People have had this idea before but I've never seen a version of it that is better than our existing notation systems. Most of our music is diatonic, and we named the notes in our scale A B C D E F G. Seven notes in the scale, seven letters. Seven positions on the staff.
Our harmonies are built on stacked thirds, and the stacked thirds line up perfectly on a staff. Line, line, line; or space, space, space. Three dots stacked neatly on top of each other. Easy peasy. Easy to read all the common intervals at a glance, once you get past an octave it starts getting a bit harder.
If you had chromatic notation, you'd allocate a bunch of extra space and names for things that you spend most of your time not using. An octave would have eleven spaces in the middle, which is practically unreadable.
I think in the long-run chromatic notation is just hostile. Go ahead and use chromatic solfege, that's super useful, but chromatic notation is usually not.
Most often I hear the criticsm from people who are not musicians or do not know how to read music. It's often smart people with an analytical mind, but people who don't have much experience with music. Just speaking from my own experience, it's much harder to read a chord from a piano roll than to read a chord from traditional notation.
I appreciate most of your points and I appreciate the conciseness of the stave notation for example. But ...
A B C D E F G. Seven notes in the scale, seven letters. Seven positions on the staff.
Thats fine as long as you're in C Major. As soon as you depart from C Major it all starts going wonky. Why is C Major baked into the notation as if you'd never want to use anything else?
> Thats fine as long as you're in C Major. As soon as you depart from C Major it all starts going wonky. Why is C Major baked into the notation as if you'd never want to use anything else?
Actually, it works for every major scale and natural minor scale!
What are the notes in E major? E F# G# A B C# D# E.
It's still the same letters, E F G A B C D. Now, you may think that this is CHEATING because I've added sharps. But when you write it out on staff paper, the sharps get shoved off to the side on the far left in the key signature, and you basically forget that they are there. You really still just care about seven notes, so you still have seven letters, and seven spaces on the staff, they're just a different seven notes from the C major scale.
You have to know which key the song is in... but you have to do that anyway.
When I say that you basically forget that they are there... I mean it. This does not even require an especially advanced level of musical skill. People with even a passing interest in music theory should be able to breeze past it.
I'm saying that our music is largely diatonic, and it's better to base our notation and terminology on the diatonic rather than the chromatic scale.
The idea that you can number semitones 1-12 has some mathematical elegance to it, but it's a terrible system in practice. It turns out that mathematical elegance doesn't count for much, and domain knowledge is important here.
You have to pick something as your starting point.
The sharps and flats diatonic system is way easier to read because you just mentally parse "key of D" instead of "start on D but also sharp the F and C". It takes time but your brain just starts to grok shapes.
"Piano roll" notation, like in DAWs/midi editors, is actually in certain ways a lot hard to read than staff notation, due to the lower density and lack of reference frame. It _is_ easier to see chord shapes transposed up and down as the same. But I'd argue that's an anti-feature, because of said lack of reference points. The symmetry /sameness makes it a lot easier to start on the wrong note.
Our harmonies are built on stacked thirds, and the stacked thirds line up perfectly on a staff. Line, line, line; or space, space, space. Three dots stacked neatly on top of each other. Easy peasy. Easy to read all the common intervals at a glance, once you get past an octave it starts getting a bit harder.
If you had chromatic notation, you'd allocate a bunch of extra space and names for things that you spend most of your time not using. An octave would have eleven spaces in the middle, which is practically unreadable.
I think in the long-run chromatic notation is just hostile. Go ahead and use chromatic solfege, that's super useful, but chromatic notation is usually not.
Most often I hear the criticsm from people who are not musicians or do not know how to read music. It's often smart people with an analytical mind, but people who don't have much experience with music. Just speaking from my own experience, it's much harder to read a chord from a piano roll than to read a chord from traditional notation.