Our domain has now changed to the shorter and simpler musicnotation.org This domain was not available last January when the Music Notation Project’s site was launched at musicnotationproject.org We think this change will save everyone a lot of keystrokes over time.

Please update your bookmarks and links to “http://musicnotation.org” and help us spread the word about our site and its new address by telling others you know about it.

Note that our former domains (musicnotationproject.org and mnma.org) will continue to work until further notice.

In addition to re-doing the images in the “music notations” section of our site, we’ve added thirteen notation systems, bringing the number of systems on our site to more than thirty-seven.

Seven of these are older systems that were included in the MNMA’s Research Project of 1999. These include notation systems by the well-known figures Arnold Schoenberg and Cornelis Pot:

Proportional Chromatic Music Notation by Henri Carcelle
Notation for the System of Equal Tones Applied to the Chromatic Keyboard by Gustave Decher
Seven-tone or Twelve-tone Notation by Hans Krenn
Untitled by Klaus Lieber
6-6 Klavar by Cornelis Pot
Untitled by Arnold Schoenberg
Untitled by Robert Thelwall

Two additional systems were known at the time of the MNMA’s Research Project, but were not included, even though they passed all of the MNMA’s screens. (It seems they were understood to be superceded by Parncutt’s 6-6 Tetragram.)

6-6 Trigram Notation by Richard Parncutt
Keyboard (or 7-5) Trigram Notation by Richard Parncutt

Finally, we have added four systems that have been designed more recently and so were not part of the MNMA Research Project, even though they appear to meet the criteria of the MNMA’s screens.

Black Triangle Twinline by Doug Keislar
MUTO Music Notation by the MUTO Music Method Foundation
Thumline Music Notation by Jim Plamondon
Bilinear Music Notation by Jose Sotorrio

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.

Our homepage has also been revised. There you will see that we have merged our chromatic staves tutorial with our account of the disadvantages of traditional music notation. This puts the concept of the chromatic staff front and center where our visitors can’t miss it. It also makes it easier to understand the drawbacks of traditional notation when they are presented together with a better approach.