Website and Wiki Revision (Now Powered by WordPress)

The Music Notation Project’s webmaster (Paul Morris), has recently completed a revision of our site that has been long in the works.  The site now runs on WordPress, which offers various advantages and will make it easier to maintain.  All of the site’s previous content and functionality remains, while the new design features: Continue reading →

Wiki Improvements

We have recently upgraded our wiki’s software and tweaked our installation to offer the following improvements:

  • 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! Continue reading →

More Scales, Intervals, and Melodies with the AudioVisualizer

The alternative music notation systems on our website are typically illustrated with a simple image of a chromatic staff.  That’s a great place to start, but you have to really use your imagination to get a sense of what reading music might be like in a given system.

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. Continue reading →

LilyPond, MuseScore, and More Software News

It is hard to believe that a year has gone by since our last blog post.  Luckily this lack of posts does not reflect a lack of things that we should have been posting about.  So this will be the first of several posts summarizing some of what has been going on in the past year, in case you missed any of it over on our Forum. Continue reading →

Git Repository for Lilypond Work, KLAVAR! software, and Website Improvements

In January Andrew Wagner  set up a Git repository to help organize and facilitate future work on adding support for chromatic staves to Lilypond.  The most recent version of Kevin Dalley’s code is now hosted there, including the Mark Hanlon’s updates to it. This will make it easier for developers to work with the code, keep it compatible with newer versions of Lilypond, and eventually contribute our code back to the official Lilypond application.  Read more about it on the repository’s wiki and our Lilypond and Alternative Notation Systems page.  A big thank you to Andrew for his work on this! Continue reading →

Review of E.M. Hume’s “Supermusicology”

by Paul Morris

Supermusicology is Ernest Moore Hume’s book about his alternative music notation system “SuperMusic” and how it seeks to improve upon traditional music notation. It is written in a conversational tone with many helpful illustrations. I particularly enjoyed reading the history section of the book and its account of the use of various staves with different numbers of lines in western music history. Continue reading →

Website Revisions: Music Notations and Homepage

Our webmaster has been hard at work on some welcome enhancements to the “music notations” section of our website. Gone are the old, grainy, scanned-in images of chromatic scales from the Directory of Music Notation Proposals; they’ve been replaced with crisp, clean computer-graphics images. In addition we’ve added information on the year in which each notation system was first documented, and added a page where they are sorted by date. Continue reading →