There are several notation systems that have been documented on our website over the past year or so that we have not yet mentioned on our blog.  So we would like to bring them to the attention of our readers.  (This is the second in a series of posts summarizing some of what has been going on in the past year or so, in case you missed it over on our Forum.)

Chromatic Lyre Notation by Jan Braunstein

Braunstein’s system has two lines per octave, with lines a major third apart, and uses hollow and solid notes to indicate pitch in a 6-6 pitch pattern.  He designed it with his Chromatic Lyre instruments in mind, but it could also work as a general purpose notation system.  See also the documentation on his website.

Reverse-Color Express Stave by John Keller

An experimental version from Keller that reverses the solid and hollow notehead pattern so that the solid notes are the more commonly occurring notes (ABCDEFG). This provides greater continuity with traditional notation and other advantages.

TwinNote and TwinNote TD by Paul Morris

Morris redesigned TwinNote so that it uses only triangle-shaped notes, offering more consistency in the appearance of intervals.  While the standard version of TwinNote uses hollow and solid notes to indicate pitch, another version, TwinNote TD (for “traditional duration”), uses them to indicate duration, as in traditional notation.  Read more about the redesign on the TwinNote Blog.  (The original version of TwinNote remains on our site, now called “Black-Oval Twinline.”)

The following notation systems have been added to our More Music Notation Systems page:

Black White Notation by CJ Wang

Like Equiton, Wang’s system uses a six-degree staff rather than either a pitch-proportional twelve-degree chromatic staff, with hollow and solid noteheads to help indicate pitch.  Two lines per octave, a major third apart.

Dodeka  by Jacques-Daniel Rochat

Dodeka uses a four-line chromatic staff, with lines a major third apart. Rather than more traditional noteheads it uses solid bars to indicate notes, resembling a piano-roll notation.  There is also a Dodeka chromatic keyboard to match.

Hass Notation by Peter Hass

Hass Notation uses a five-line chromatic staff with lines a minor third apart. Three noteheads shapes are used: ovals and downward and upward triangles. This corresponds to the three rows of a chromatic button accordion and its isomorphic layout.

NoteTrace by Enrique Prieto

NoteTrace radically rethinks music notation, doing away with staff lines entirely, and representing notes by horizontal line segments (called note traces) whose length is proportional to a note’s duration, as in a piano-roll notation.

There are currently a number of notation systems that we have not yet documented on our site.  Follow our blog to read about them when we do.  You can follow our blog by email, RSS feed, on Facebook, and now, on Twitter.  Use the icons at the bottom of the column on the left hand side of any of our web pages to follow our blog posts.