“Hummingbird,” A New Form of Music Notation That’s Easier to Learn and Faster to Read

If you learned to play a musi­cal instru­ment as a kid, you like­ly remem­ber your first encounter with tra­di­tion­al music nota­tion. You remem­ber being baf­fled by the sym­bols denot­ing quar­ter notes, eighth notes, six­teenth notes. Or the dif­fi­cul­ty of read­ing notes locat­ed above or below the staff. The West­ern sys­tem of music nota­tion goes back hun­dreds of years, and it has been befud­dling stu­dents for gen­er­a­tions. Enter Blake West, a piano teacher from Austin, Texas, who enlist­ed his old friend Mike Sall, a data visu­al­iza­tion wiz, to cre­ate a more intu­itive form of music nota­tion. They dubbed it “Hum­ming­bird,” and between the two videos on this page and this com­plete ref­er­ence guide, you’ll get a quick feel for the con­cepts under­ly­ing this new way of read­ing music. On the Hum­ming­bird web­site, you can also find 26 songs — every­thing rang­ing from Bach’s “Ode to Joy” to Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train” — rewrit­ten in a for­mat that bud­ding music stu­dents will love.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How a Bach Canon Works. Bril­liant.

85,000 Clas­si­cal Music Scores on the Web

Bob­by McFer­rin Shows the Pow­er of the Pen­ta­ton­ic Scale

Lis­ten­ing to Music (Yale) in Our Col­lec­tion 700 Free Online Cours­es