Music notation is one of those conventions that solidified long before it was critically analyzed, and well before the advent of even remotely modern usage. The fact that sharps and flats involve special symbols, either in the key signature or as "accidentals", is a sure sign of a hack that has ossified into a standard- one that is painful to learn and use. But the most painful aspect of modern music notation is that the same note appears in contrasting places in different octaves- on different staffs, and in different locations on a single staff. For example, for normal piano music, where both treble and bass staffs are provided, and the note "C" sometimes hits a line, but elsewhere sits between lines. The position alternates going up the staves because the (C) major scale on which the notation is based has an odd number of notes- seven per octave.
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| Early music notation, dating from roughly 1000 CE. We don't need no sharps or flats! |
These characteristics make note reading, not to mention sight reading, very difficult to learn, a big turnoff to the young students who may otherwise be quite enthusiastic about making music. Ranging from the central hand position is made substantially more difficult by the precisely opposite locations that the farther-ranging notes have in this notation system. All this becomes second nature eventually for advanced and professional musicians, but it is clearly a long and arduous process, needlessly difficult. Indeed, many famous musicians never learned to read music, maybe in part because of its notational difficulty.
One solution is to make smaller staffs, only one per octave, with a one-tone gap between each. This would make each octave look identical, and successive octaves could be stacked as needed. Modern printing could surely make such a system as compact as the current 5-line staff, which carries two octaves, if one counts one supplementary line below and two above.
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| A chromatic notation with each of the twelve tones on its own level, and an even number of notes occupying a full staff, ready to repeat in a regular way to other octaves. |
Another solution is to lay out the whole chromatic scale, which has a separate position for each note in the customary Western 12-tone scales including sharps and flats, as separate notes. The number of notes per octave becomes even (twelve), providing consistency in note position. And the need for sharp and flat notation is reduced if not obviated. A downside is that the representation of chords would change dramatically, relative to the typical triads or sevenths that look so regular on a conventional staff.
