It is awesome that you can embed interactive Noteflight scores in a web page, like so:
But for optimal music education results, I also want to be able to show that same example in MIDI piano roll view too. Imagine if the Noteflight embed included a pane that showed this:
The beauty of interactive interfaces is that your ears support your eyes and vice versa. However, any visualization scheme will work better for some concepts than for others. Standard Western music notation evolved over a long period of time to be human-readable, but it also evolved in a particular cultural context, one where harmony was mostly diatonic and rhythms were mostly simple. Notation became standardized before twelve-tone equal temperament did. The idea of starting with a diatonic scale and then modifying it with accidentals works fine for Mozart, but it is horribly awkward for chromaticism. Showing complex syncopation and polyrhythm is a headache in notation, and you can’t represent swing at all.
The MIDI piano roll is less human-readable than notation, but vastly more flexible. You simply draw the notes where you want them. There’s no need to calculate rests to fill silences, and no need to worry about accidentals. The standard was designed with 12-TET in mind, and chromatic music is actually easier to represent in MIDI than diatonicism. That said, the piano roll also has its own limitations. Like notation, MIDI presumes that pitches and rhythms are always going to be discrete. There is no good way to show notes fading in or out, and if you want blue notes or other microtones, you have to start with piano-key pitches and then modify them with the Pitch Bend parameter. Still, the piano roll is an extremely valuable interactive learning tool, because it’s so discoverable through trial and error.
In a perfect world, you could have both notation and the piano roll visible on the screen at the same time, set up so that any change you made in one view would be instantly reflected in the other. Dorico is the first piece of software I know of to allow you to do that. Image via Robby Burns:
Here’s a more complex example–image via David MacDonald:
Much as I love Dorico, it is desktop and iPad software only. If you want to reach music educators and students at massive scale, though, then you need to make tools that live in the browser. Noteflight has many limitations and shortcomings, but I still use it for everything, because the fact that you can make and listen to interactive scores from any device is such an enormous practical advantage. Who will be the first to make a browser-based embeddable Dorico-style score and piano roll editor? Noteflight? Dorico? Someone else? I would do it myself if I had the JavaScript chops, but sadly, I don’t.
I have been involved in the design of some multiple simultaneous music visualization schemes. The Groove Pizza has both a radial grid and a linear grid:
The aQWERTYon shows notes both on a pitch wheel of my own design and on the staff:
I also love Samuel Halligan’s Pop-Up Piano, a Max for Live device that enables you to show MIDI notes on a staff, a pitch wheel, a piano keyboard, and a guitar fretboard. I have been using the piano and pitch wheel views for my recent Ableton Live musicology videos:
I have no idea what the business case is for developing a notation/piano roll browser interface. I have no particular insight into the economics of music education software. I just know that multiple simultaneous representations of music make teaching and learning easier. Who wants to help me make this vision a reality?
Thank you once again Ethan for your so-generous approach to providing multiple entry-points and and a panoply of aids to learning about music, especially in the context of modern music styles for which Western notation is less suited
In a classroom situation, it seems obvious that to enable each individual student to the fullest degree, with their differing abilities and preferred mode of apprehending information, a ”one size fits all” attitude (traditional education) is not optimum, and so the ”more is more” idea you are endorsing is more and most appropriate, with the proviso that the music-educator who seeks to provide an individually-catered learning experience for each and every student is engaging on an immense task in terms of the effort involved at every stage, an effort you yourself have been making over an extended time as you’ve developed and refined more and more tools, as you’ve seen the need and then discovered how to meet that need
Since music is a matter of sound, ”representations” of music for the purpose of education, are of necessity ”visual representations” Computer screens are visual, screenshots are visual, and the groove pizza and other ideas and tools you’ve developed are ”visual aids”
Of the tools you’ve developed, it is the pitch wheel associated with the aQUERTon which is the easiest to grasp for me, with my limited visual imagination
I’ve found that it is the double wheel, with one chromatic and the other organized according to the ”circle of fifths” which is particularly useful
With time to spend in front of a DAW, the screen-shot type of aids obviously become more familiar to the student, and the emphasis you put on ‘facilitating a ‘hands on” approach is a wise decision
With respect to my own interest In analyzing modes of communication about other communications, I think you might find it unsurprising that I now draw your attention briefly to the naturalness (normally) of the phrases ”particular INSIGHT” and ”make this VISION a reality” in the final paragraph
Ethan, you are worthy of the highest praise, for unstinting inspiration, you are always reaching out, a true and committed teacher-educator
WTK (newcrossingsout)
Thanks for all the validation! It means a lot.