Who invented music notes

This was made of four lines. A method of notation that made it possible to show the length of each note was developed in the 13th and 14th centuries. Notes took new shapes and stems were added to some notes according to their length.

By the 's the notes had become round and musical notation began to look the way it does today. Who invented musical notes? Your reaction? Almost all other western music uses the same notation, which when you think about it is a remarkable feat. Cookie banner We use cookies and other tracking technologies to improve your browsing experience on our site, show personalized content and targeted ads, analyze site traffic, and understand where our audiences come from.

By choosing I Accept , you consent to our use of cookies and other tracking technologies. The Straight Dope homepage. Filed under:. Who invented musical notation? By Straight Dope Staff May 20, Reddit Pocket Flipboard Email. Then in the 17th century, note values started to look a bit rounder. Throughout the s, music notation continued to evolve according to the music of Renaissance and Baroque composers.

So when instrumental music overtook vocal music as the most popular genre, a change in music notation was needed. So, composers began to introduce barlines, dynamic markings and performance directions — like this one:. The s saw the invention of graphic scores , which combine art and music in a sort of musical map, giving the performer a guide — rather than strict instructions — on how to play the music.

As such, graphic scores have often been interpreted as a reaction against the highly detailed sheet music of the 20th century and 21st century. So, what will sheet music look like in the year ? The notation for such "untuned percussion" may use a different number of lines or just a single line to represent when a note is struck, and a range of different symbols to indicate in more detail how the note should be struck. The guitar is a very popular instrument today, and alternative forms of notation can be used for its music.

The simplist is a list of chord names with or without chord diagrams which indicate chords to be strummed, and guitar "Tablature" or Tabs uses numbers on a stave of 6 lines to indicate at which fret particular strings should be stopped. Guitar Tabs have descended from that of an earlier stringed instrument, the Lute. It is curious that guitar tabs look very similar to conventional notation, despite the fact that the lines in their stave have a completely different meaning. Some modern styles of music are so unusual that they need strange new forms of music to define them.

In fact some such musical pieces don't use notation at all, but consist of a set of instructions to be followed by the musician or musicians. Despite these alternative forms of notation, standard musical notation remains a cornerstone of Western music education. Musical notation is widely understood, many children have the opportunity to learn an instrument at school and the basics of musical notation. Even people who can't read music still recognise a range of symbols since they are ubiquitous in our culture.

Musical notes appear in cartoons and comics coming from the mouths of people or birds when they whistle or sing, and notes, clefs, sharps or flats appear frequently on Christmas cards and decorations, in company logos, on wrapping paper, T-shirts, mugs, pencils and all sorts of objects. Computers have revolutionised the way we do many things, and music is no exception. Just as word processors allow text to be entered, edited and printed, so music notation software such as Finale or Sibelius used on mfiles allows music notation to be entered, edited and printed.

Indeed the type-setting of music just like newspapers, magazines and books is generally done on computers today. Notation software makes many things easier, including the making of corrections in the middle of a piece, the extraction of parts from orchestral scores, the transposition of music between different instruments, changing the key of a piece and many other tasks that continued to be time-consuming even in the world of mass printing facilities. The power of software even allows music to be played using sampled instruments which give a good impression of what it would sound like with real instruments.

Other types of musical software use different ways to represent the underlying music. One method with a real life analogue is the "piano roll" representation. Piano rolls were originally rolls of stiff paper or card with holes punched in appropriate places to trigger the playing of a note by mechanical means, for example on a "player piano" or other instruments.

On a computer screen horizontal lines represent the different notes with the length of the line representing the duration of the note. Another method for representing music in a computer is called MIDI. This stands for "Musical Instrument Digital Interface" and was originally developed and still used to allow electronic instruments and devices to exchange information. Midi and its different extensions includes an ability to apply different effects to the music, typically electronic effects which were not available when musical notation was developed.

Nevertheless despite all these new developments if you want a musician to play some music, then the musician will generally expect you to use a form of musical notation to represent that music. While music notation has evolved considerably from its early beginnings it looks as though its foreseeable future is secure.

Here is a list of the music examples mentioned in this article, all converted to modern sheet music notation:. For two of the above examples we have videos comparing the original notation with modern music notation:.