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More Music Notation Systems

"With so many solutions, you know there must be a problem."

- MNMA member Andre Lippens

Below is a listing of some more music notation systems with links to their websites. Unless otherwise noted these systems are not presented elsewhere on our site. The systems that are illustrated elsewhere on our site generally meet all of our desirable criteria for alternative music notation systems. For the additional systems listed below, numbers are provided that indicate which criterion or criteria the system does not meet, to the best of our knowledge. (This is intended to be a factual analysis, not a judgment on whether the system is well designed or meets the inventor's goals, because those goals might be different from those of the Music Notation Project. Suggestions for corrections are welcome.)

The MNMA collected over 500 notation systems, as documented in Tom Reed's Directory of Music Notation Proposals (1999). An earlier collection is Gardner Read's Source Book of Proposed Music Notation Reforms (1987). See also Wikipedia's Musical Notation page.

Some of the websites below are in languages other than English. Use the Google Translate service if needed.

More notation systems that use a chromatic staff

Ambrose Piano Tabs by Russell Ambrose, formerly known as "keyPlay" at keyPlay.co.uk (see criteria 7 and 8, and comment about Klavar below)

Dodeka Notation by Jacques-Daniel Rochat, (see criteria 1, 2, and 17)

Drielijn Notation by Pierre Hendriks, Netherlands (see criterion 11)

Klavar Music Notation (Klavarscribo) by Cornelis Pot
Dutch site, English site, Klavar Music Foundation of Great Britain, Klavar Foundation of the Netherlands, KlavarScore website, see also Software (see criteria 8 and 13 -- Klavar almost meets 8, but the staff is not quite pitch-proportional, because it mirrors the piano keyboard, whose white keys divide the octave into seven equal steps. Note that there are three variants of Klavar featured on our site: Pot's own 6-6 Klavar, Jean de Buur's Mirck Version, and Tadeusz Wójcik's Isomorph Notation.)

Meloz Music Tablature by Jerald Lepinski (see criterion 8, and comment about Klavar above)

NoteTrace by Enrique Prieto. It uses unique note shapes to indicate each of the 12 pitches of the chromatic scale. The shape consists of one of 4 notehead shapes plus a horizontal line segment extending to the right from the notehead at one of 3 vertical positions. Instead of a staff with lines and spaces, it uses shaded horizontal bands in the background behind the notes. (See criteria 2 and 7. NoteTrace meets criterion 8 if, as the inventor intends, one considers only the line segments; the vertical placement of the noteheads is not pitch-proportional.)

Numbered Notes by Jason MacCoy (see criterion 17). Places numbers (1-12) in front of each note to help with note identification and interval calculation. See also the only notes version and the only numbers version on our site.

NUME (New Understanding of Musical Expression) by Mike Ellis. Uses an alternative symbol system of noteheads for rhythmic notation. (see criteria 10 and 15)

SuperMusic by Ernest Moore Hume (see criteria 8 and 15)

Symmetrisch Chromatisches System (SCS) by Robert Doll, German and English Sites (see criteria 10 and 15)

Systems that do not use a chromatic staff or a traditional diatonic staff

See criterion 8 for all the notation systems in this group.

Equiton Notation - Gould Version by Mark Gould. A system with an innovative and comprehensive approach to rhythmic notation. It uses a six-degree staff rather than either a pitch-proportional twelve-degree chromatic staff, or a traditional diatonic staff. (Original Equiton Notation by Rodney Fawcett, published by him in Zurich in 1958.)

FinKeys Notation System by Victor Mataele. Pitches are represented by the numbers 1-9 followed by the letters X, Y, and Z (C is 1 and B is Z). Time is represented on the vertical axis. Duration is indicated with colors. (See Criterion 7.) The horizontal axis does not represent pitch but finger number, so it is divided into ten columns, five per hand. (See Criteria 8 and 9.) The music therefore has a different appearance for different instruments, as well as for different ways of fingering a passage on the same instrument. (See Criterion 3.)

Hamburg Music Notation by Christian Pörksen (aka Robert Elisabeth Key). Uses a series of numbers and letters (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, A, B) rather than noteheads, to represent the twelve notes of the chromatic scale. The letters are used in order to avoid having to use numbers with double digits.

Leszer Notation by Eduardo Terol. Uses a non-standard diatonic staff that cycles on the octave.

Nydana Notation by Dan Lindgren. Uses a non-standard diatonic staff that cycles on the octave.

Systems that use the traditional diatonic staff

See criteria 8 and 9 for all the notation systems in this group.

Amadeus Musique

New Standard Notation by Clark Battle

iCanPiano Notes by Ophir Atar (formerly known as "Prima Vista Notes")

Shape Note Notation: Sacred Harp and Shape Note singing (fasola.org), Shape Note Bibliography by John Bealle, Sacred Harp Singing by Warren Steel, Samples of Musical Notation by Warren Steel

Simplified Music Notation by Peter Hayes George

Systems that do not use a staff

See criterion 8 for all the notation systems in this group.

3JCNGUYEN Music Notation by Thomas Nguyen. A note is represented by a lower-case alphabet letter, followed by a real number to show the note's duration. Rests are real numbers. Different colors are used to show positions of notes in different octaves.