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.

The AudioVisualizer is still a work in progress, but it can already display 23 of the systems shown on our Guided Tour and Gallery pages.  (However, in some cases it does not fully represent every aspect of a given system, as described here.)  It also lets you experiment with variations on these systems by altering their notehead pattern (i.e. black/solid and white/hollow noteheads) or by shifting the vertical position of the staff up or down relative to the pitches of the chromatic scale.  We plan to add additional notation systems as time permits, but we wanted to go ahead and put it out there so people could start taking advantage of it.

We could tell you more about its various features (like its three-octave range, auto-scrolling staff, or use of HTML5 audio), but it would be better to just give it a try yourself.  (For best results with the audio, we recommend using the Firefox web browser, although most other browsers should work adequately; see this note about HTML5 audio).

Please help us out by sharing it with anyone who might be interested, and let us know what you think in the comments below, or on our Forum!