MNMA Research Project: Report on the Results

by Doug Keislar

(The following is a short excerpt from the full "Report on the Results of the MNMA Evaluation Test" that was published at the conclusion of the MNMA Research Project. The full text includes statistical analyses of the participating musicians' responses and was published in the Vol. 10, No. 2, 2nd Quarter 2000 issue of the MNMA's Music Notation News.)

 

If the evaluators had been close to unanimous in their opinions of the best systems, interpreting the results would be straightforward.   As it turned out, they were far from unanimous, meaning that one must examine the results carefully before drawing conclusions.  If one must choose an existing system based on the test results, with none of the improvements suggested by the evaluators (and not allowing for future proposals), I see two candidates, depending on the criteria one uses. 

Only one system was chosen as a final preferred system by two evaluators: LP #15, Parncutt 6-6 Tetragram.  The fact that this system is a minor variant of LP#14, Brennink, which was chosen as a third evaluator's final system, strengthens its position considerably.  Taken together, Brennink's system and Parncutt's variation of it won three of the seven final "votes" by evaluators, which is a strong plurality.  Unfortunately, these three evaluators were not wildly enthusiastic about the system.  One rated it somewhat worse than traditional, another about the same, and the third somewhat better.  This is not the kind of ringing endorsement that would convince the world at large to bother learning the system as an alternative to traditional notation, much less as a replacement for it.

Only one system among the final choices received an evaluation of "much better than traditional": LP#6, Tom Reed's Twinline.  This is the kind of ringing endorsement one would hope for, but unfortunately it came from only one out of seven evaluators, far from a consensus.  However, if one examines the overall numerical results instead of only looking at the final choices, the position of LP#6 does become somewhat stronger: it receives the highest numerical rating in all the analyses of the scores, higher than LP#15 (or LP#14).  The final report will include all evaluators' numerical responses to all questions in the test, so that readers can verify my analyses if desired.

These two systems, LP#14/15 and LP#6, represent the work of two men who have each devoted innumerable hours to the problem of notation reform: Albert Brennink and Thomas Reed.  (Parncutt's contribution to Brennink's system, while evidently deemed a worthy improvement by the evaluators, cannot be considered the product of decades of research in notation reform; so it seems fair to lump his system together with Brennink's in the present discussion.)  Certainly one cannot assert that either Brennink's or Reed's system is carelessly designed.  Brennink's system is closer in appearance to traditional notation; at a glance, it can actually be mistaken for traditional notation.  Reed's system, on the other hand, ostensibly avoids the problem that plagues almost all chromatic notation proposals: their less efficient use of space on the page.

In short, I find that both the Brennink/Parncutt system and the Reed Twinline system have their advantages.  The former system's greater similarity in appearance to traditional notation would probably make it easier to promote. However, I also see advantages to some features of systems that no evaluators selected as a final choice.  (For example, the use of alternating black and white noteheads would accentuate the staff lines and spaces, allowing music to be printed smaller, and it would also highlight intervallic patterns, facilitating transposition and improvisation.)  Perhaps a composite system can be imagined.  I think it likely that a notation system superior to any of the 37 studied in this test can, and eventually will, be invented.  I will not predict whether the world at large will adopt such a system (or any of the existing ones); it might well be that traditional notation is too entrenched to be replaced, or even significantly displaced, in the foreseeable future (say, within the next century).  Perhaps only a system that is an order of magnitude better than the ensconced system, not merely twice as good, can effect such a global change.  One can, however, foresee that computers will make it much easier for experimentally minded people to adopt notation systems of their liking and to translate music between those systems and traditional notation.