Grant Dukeshire

Preface

Most substantive changes to Standard Music Notation (SM) have failed over the last few hundreds of years. Accordingly, you are quite justified in being dubious about what will be presented here. Nevertheless, I have tried my best to provide convincing arguments that Alpha Beat Music Notation can play a valuable role in the music world. You will be the judge as to whether this could be possible.

Some reasons we use music notation:

• Sight-reading - playing directly from notated music.

• Learning - lick practices and accurate classical playing.

• Communication - from napkin scratching to full transcribing.

• Analysis - pitch, rhythm, identifying patterns, etc.

No single use is enough to embrace a particular notation, but the above list appears to be good start.

To those musicians who can already read music well …

Can you calculate how many hours you have invested in obtaining a competency of being able to sight-read? I suspect that you could compute a number on the basis of how much time you think it would take to learn, but obtaining an idea of how long it actually took to know Standard Music Notation (SM) well — is likely out of your reach. This is because a mastery of sight-reading takes years of practice. To attain real fluency always takes considerable time. Your long-term familiarity of SM prevents this estimate of grasping its intricacies.

To those musicians who are struggling with reading music …

I sincerely feel sorry for anyone who has taken up music and is hoping that it will “just happen” — that natural talent will magically develop. It won’t. Music takes work. And to develop advanced sight-reading skills takes serious work. Do not let people tell you differently. To play some without much effort may happen, but to really progress, some serious time for study and practice is needed. But still, we should ask if learning music notation could be made easier. Alpha Beat thinks so.

In order to play using Standard Music Notation (SM), one needs to:

• View positioning of the duration symbol on the Staff.

• Correlate the Letter of the C major scale per the positioning.

• Apply the Key signature and other sharps and flats to that letter.

• Compute and apply the duration/timing per the Rhythm symbol.

Neither Standard Music Notation nor Alpha Beat Music Notation will provide instant sight-reading abilities. Be honest — music is just not that simple. But material simplifications can be been made to each of the above steps as well as improving some of the precision even. 

Historically, many alternate music notations have been suggested and discarded, or at least have not gained any general acceptance. Only ABC Music Notation has a reasonable (but very limited) following — largely because it facilitates keyboard-friendly communication of scores along with being able to produce Standard Music sheet music when required. But due to its mathematical basis, sight-reading of ABC Notation is virtually impossible except for simple cases. On the other hand, Alpha Beat offers something significantly different, contains no explicit math computations, and yet fully captures rhythmic details.

Essentially, the primary similarities between Alpha Beat and ABC are these two items: the use of a lettering symbology within a horizontal axis, and the use of a default duration value that is later modified as needed. ABC was constructed to make computer communication of music easier, and to enable a conversion to SM score. Context on the other hand, was developed for the sole purpose to enable efficient sight-reading — heavily employing our natural and intuitive concepts of context along with a sequential correspondence of letters to pitch. 

Some honest disclosure per 2020’s development:

The author is a harmonica player. Wait — don’t stop reading. Yes, I know that harmonica players are not supposed to be real musicians. And I know the jokes.

However, most people are unaware that the harmonica has a very unique aspect of being fully transposable in that it promotes easy performance in any of the 12 keys. This is unlike most other instruments. Although many instruments can play in any of the 12 keys, to do so normally involves considerable contortions (commonly called positions) because of the differences of where the necessary notes are located within the scale of each key (think black vs. white keys).

“What?? I thought a harmonica was basically just the white notes of the piano …” Well that is true in one sense should you only look at the single harmonica in the player’s hand. But in a broader sense, a “full harmonica”, in the more general sense, is not just the single harmonica being played during a particular song. It really is the complete set of 12 harmonicas that the player trucks around.

So when someone calls out that the song is in the key of C or F#, the harp player pulls out the needed harmonica that simplifies the relative position of notes for the required key (and mode), and then basically plays in the same manner whether the song is in the key of C or whatever. Yes — a bit of a cheat. 

What other instruments have this ability? Well the obvious one is the electronic keyboard that can transpose to any key — just play the song in the key of C but sound as if you are playing in the key of F# maybe. Also the guitar's capo can be used to essentially tune the whole instrument up a few tones (by shortening all the open strings) and allowing identical playing mechanics as for a key already known. So to play in F#, the guitarist could capo to the sixth fret and then play as if in the key of C. You get the idea.

So why mention this? Well, music notation for a harmonica is number based (providing the direct mechanics of the playing) as opposed to using the 12 tone-letters of the various octaves. And with no staff required for its notation, the above list then devolved to only require a solution that indicates the rhythm with compact and contextual rhythm symbols. This realization allowed pitch to be represented by tone-letters in a single line of text while still retaining the required elements of rhythm. That was how 2020M was born.

We normally resist at making significant changes to the status quo. Alpha Beat Music Notation will be criticized for:

• Being too simplistic.

• Being devised by a non-classical musician.

• Not enabling all possible performance renderings.

These issues, and more, will be addressed in due time should you be patient enough to clearly understand the possible advantages that could be brought to the table. Again — try to keep an open mind.

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

“Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.”

— Albert Einstein

Alpha Beat Music Notation has carefully tried to establish an appropriate balance between complexity and simplicity. Although its final success will depend on each player and each instrument, as well as the type of music being played, the numbers indicated that it is worthy of some serious thought.

One cannot read the final chapters on Comparisons and Evaluations and not at least, consider the possibility of musical improvement for a substantial number of cases.