Types of research

Research could be conducted by a whole range of music educators and academics:

This is not to say that interested folks in any arena or background could not also do research.  I would expect college and university-level researchers are most likely to be those in Musicology or Music Education.


And there is a range of types of research that could conducted from informal to formal.


Informal, or subjective, testing could be to review an Alternative Notation with subjects and simply collect their impressions and feedback.  This could be with small groups or one subject at a time.  The best subject might be those who have no experience reading music and those who struggle with it.  This kind of testing could be performed by undergraduates.

More formal, or objective, testing with beginners could include comparing response time and accuracy of reading notes between Traditional and Alternative staves (both Treble and Bass).  Other comparisons could be related to tempo such as identification of note (onset) order across Treble and Bass staves with non-trivial note sequences.  Another could be the measurement of accuracy of identifying note duration with unfamiliar tunes (or just pseudo-random sequences).


Another avenue to pursue would be to contact music instructors who use Alternative Notations in their instruction.  There is a least one notation inventor included on the MNMA website that does so.  (Finding others may not be straightforward however since this is the only one I know.)

Testing with experienced (and perhaps older) readers of Traditional Notation is probably not worth the effort since these players are likely to be locked into Traditional Notation.  There is some limited evidence that this is the case (i.e., the MNMA Research Project results).