Pitch Notation
Every time you see a piece of written music you are already looking at a visual language of music. Most people have seen printed music somewhere. Printed music is static, unlike the performance of music which is dynamic. Current musical notation is the result of hundreds of years of evolution and to develop an effective dynamic visual language of music I aim to incorporate those aspects which are already broadly understood by the general population.
Pitch Notation
Our current pitch notation is the most widely understood form we have. It is considered to have its limitations because of the way it represents accidentals. Our western tonal system identify 12 individual pitches which then repeat at the octave. Our system of keys, how ever, use only seven notes out of those 12; A, B ,C, D, E, F and G. The other 5 unused pitches are notated as inflections of those existing seven notes, represented through the use of accidentals. As music became ever more tonally complex, the use of flats, sharps and naturals to indicate particular notes increased, cluttering the visual line. This is a serious problem for modern music where tonal traditions which use sharps and flats are irrelevant. Despite there being no tonal centre, modern notation still applies accidentals as if there were, in some cases 98% of the notes have accidentals applied to them (Schonberg's Pierrot lunaire (1912) has pages where 98% of the notes are inflected by accidental signs).
Accidental: the sign indicating a departure from the key signature, by the momentary raising or lowering of a note by means of a sharp, flat or natural.
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sharp - raising.
flat - lowering.
natural - overrides the effect of any sharp or flat in the key signature that would have otherwise effected it.
Other notational systems have been designed to overcome this problem but the current system is too widely used and the inertia too great for anything different to be adopted by the broader music community.
That said, the system I use to represent pitch allots a set position along the Y-axis in a 3 dimensional environment for each of the twelve notes in the western tonal system. This avoids the clutter issue with accidentals and is also more consistent with the scientific approach I also use to inform the imagery. The note lengths are represented by the length of the step.
Interesting to note the similarity (excuse the pun) between notation and the physical action of finding different notes on a variety of instruments. Different notes on string instruments are defined by their distances from each other on the string, and written notes are also defined by units of distance from each other as defined by the lines of the stave.
Written notation describes a linear landscape which is traversed visually from left to right and top to bottom, when a performer reads music. In a 3 dimensional landscape it is possible to construct and weave these lines around each other in such a way as to highlight the interaction between different voices/melodies. This also offers the opportunity to visually reflect phrasing through the path architecture.
