MNMA Research Project Recommendations

The Project is described here on the MNMA website.  It includes a summary of the results, but does not include the following which was offered by the author of the final report in a printed publication that is no longer available nor is it online. 

“The outcome of any evaluation effort is highly dependent on the criteria and methodology used in the evaluation.  The present test had, in my view, the following features:

1. It was designed to be taken by musicians who have a great amount of training in traditional notation, but with some exposure to new notations.

2. It focused on writing music more than on reading music.

3. It focused more on the evaluation of existing systems than on the assessment of individual features and requirements that might be applied to a yet-to-be-invented, possibly hybrid system.

These were entirely appropriate features for an evaluation test, and the results are of great value.  This does not mean however, that one should feel reluctant to ask whether other sorts of tests might be designed to answer different sorts of question.”

The MNMA Research Project evaluators represented a narrow segment of the entire musician population.  This group was composed of highly experienced and advanced skill musicians. The author of the final report recognized this limitation and proposed the following thoughts regarding future testing.

“For example, what type of system is most easily learned by a beginner who has no bias toward traditional notation?  In this case, the system must meet all the requirements of a general-purpose notation; it must be at least as adequate as traditional notation, but it need not be similar to traditional notation.  Such an evaluation test might have the following features:

1.  It is designed for musical novices, or for musicians who do not know how to read music (the latter include self-taught musicians as well as those from cultures with and oral/aural teaching tradition).

2.  If focuses on perceptibility and intelligibility: the ease with which a system can be read (for example, at a distance, at a glance, when reading multiple staves simultaneously, etc.)

3.  It also focuses on how easily a system can be learned: it considers not only the perceptual matters of question 2 but also cognitive matters.

4.  It addresses the question how well the system aids musical comprehension in a music-theoretical sense.  For example, how readily can the student identify scales, harmonies, transposed motives, and other intervallic patterns?  Such properties are very important for students who wish to compose or improvise.  This requirement goes beyond the usual requirement that a student be able to read a series of notes and accurately render them on an instrument; it involves a deeper understanding of the music, one that traditional music instruction often neglects.

5.  It permits a system to be handwritten in a somewhat different manner than it is printed.  Since probably at least 95% of musical activity with notation involves reading music rather than writing it, and since an increasing number of composers use computers to print their music, one can legitimately ask whether reading should not be given a higher priority than writing in evaluating a system.

These ideas for future research should not be in any way interpreted as diminishing the current test’s importance.  It is clear to me, and, I hope, to readers of this report, that the field of music notation modernization has now taken a large step forward through the collective effort of the evaluators.  Any future studies of notation reform must surely take their observations into account.”

Note that items 1 to 3 are relevant to beginning students, while items 4 and 5 to advanced musicians.  The notations evaluated in the Research Project were limited to chromatic designs.