Announcing the Music Notation Project Wiki

We are pleased to announce the Music Notation Project Wiki, a new addition to the Community section of our website. Like the MNMA's quarterly newsletter (Music Notation News), and our Forum (Google Group), this wiki will provide a means for our community to share ideas, knowledge, proposals, examples, experiments, images, and sheet music for alternative notation systems.

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!

Please post your comments on our Forum.

Numbered Notes, 6-6 Jazz Font Express Stave, and TwinNote music notation systems

In case you haven't seen them, check out the following notation systems that have been added to our website in recent months.


Numbered Notes (notes-only and numbers-only versions) 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. 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).


TwinNote by Paul Morris



TwinNote 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. More information is also available on the TwinNote Music Notation website


Expanded TwinNote by Paul Morris



Expanded TwinNote is designed as a companion notation for use with TwinNote. 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.


Please post your comments on our Forum.

The Music Notation Project is now on Facebook

The Music Notation Project now has a public profile on Facebook. This will help us connect with more people and build awareness of our organization and its mission.

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."

Please post your comments on our Forum.

New Interactive Gallery of Music Notation Systems, and Updated Guided Tour

Have you ever wanted to select the set of characteristics you want in an alternative music notation system, and then quickly see which systems have them? Now you can with our new interactive Gallery of Music Notation Systems.

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!

Please post your comments on our Forum.