Music Notation Through Time

Visual Representation of Music:

• Music notation is a system used to visually represent music through written symbols.

• Different cultures and music genres use different notation methods.

• Symbols used for notation include those cut into stone, made in clay tablets, printed, or made using modern copying technology.

• Ancient cultures used symbols to represent melodies and rhythms, but none of them was comprehensive.

• Western notation was developed in medieval Europe for ecclesiastical uniformity.

• Music notation continued to develop during the Renaissance and Baroque music eras.

• Music notation has been adapted to many kinds of music, including classical, popular, and traditional music.

• The earliest form of musical notation was found in a cuneiform tablet in Babylonia in about 1400 BCE.

• Byzantine music included vocal church music written down in Byzantine round notation.

• Modern music notation consists of 5 parallel horizontal lines with oval note-heads placed on or between the lines.

• The pitch of a note is indicated by the vertical position of the note-head, and duration by the form of the note-head or with the addition of a note-stem plus beams or flags.

• A staff of written music begins with a clef, which indicates the pitch-range of the staff.Overview of Music Notation Systems

• Music notation systems use symbols and markings to represent musical sounds and rhythms.

• The staff is a set of horizontal lines and spaces on which musical notes are placed.

• The clef is a symbol at the beginning of the staff that indicates the pitch of the notes on the staff.

• The key signature is a group of sharp or flat signs placed on the staff to indicate the key of the piece.

• The time signature consists of two numbers that indicate the number of beats per measure and the type of note that receives one beat.

• Directions regarding tempo, dynamics, and expression are indicated above or below the staff.

• Vocal music includes lyrics written near the pitches of the melody.

• Scores show music for all players together, with the staves for different instruments and/or voices stacked vertically.

• Znamenny Chant in Russia uses a "hook and banner" notation that records transitions of the melody rather than notes.

• Jeongganbo is a unique traditional musical notation system created during the time of Sejong the Great that was the first East Asian system to represent rhythm, pitch, and time.

• The Samaveda text in India contains notated melodies, and these are probably the world's oldest surviving ones.

• Cipher notations are used in Indonesia, in which the pitches are represented with some subset of the numbers 1 to 7, with 1 corresponding to either the highest or lowest note of a particular octave.Overview of Different Music Notation Systems

• Drum notation symbols are based on letters representing vocables and are variable from place to place and performer to performer.

• Cipher notation systems assign Arabic numerals to major scale degrees and have been used since the 16th century. The one most widely used today is the Chinese Jianpu.

• Solfège assigns syllables to names of the musical scale, and tonic sol-fa is a type of notation using the initial letters of solfège.

• Letter notation writes the notes of the 12-tone scale by their letter names A–G.

• Tablature was first used in the Middle Ages for organ music and later in the Renaissance for lute music.

• Klavarskribo is a music notation system that was introduced in 1931 by the Dutchman Cornelis Pot and is intended to be easily readable.

• Graphic notation refers to the contemporary use of non-traditional symbols and text to convey information about the performance of a piece of music.

• Simplified Music Notation is an alternative form of musical notation designed to make sight-reading easier.

• Modified Stave Notation (MSN) is an alternative way of notating music for people who cannot easily read ordinary musical notation.

• Parsons code is used to encode music so that it can be easily searched.

• Braille music is a complete, well-developed, and internationally accepted musical notation system.

• In integer notation, all pitch classes and intervals between pitch classes are designated using the numbers 0 through 11.

• The standard form of rap notation is the "flow diagram".

• ABC notation is a compact format using plain text characters, readable by both computers and humans.

• Tin whistle tabs are particularly useful for those unfamiliar with sheet music notation.

• The Musical Symbols Unicode block encodes an extensive system of formal musical notation.