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

I won­der how a play­er would read ful­ly har­mo­nized piano music for both hands.

I applaud your effort, a grand help for sin­gle line nota­tion.

Do you have tuto­ri­als for hand- writ­ing hum­ming­bird? You prob­a­bly know, hand writ­ten musi­cal nota­tion uses an angu­lar line to rep­re­sent most notes- cir­cles are dif­fi­cult and slow. Per­haps you could design a spe­cial pen.

To mar­i­anne,
We have many songs avail­able on the site that use 2 hands, chords, etc. Give them a shot!
We don’t have tuto­ri­als for writ­ing by hand, but the sym­bols are designed so that you could just quick­ly writ them and the “gist” is still there. As in, just a cir­cle with some part of the top half filled in will let you know it’s “A”. The hand writ­ten ver­sion does­n’t need to be the exact same as the print­ed. Same how tra­di­tion­al nota­tion has many flour­ish­es and ornate details when print­ed that are always left out when hand writ­ten.

as an appren­tice musi­cian and aspi­rant music teacher, i’d say that the fun­da­men­tal effort is to get peo­ple play­ing music. if there’s a way to make it eas­i­er to begin and more acces­si­ble, all the bet­ter. besides, i sup­pose com­par­ing this sys­tem to tabs seems to be inac­cu­rate, for tabs don’t show dura­tion of the notes among many oth­er sub­tleties. And even then, this seems to me as a great method to start from and lat­er get into more tra­di­tion­al forms of sheet music. We don’t need to exclude the one to grasp the oth­er, but i find that it is just nat­ur­al that writ­ten and spo­ken lan­guage (be it for talk­ing, play­ing music, pro­gram­ming etc) evolve and change and become sim­pler so as to be more acces­si­ble. I meet many old­er musi­cians who play the hell out of their instru­ments but can only scratch their heads when look­ing at sheet music. I don’t usu­al­ly see any­one teach­ing 1‑year-olds to write the first word they say, but rather have them talk­ing a lit­tle and hav­ing them visu­al­ly used to let­ters as they go.

All these “new” nota­tion are geared toward sim­ple pop­u­lar melody that peo­ple already know by ear, i.e. peo­ple learn­ing songs by ear then pre­sent­ed with visu­al clue, of course they can read it.
You are using the staff, which already can rep­re­sent both pitch and posi­tion, and split that into note head for pitch then staff for posi­tion. This will great­ly slow down score read­ing.
Also the “tra­di­tion­al” nota­tion already has the rel­a­tive spac­ing of rhythm. We don’t need extra lines to tell us how long we should hold the note for. And of course, the small­est divi­sion is 8th notes, i.e. trick­led down musi­cal nota­tion.
The gold­en thing about “tra­di­tion­al” nota­tion is that pitch/position/rhythm is con­densed on the note itself. You read one note, you know all 3 pieces of infor­ma­tion. And you don’t have to rely on spac­ing for rhythm, thus allow­ing us “re-lay­out/re-space” music.
Nice try though. But I don’t think one man can improve music nota­tion that’s been devel­oped by count­less of real musi­cians with­in the last few thou­sands of years.

Hum­ming­bird seems ter­ri­bly Eng­lish-cen­tric and too busy with extra sym­bols and lines.

Some­one whose first lan­guage is Ger­man or Span­ish, for exam­ple, is not going to ben­e­fit as much from these sym­bols, and may feel sub­tly dis­tanced from the nota­tion.

There’s no good rea­son to rep­re­sent pitch by height AND by sym­bol. You real­ly do need to pick just one. (This is a flaw in the orig­i­nal sys­tem, made worse by this one)

There’s no good rea­son to rep­re­sent dura­tion by line length AND by cross-lines. You real­ly do need to pick just one.

In a lot of music, where more is hap­pen­ing, com­mu­ni­ca­tion effi­cien­cy is impor­tant. I looked at five of the exam­ples, and NONE looked like any­thing I remem­ber play­ing on piano. I no longer play, but I recall that I would be play­ing up to 5 notes at a time, some on each hand. These exam­ples show at most 2 notes, on dif­fer­ent hands.

It does­n’t look any sim­pler to me…

I think peo­ple here should learn the new sys­tem, try out some sight-read­ing, then give an edu­cat­ed opin­ion on whether it’s eas­i­er to sight-read or not. Like­wise, hand-writ­ing. Just dis­miss­ing it because it looks dif­fer­ent than what you’re used to is nei­ther a fair nor use­ful crit­i­cism.

As a gui­tar play­er, I can see one good thing about it: read­ing the bass clef. Dri­ves me nuts, on the rare occa­sions I have to do it.

I inher­it­ed my grandmother’s piano. She played beau­ti­ful­ly but I did not get her tal­ent. I love the sim­plic­i­ty of your method! I can now play sim­ple songs and hope to keep improv­ing. It allows the casu­al play­er (like me)a chance to enjoy play­ing the piano. I would like to see more songs using the hum­ming­bird method and would even lbe will­ing to pur­chase them. Are more pieces avail­able? (Oth­er than the 26 you offer free)