven pages that have been created by members of our community since it was launched back in November of 2009.  Our Forum (Google group) membership has broken into the triple digits with 107 members, and we now have 153 fans of the Music Notation Project on our Facebook page (at the time of writing).  (See Community.)

The post Git Repository for Lilypond Work, KLAVAR! software, and Website Improvements appeared first on The Music Notation Project.

Our forum already provides an easy way to share and discuss such material and keeps a chronological archive of posts that can be easily searched. However, the wiki will complement the forum and the rest of our site by providing a more robust platform for collaborating and topically organizing this community-generated content. Organizing this material in the wiki will make it more accessible to new visitors browsing our site, and increase the breadth and depth of content available on our site.

Our wiki runs on the same open-source MediaWiki software that powers Wikipedia, and so its interface may be familiar. However, our wiki’s purpose is not to provide another comprehensive encyclopedia. It is to simply provide a collaborative space in which to collect and organize the content being created and shared by our community.

Over the long term, the most significant role of the wiki may be as a place to collect examples of sheet music in alternative notation systems. Building such a collection will make it much easier for anyone to really experiment with various alternative notation systems (and ultimately start using them).

Please feel free to contact us if you would like to contribute to the wiki and need help getting started. We look forward to seeing the wiki grow with your help. Let us know what you think.

The post Announcing the Music Notation Project Wiki appeared first on The Music Notation Project.

Numbered Notes by Jason MacCoy

MacCoy’s system is notable for its staff with lines that are a minor third apart. Although this possibility has been discussed, to our knowledge this is the only system that has implemented it. As its name indicates, Numbered Notes emphasizes the use of numbers for identifying pitches. There are two versions, a notes-only version and a numbers-only version. More information on Numbered Notes is also available from the Numbered Notes website.

Express Stave (6-6 jazz font version) by John Keller

This is a version of Keller’s Express Stave that has a 6-6 pitch pattern through a variation in the slant of the noteheads. Half of the noteheads are sharply slanted while the other noteheads lie flat. This 6-6 pattern is “overlayed” over the 7-5 pitch pattern found in the solid and hollow noteheads, making it one of only a few systems that represent both (other examples are Diatonic Twinline by Leo de Vries and perhaps 6-6 Tetragram by Richard Parncutt).

Black-Oval Twinline by Paul Morris

Update: Morris renamed this system in order to call his newer system TwinNote.
TwinNote Black-Oval Twinline is Morris’ version of Twinline by Leo de Vries. It is similar to the versions of Twinline by Reed and Keislar, but uses solid-oval and hollow-triangle notes to highlight the 6-6 pitch pattern and make notes easier to identify. This is also similar to Sotorrio’s Bilinear notation. Using solid-ovals gives quarter notes, eighth notes, sixteenth notes, (etc…) a more consistent appearance when switching back and forth from traditional notation.

Expanded Black-Oval Twinline by Paul Morris

Expanded TwinNote Black-Oval Twinline is designed as a companion notation for use with TwinNote Black-Oval Twinline. They share the same line pattern and solid-or-hollow notehead pattern making it easy to read either system interchangeably. The only differences are TwinNote’s vertically compact staff and use of triangular noteheads.

The post Numbered Notes, 6-6 Jazz Font Express Stave, and TwinNote music notation systems appeared first on The Music Notation Project.

To visit our public profile, follow the link under the new Community heading on our website. If you are a Facebook user we encourage you to show your support and help spread the word by becoming a “fan” of the Music Notation Project. To do this simply click the “become a fan” link on our public profile. You might consider inviting any friends you think would be interested to become a fan as well.

Here are some quotes from the Facebook website about public profiles:

“A Facebook public profile gives a voice to any public figure or organization to join the conversation with Facebook users. Since November 2007, bands, sports teams, artists, films, brands, non-profits and businesses have been using public profiles (formerly called Pages) as free, customizable presences on Facebook.“

“As a Community or Non-Profit, with Facebook public profiles, you can create an authentic connection with current and potential supporters, students, alumni and donors. There are already over 100,000 non-profits, universities and religious organizations using Facebook to stay connected to their constituents.”

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On this new page you can select the characteristics you prefer, and it will filter and display only those systems on our site that have them. Characteristics like:

• Lines per octave
• Line spacing (intervallic distance between lines)
• Use of bold and dashed lines
• Use of solid and hollow noteheads (for pitch or rhythm)
• Use of different notehead shapes
• Vertical space required

Eventually we will be able to add other characteristics (especially their approaches to rhythmic notation). Are there any others you would like to see that are not in this list? If so, let us know.

As was possible before, you can still sort the systems by line pattern, by 6-6 and 7-5 pitch patterns, and by date. Now this sorting works together with the new filtering function.

We have also updated the Music Notations Guided Tour page. It now features larger images of a chromatic scale in each system. These illustrations now include the note names under the notes. They are also now presented one at a time under each category, to avoid overwhelming new visitors with too many systems to take in at once. These changes should make the guided tour even more informative and engaging for those who are new to alternative music notation systems.

(And if you have not seen our Intervals Tutorial recently, it has also been updated with new dynamic, interactive illustrations.)

Let us know what you think!

The post New Interactive Gallery of Music Notation Systems, and Updated Guided Tour appeared first on The Music Notation Project.