How I'd redesign piano sheet music - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@alexcouch/how-i-d-redesign-piano-sheet-music-355c4f9012f1?source=tw-a086ba56b195-1435792847059?source=tw-504c7870fdb6-1428623404341 <comment><USER2> What happens if you rotate that first image 90° counter-clockwise? [http://i.imgur.com/i2V57On.png](http://i.imgur.com/i2V57On.png) You get a traditional sheet music with simpler graphics.

What about the new features?

      - Easily printable: traditional scores already are
      - Screen and scroll-friendly: you can stack traditional score pages vertically
      - Chord names: already exist on traditional scores
      - Lyrics: same thing
      - Foot pedal arrows: same thing

The only novelty here is to match a piano's physical _horizontal_ pitch range, which forces the time axis to be vertical instead.

I guess sheet music is like code: sometimes you just need to learn it the _hard_ way.

<comment><USER3> I challenge "easily printable." This way of writing sheet music is vastly more space inefficient. Each beat requires an entire row of space, whereas a beat in sheet music might require 3 square inches at most. Having many pages of sheet music, like in coding, makes it much harder to understand the song as a whole and navigate repeats.

I do like the fact that — unlike with sheet music - the 12 semi-tones are spaced evenly, as they are in reality. This allows for fast visual recognition of chord types and intervals.

<comment><USER4> As long as you're playing tonal music, chord types and intervals will be strongly associated with the 7 note names, not just the 12 semitones. A perfect fourth will always be the same size on the staff, for example.

If it's "spelled" differently -- if an interval of that size is actually written as C-E#, for example -- then that's a sign that something weird is going on and you're not supposed to think of this interval as a fourth.

The fact that we write music using the 7-note diatonic scale is kind of like compression: it optimizes notation for the notes and intervals you're most likely to play. It's just not suited for atonal music, much like compression is not suited for random-looking data.

<comment><USER5> I know little music theory, but I've been playing instruments "by ear" for a long time and it made many things easier to me when I learned that if you're using diatonic scale, it's very unlikely that you'll use notes outside of the scale; e.g. if you're playing a song in C Major, most of the time you'll play C and D, not C# or Db, so if you need that note, it's easier to switch than having an almost unused line in the sheet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm a bassist, of the "don't quit your day job" variety. Owing to the accident of having a certain musical background, I'm a fluent sight-reader, and the groups that I play in require this skill. I frequently encounter a mixture of standard notation (SN) and chord symbols, plus the occasional Nashville number chart.

From what I can tell, people have explored different notation systems for a couple of reasons. The first is that SN is an entry barrier for beginners. The second is to express musical ideas that don't fit within the bounds of SN.

But in my view, the reason why SN remains in use, is that there's a symbiosis between composers who can write it, and musicians who can sight-read, i.e., perform it directly from the sheet. Tabulature, or other pictographic notations don't work because the composers don't intimately know all of the instruments that they're writing for (including the variety of tuning and fingering systems for each instrument), and nobody knows how to sight-read those notations.

Another issue with any method involving computer graphics, is that there are still a surprising number of composers who use pencil and paper, because notation software is so cumbersome.

In one band that I'm in, the composer brings new material to each rehearsal. It's all written out by hand.

<comment><USER7> I agree. The value of SN is that it's _abstract_. It assumes a certain structure (the one that western music uses) and describes melody in terms of that structure. It doesn't concern itself with the actual sounds involved (eg. frequencies and durations) or the mechanics of producing them (eg. tablature).

SN is difficult for beginners because music is difficult for beginners. Notations that focus on the mechanics of the instrument are easier to start with, because they don't require any theoretical background in music. That's fine, but they won't be able to replace SN.

I'm very interested in this sort of cognitive technology, but I have yet to see a proposal for improving on SN in its own terms. Is there some notation out there that is simpler than SN, but just as expressive? Something that could be approachable for beginners, but still useful for experts?

<comment><USER6> One thing I'm familiar with, thanks to my kids, is the Suzuki method of violin instruction. Kids start out just playing by rote memorization, and by ear, with no charts. There were books for the Suzuki repertoire, more for the use of adults, as the kids didn't read from them.

When I was growing up, Suzuki was controversial in the US because teachers were afraid that kids would lose the chance to learn how to read, and be musically crippled for life. I have to admit that I was among the skeptical, since I learned according to the European method.

The first note that I ever played, an open string, I read from a book that had that one big note sitting there in front of me. The entire emphasis was on "getting the cats out of the instrument" as it were, but yet it was all done with reading from the git-go.

What's happened since then in the US (don't know about elsewhere) is that reading is introduced gradually through a separate curriculum. It's been going on for long enough that Suzuki kids are now playing professionally in orchestras, and we've met one or two "superstar" concert violinists through master classes for the kids, who have mentioned their Suzuki background.

So apparently you can start out without reading, and live to tell about it.

<comment><USER8> Well we all learn to talk well before we learn to read and write, so I guess it's not too farfetched.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Yes, musical notation is hard. But no, this is not an improvement.

While a lot of the problems of it comes from its limitations at the origin (think medieval musicians writing music) it is a very flexible and interesting format

What are the problems I see with it:

\- Apart from the center notes, it's hard to know which note is which. I know that the second line from the bottom is a G, beats me what's that thing 3 lines above the regular lines

\- It's hard to capture what's happening. Chords on top help

\- Having to identify notes in G clef, F clef (and C clef sometimes)

\- It's an absolute mess when you have lots of simultaneous notes

I know there are a lot of historical, instrumental or music-theoretical reasons things are like that, but there's room for improvement

I just wouldn't think of twinkle twinkle little star when designing it, I would think of something more complex (and Let It Be, props to him, is not very complex but also not very simple)

(And that's not touching the issues with the piano, that's another load of items)

<comment><USER10> It's clearly stated that the solution is meant to be like guitar tabs for piano. It's a limited, instrument-centered approach and not intended as a complete or universal solution.

<comment><USER11> Traditional sheet music is already like guitar tabs for piano, because pianos (unlike guitars) only have one physical place where you can play a given note (like middle C). The reason guitar tabs make some sense [0] for guitar music is that "middle C" on a guitar can be played on several different strings.

[0] I say "some sense," because tabs are still fairly limiting, particularly in depicting complex rhythms. Traditional sheet music is still very common (and, I contend, indispensable) for advanced guitar study.

<comment><USER12> Does it matter on which string the note is played, except to not get yourself into an unplayable position?

<comment><USER13> What baddox says is true, but I have to add that there is a noticeable difference in timbre between the same note played at two different places. So if you find yourself with the choice, you have to use your own judgment to decide which fingering you think sounds better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This has some things in common with what we did in designing the notation for keyboards in Rock Band 3 (see [https://images-na.ssl-images- amazon.com/images/G/01/videogam...](https://images-na.ssl-images- amazon.com/images/G/01/videogames/detail-page/rb3.KBD.ss.04.lg.jpg) for an example), where we had the same sort of concerns in mind.

This sort of "piano-roll" notation has the nice feature that the elements are easy in theory to parse: time goes along one axis, pitch goes along the other, and you just do what it tells you. As far as notation for Western music goes, it does have some disadvantages.

All twelve pitch classes are spaced equally, so the scalar structure of tonal music is harder to make out. I can tell just by glancing at a page of sheet music whether it is tonal or atonal, and I can't do that here. All the notes kind of look the same (though I'm sure this is true for someone who isn't fluent at Western notation trying to read sheet music!). One way we tried to ameliorate this in Rock Band was to color different groups of notes differently, so you had a lot of features to grab onto (e.g., the boundary between E and F is the boundary between blue and green).

Durations are completely visual, which is nice from a intuitive point of view but means that it's harder to parse the underlying pulse and rhythmic structure of the music. A grid might help here. (I was constantly insisting that the grid in Rock Band be made to be as helpful as possible.)

Anyway, it's a nice visualization of keyboard music, and I don't doubt that this is easier to understand for people who don't read music already. I wish he had chosen a less hyperbolic title, though.

</comment><comment><USER15> It's not really new as it's used in most MIDI software to represent chords over time [0], or in many music videogames [1]. I think this style might work for very simple music sheets, but would become way too confusing and imprecise for complex ones.

[0] [http://www.musicmasterworks.com/MMScShot.gif](http://www.musicmasterworks.com/MMScShot.gif)

[1] [http://i.ytimg.com/vi/rNg50UGkXfw/maxresdefault.jpg](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/rNg50UGkXfw/maxresdefault.jpg)

<comment><USER16> I think it was first made famous by Synthesia: [http://www.synthesiagame.com/](http://www.synthesiagame.com/)

<comment><USER17> No way. "Piano roll" UIs have been available inside of MIDI software for 20+ years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Does the author actually play piano? I didn't see him explicitly say it. I play violin, and reading sheet music was _never_ a limiting factor. It was not a challenge to learn, and you don't learn all the symbols in the beginning. As you get more proficient and read harder music, only then do you learn new symbols.

Maybe sheet music can be improved upon, but the real question is should it? Sheet music is easy enough to learn, and once you learn it, all music opens up to you.

<comment><USER19> I'm a violist, and I used to teach violin and piano. With stringed instruments, as you say, just making a sound and holding the instrument right are so difficult for beginners, reading music pales in comparison. Piano is unique-ish as an instrument that you can sit down at and start making a sound essentially right away. I found that for my beginner piano students, learning to read was probably the biggest challenge starting out. However, _not_ learning to read is even worse, as then you won't be able to learn music going forward.

And, all that being said, learning to read music is really not very difficult. There seem to be a lot of complaints from the HN crowd about music notation, but learning to read music is wayyy easier than learning a new programming language. Seriously, just get over it and learn the system that everybody else uses, and you will be able to play any piece in just about any repertoire on the planet.

<comment><USER6> In my view the hard thing is sight-reading. With programming, if it takes one person twice as long as another, to read or write a program, at worst their productivity will be a bit lower. Or maybe higher. ;-) If you can't read music at tempo, then there are certain kinds of work that you can't do at all.

Granted, sight-reading skill is a matter of degree. I can read a jazz band gig, but would struggle with complex modern orchestral music. In musical styles that I'm familiar with, I can often make a good enough guess about what's next, that I only have to focus my attention on the dangerous bits. My attention often wanders away from the page.

I used to think that sight-reading was something that had to be learned, starting at an early age. I don't know if I still believe that, but I know that most adults who attempt to learn, find it to be prohibitive. This is one reason why it would be great to find an alternative. Even a piano with keys that light up.

<comment><USER20> As someone with an occasional passing interest in playing the piano, Synthesia has been great for me when it comes to learning songs. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WolqGAgiolM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WolqGAgiolM)

Of course, it is not exactly a substitute for sheet music, but it is eminently readable to the novice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Computer scientists of all people should understand why standard notation is used. It's a high-level symbolic language that allows for music to be ported across instruments and for the communication between musicians. Low-level markups such as tablature are akin to assembly and machine code. They cut out the work of the compiler at the expense of portability and higher level reasoning (such as key signatures). In this analogy, the musician is a dynamic compiler of musical notation into the physical actuations required by the instrument. Tablatures remove most of the work of compilation by depicting a more direct relationship to the physical playing of the instrument, and for this reason they are less cognitively demanding. But if one wants to be a musician, rather than a player of an instrument, I recommend sticking to a symbolic language such as standard notation. It's hard to imagine a composer writing a symphony in dozens of unique machine codes.

</comment><comment><USER22> I really love this. When I was young, I was really excited to learn to play the piano. The biggest problem I had was being able to read the sheet music. It was incredibly difficult for me to read and understand the notes for both hands at the same time. A big part of this was that when individual notes were off the normal staff (e.g., C is below the staff), you either had to have an innate sense of how far from the staff it was and what note that corresponded to, or you had to stop playing and count to see which note it was. This seems to solve all of those problems.

<comment><USER23> So does a deck of flash cards. If you learned multiplication tables you can learn to read music. And if you can play video games you can play piano.

And it's NEVER too late to learn.

<comment><USER8> I suppose one could also say "if you can learn to sight-read a novel you can learn to sight-read music" and it might be true but I think there is a certain natural ability prerequisite. I played in school concert bands for four years and could never manage to sight-read anything very complicated. Practicing was a chore and when we got new music I always had to sit and pick through it very slowly measure-by-measure until I figured out how it was supposed to sound. Once I knew that, I could "read" the music but I could never play a new piece on first sight. I knew all the notation but I could not look at a new piece of music and "hear" it in my head.. It felt more like trying to read a book letter by letter. I never was able to really see "words" and "sentences". By the time I quit I really just hated everything about it.

I also had tremendous difficulty learning basic addition, subtraction, and multiplication facts compared to most of my friends. And I don't play video games.

I do enjoy listening to music quite a bit, but I think I am a person who doesn't have an ability to play it.

<comment><USER12> Are you dyslexic as well, or does it only happen with music?

<comment><USER8> Not in the usual sense. If there is such a think as numeric dyslexia I might have that to some degree. I frequently transpose digits. I have trained myself to be very careful whenever I have to transcribe a number, fill out forms, or even dial a phone number. I find it helps to look at numbers in groups (pairs or triplets) rather than individually. I don't recall every trying that with music...

But I don't have any difficulty with reading text, and enjoyed reading a lot as a kid so in that sense I am not dyslexic.

<comment><USER24> There's [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyscalculia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyscalculia)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The traditional notation system has lasted so long for a reason. It's super difficult to figure out how long notes are meant to last with this notation system. It also takes up a lot more space than normal music notation. Moreover, it looks really difficult to write because of how note durations are represented.

<comment><USER26> "[The] target user is probably learning easy, contemporary songs, and already knows what they sound like before they learn them."

Leaving out exact note durations is intentional, and probably the main reason why it's so easy to read. The shaded tails from notes just have to evoke what's already in your head.

<comment><USER27> The problem there is that 90% of people have the lengths of notes in their head _wrong_. Sure, if you ask them to hum a song, they'll produce something that sounds rhythmically passable, but it's a far cry from being correct.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Just wanted to leave this here, for people who get off on alternate music notation...

An amazing collection of functional/beautiful/arty alt music notation can be found in "Notations 21", edited by Theresa Sauer. One score per page, all wildly different in their approach to encoding music. Just wow.

This video has some images from the book:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8F2Dv27CSuI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8F2Dv27CSuI)

</comment><comment><USER29> A bit of a click-bait title, don't you think? Maybe "How I'd redesign piano sheet music _for beginners_."

This is basically just tablature for piano. Great for simple pieces, unweidly for anything more. Can you imagine notating Fur Elise with this? That's a fairly cmomon beginner/intermediate piece. Or etudes? Or any excercise that develops techincal proficiency?

Maybe it has a place, but like tab or lead sheets it is not a replacement for sheet music.

<comment><USER30> I play guitar and find having both sheet music and tablature together useful. Sheet Music has an incomparable amount of timing information and other nuances, and tablature has the fingering positions you can sight read effortlessly once you've got the piece down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I am on board with the goals of the article, and I've actually been working on an iOS app to pick away at this problem[1] (albeit in a different way — mine is more fluid and is intended to be used interactively, not to be printed). Sheet music is a great format to represent classical music, but the fact that it doesn't allow you to easily notate one of the most common elements of modern music — syncopation — points to the fact that it's out of date for today's needs by about a century. Modern music does not fit into a rigid meter. It goes off-beat; features arbitrary note lengths and overlapping meters; pitch bends without a second thought; ties performance and production together with the notation. If you want to write down popular music on staff paper, you'll be using a _lot_ of awkward dotted notes and rests.

In my app, I figured I'd try to distill written music down to its basic elements — pitch and time — and allow users to draw on notes arbitrarily, with the equal temperament pitch grid as a guide and pitch/time snapping available as an option. (As an aside: the pitch axis is basically a logarithmic graph of tone frequnency — cents from A440. Because of this, I can swap out the equal temperament scale with basically any arbitrary scale. I've implemented *.scl file import and have been playing around with odd non-equal tunings from huygens-fokker.org's archive[2], though I don't know if this will end up in the final user-facing product.)

[1]: Early demo video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ra8OvnoxKQw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ra8OvnoxKQw)

[2]: [http://www.huygens-fokker.org/docs/scales.zip](http://www.huygens- fokker.org/docs/scales.zip)

</comment><comment><USER32> This idea isn't entirely new (is anything?); for an earlier version, check out Klavarskribo: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klavarskribo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klavarskribo). It didn't really take hold, because it's much more inefficient than normal notation.

<comment><USER33> I spent a long time Googling before finding this, only to see that it had already been posted. When I was in college I went on a tour of the Netherlands with my school's choir. We sang in a number of Protestant and Reformed churches and I remembered one of the music students pointed out a hymnal, still used by a congregation in Friesland, that used this particular notation system.

Someone else suggested that this was a notation with which they were familiar, from an old hymnal of the (U.S.) denomination affiliated with the college I attended. I had assumed it to be quite an old system as the hymnal appeared quite antiquated. Still, it doesn't surprise me that it (only?) dates to the 1930s, nor that there would still be churches using it. Many old Reformed churches have short institutional memories but nonetheless cling to assumed traditions. That, and the Frisians are, stereotypically, an old, stubborn people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> The first issue that I see with this notation is that you loose information compared to standard notation. For example, a half note contains the information of how long it will last along with the note itself. This information is given to you when your eye hits the note at which point you can stop looking at it. In this notation, you either have to continue seeing the note for the length or memorize the lengths of different notes which would require you to "zoom out" much farther.

IMO, an experienced sight reader would have more difficulty sight reading more complicated music using this notation.

<comment><USER35> This is intended as a 'piano tab'. If you can sight read, you already have music. Those of us who don't know how to read music would benefit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Sheet music evolved when it would be difficult to produce a different representation for each instrument. Now this can be automated it makes a lot of sense to produce specialised formats, such as tab for guitar or this for keyboard. As a novice keyboard player I'd certainly prefer to use this than sheet music. Having said that there are advantages in sheet music that a professional musician would find lacking here. There's no rhythmic grouping (the beams provide this cue) and I'm sure there are many others that I'm unaware of.

<comment><USER37> Yeah, this only makes sense if you already know the song. trying to infer the correct timing spatially would be difficult.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Here are some shortcomings I thought of immediately.

\- Traditional notation is instrument-agnostic.

\- It may be easily printable, but a staff is easily _writable_. With just a pen and a ruler, I can produce a neat staff in ~10 seconds. The ruler is optional if I don't care about prettiness. With this, you more or less have to print it: getting the spacing right by hand would be quite difficult.

\- I have mixed feelings about the the traditional representation of key. Missing a sharp or flat in an unfamiliar key is probably my most common error when reading sheet music. OTOH, The traditional notation _tells_ me which sharps and flats to use. With this system, I have to already know the structure of C# major if I want to noodle around (always). This would seem to be more hostile to beginners.

\- The precision issue has already been brought up many times, but I would add that all the lost information is an archival disaster. It might seem superfluous since we have recordings, but given the rate of change in technology, access to data in old formats is by no means a certainty. Since this notation basically requires you to have heard the song in order to play it, it would become incomprehensible pretty quickly.

It seems to me that most of the complexity of musical notation reflects the "essential" complexity of actually playing the music. For example, consider key: even at the level of simple rock songs, a basic grasp of "key" is absolutely essential, and if you're playing a piano, this means you have to know which sharps and flats to use. If this seems pedantic, consider that the main difficulty of learning to play a piece is dexterity. It's going to take a bit of effort just to make your fingers hit the damn keys. Since this effort has to take place anyway, the little bit of extra effort to learn notation doesn't seem like much to ask. Besides, the amount of notation required to play pop songs is relatively small - that rendition of "Let it Be" contains about 10 symbols, most of which are related.

This isn't to say that traditional notation is perfect, or even good. It is rather baroque, and I'm open to a "redesign," as long as it really solves the problem. This redesign isn't useless, but its scope of usefulness seems so limited that I'm not really sure it's worth it.

</comment><comment> sean-duffy This isn't redesigning piano sheet music, this is just creating a piano tablature. That's great and all, but this has existed for a long time, it's similar to how Synthesia[1] represents piano notes. The fact that the timing can't be easily read from it means that like guitar tabs, it can't be a replacement for traditional sheet music. There's a good reason sheet music has been around for so long, it makes sense and is versatile, it doesn't pertain to any particular instrument, and I don't think it's going away any time soon.

[1] [http://www.synthesiagame.com](http://www.synthesiagame.com)

</comment><comment><USER39> I've been playing the piano since I was a kid and found it very difficult to learn to read sheet music. There was a period for maybe 3 months where I was fluent in reading after 3-4 years of study but then took some time off and lost the ability.

I think very visually and find watching someone play a song on youtube infinitely easier than trying to learn with the equivalent sheet music. I really feel like this comes down to a left brain/right brain thing but I'm not sure how true that generalization is.

Are more visual approaches like youtube tutorials or this redesigned sheet music the way of the future? I wonder if it might it be detrimental to take this approach from the start?

</comment><comment><USER40> By pure chance I had just sat down at a piano, trying to figure out my old music sheets that I had managed to play, with lots of stress and never well in any sense of the word, 10 years ago. (My piano lessons got me to "Fröhlicher Landmann", before my teacher and I gave up.) Now I struggled with the most basic lessons and contemplated about the inefficiencies of the notation.

I gave up, somewhat frustrated, and then saw this post. Here is my experience:

\- The top to bottom timescale is easy to get use to and makes sense, given that you need a wide space just to fit all the keys. I placed my iPad on the piano in horizontal mode and could well imagine an app that scrolls the sheet for me, for time progression. Edit: Sorry, I was so excited about the article, I did not even see that it goes on after the notes, where the author talks about this.

\- With the standard sheet music, because decoding was so inefficient, I would first figure out the keys and then try to memorize the finger pattern as quickly as possible, so that I don't have to decode the notes again. With the new notation I got lazy and kept my eyes on the sheet for the whole time, which actually slowed me down. I had to remind myself to memorize more. Just something to get used to, I guess.

\- The notation does not give an exact rhythm, which I actually loved. If you've ever heard the song, you quickly figure out what the rhythm is supposed to be. The minimal rhythm notation is great, because it's not in the way of the notes.

I had a lot of fun learning the start of this song, and I would love to see more. I always wanted to learn some Beatles songs, and the sheet music that my mother bought so many years ago was always too complex to be fun. With this notation, songs like that are a lot more approachable. I don't think it makes sense for classical music, where the timing is not as obvious, but for pop and folk songs, or playing along to Studentenlieder ("im schwarzen Walfisch zu Askalon", anyone?), it seems like a great choice.

One minor sugestion to the original author: It would be great if the grey lines that correspond to the black keys would be bolder and darker. I had trouble seeing them, but I don't have the best eyesight...

</comment><comment><USER41> I love the idea of trying to come up with a better way of notating music to make it more accessible. That's a great idea.

However, I'm skeptical that this is it. First, looking at the 2 notations of "Let it Be," we can see that the new notation does not convey the same data, or even a simplified version of it. It's a different version of it. I find that odd.

Second, I don't think learning music notation is very difficult. I learned to read treble and bass clef when I was 5 years old. It was much harder trying to make my fingers press the right keys at the right time than memorizing which circle on which line matched with which key or note.

Looking at this, I'm reminded of Laban notation ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laban_Movement_Analysis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laban_Movement_Analysis)) and Benesh Notation ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benesh_Movement_Notation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benesh_Movement_Notation)) for notating dance. Both are very complicated and essentially never used by the people who actually do the dancing. Furthermore, I'm told that Benesh, for example, allows a notator to add written (human-language) notes below the staff to convey additional information. In other words, they know it doesn't convey everything it's supposed to.

So what do dancers do? They learn from video. They watch the masters who went before them directly performing the movement. Frankly, I think it would be great to see something similar for music. Having a video of someone playing a keyboard from above, possibly with a graphical overlay showing the notes pressed would be way better (in my opinion). (Which isn't to say it's without issues - far more bandwidth, video codecs, playback hardware, etc.)

<comment><USER42> I have always wondered how dance/ballet is recorded, and I'm not surprised it comes down to video. But music is more limited data I think, an opinion supported by the fact that sheet music exists and sheet dance is still questionable.

There's a passage in a piano piece I'm having trouble with and I tried watching videos of pros on youtube to figure out how to play it. It was frustrating and almost useless. The video goes by too fast. Granted, I was looking for technical details, not notes, but I think notes would be almost as hard.

E.g. Can you tell what notes are being played in the video below?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8IHzqVKugE&t=35](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8IHzqVKugE&t=35)

Here's another fun one to try:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpXqdBKSSFo&t=4m51s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpXqdBKSSFo&t=4m51s)

<comment><USER12> You can slow down youtube videos in the gear menu and it still can't be seen. I suppose you would need 60fps to see that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I think this a cool idea. I think piano needs its own version of the guitar tab to be more approachable. For someone who knows the basics, just seeing the chords goes a long way. But this gives better detail.

One thing it glosses over is how the format responds to greater range. It acknowledges the fact that only 3 of piano's ~7 octaves are shown, but it doesn't address how much difficult it would be to read if there were notes in both the C2 octave and C6 octave at the same time. It gets much more difficult to line up the timing in that case because your eyes would be scanning frantically every note.

In traditional sheet music, notes played at the same time are never more than an inch or two apart. Will this format support sheet music's equivalent of 8va to keep notes properly within visual range?

<comment><USER44> > I think piano needs its own version of the guitar tab to be more > approachable

But then you end up with the same problem you get on guitar: beginners use tab as a crutch and don't develop skills as readily as they should once they're over the beginner hump.

<comment><USER45> This is the hardest part of learning and teaching music. On one hand, it's hard to stay motivated when you're mangling Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, but almost any shortcut you take in this stage will retard your growth later...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I don't want to diminish the author's effort here, but this system feels like it would have difficulty beyond basic cases. And, in the most basic cases, it doesn't offer much more than simply calling out the chords over the lyrics.

It does lead me to think that a simple piano roll layout, like the ones found in Logic and other digital audio workstations, would be useful for those of us who are terrible at sight reading music.

</comment><comment><USER47> The only people who waste time trying to reinvent the wheel are those who never use a wheel.

This is silly. Standard notation isn't absolutely perfect but it's pretty darn good. If a symphony can come out of dozens of musicians consistently by using standard notation I think we are OK.

I think the problem often has to do with not wanting to put in the time to master not only the notation and the instrument but also the hours and hours of work required to crate the synaptic connections necessary to read and play without thinking.

It's like complaining about vim because it is hard to learn. The problem isn't vim, the problem is the person who doesn't want to do the work.

</comment><comment><USER48> Reminds me a bit about how Mark Twain would redesign English spelling. Once you've read sheet music for a while and played it you don't really see it any more, you hear it in your head and you play it. I'm sure there are many different ways you could write it but they all suffer from the same challenge, which is is first training your brain to read it.

Given the amount of information on a page though, you would have to at least match that, otherwise you spend to much time flipping pages and not as much time playing.

<comment><USER49> The article says that the notation is for beginners.

I am surprised all the JavaScript programmers on HN are so opposed to an accessible notation for beginners.

<comment><USER48> I realize you're trolling but you might consider that thought a bit more carefully. In particular 'notation for beginners' is simply one instance of "<x> for beginners" which, doesn't scale to "non beginners". I have had a lot of UI's foisted upon me with the admonition "Its really easy for beginners to come up to speed!" and often it is, but as they get up to speed their ability becomes hampered by the design which doesn't support "non beginners".

It isn't surprising, the first time anyone tries to master something a bit more complicated their initial thought is "this is soo confusing! Why doesn't someone design something easier to learn!" and for the motivated ones they may follow through.

The problem is then that they have mastered their "easy" thing and now their trying to do more complex things, or in this case describe more complex music, and wham, suddenly they just can't seem to make it work. But had they actually mastered music notation _first_ they would have mastered a system that has successfully expressed a wide variety of music, styles, and levels of complexity. So they wouldn't end up stopping in the middle of their "progression" to go back and learn a new system because their old system pooped out on them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> very nice! my 2c for improving notation are more evolutionary. i see two main issues with sight reading:

1\. treble/bass clefs are not consistent: one is EGBDF, the other GBDFA. eg instead of the third line _always_ being a B, it's a B in one & a D in the other!

2\. having to remember sharps & flats. ie, despite the note being F, you have to remember that it's not really an F, but in this case an F# or Fb.

the proposal:

1\. make the clefs consistent: make them both 6 lines, and both EGDBFA. this means adding an E to bass at the bottom, and an A to the treble on the top. now a student has to remember only one format and note positions are consistent. the third note is always a B regardless of the treble or bass clef.

2\. to resolve flat/sharp issue, especially for complex keys with many sharps/flats, use the note's head shape to distinguish. ie, instead of just an oval head to represent a note's pitch, use for example a round note head for a normal G, a square note head for G# and a triangle note head for Gb. that way no matter what the key, your eye can easy and immediately recognize that that G is not in fact a G, but a G# or Gb. after all we already use note shape (solid/hollowness) to indicate duration. why not go a step further and make realtime parsing easier by making the notehead shape indicate sharp/flatness?

<comment><USER51> Oh, and there's already a notation within the standard system for your first proposal: a treble clef with "8vb" written below it.

<comment><USER52> Someone else mentioned adding another line atop the treble clef and then using the 6-line staff for both clefs. I like this idea because it maintains the one-line gap between the staves and also somewhat reduces the need for ledger lines, which drive me a bit mad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Compared to normal sheet music, this system mostly deletes cues. In normal sheet music, you have both the shape of the note and its rough position horizontally on the page as cues about the rhythm. Measure lines are removed in this system, which is a pure loss of readability, like removing periods and commas from English and replacing them with extra spaces (while saying you are trying to aid beginners, who may be still learning what a sentence is!). In normal sheet music, a note is either on a pitch line, or between two lines, where as in this new notation, a note may be on the left half or the right half of a space between two lines. It's just visually more difficult to parse.

The octaves are seemingly delimited by solid black lines, but these lines actually represent the note C#, counterintuitively. My feedback there is that you've been staring at this too long if you think it immediately resembles a piano keyboard. Make it look more like a piano keyboard if you want it to be more readable than sheet music for beginners.

Make the example of your notation match the example of traditional notation. There should be three notes in the right hand at the beginning of Let It Be.

</comment><comment><USER54> _It looks like a keyboard doesn 't it_

Not really.

<comment><USER29> Yeah, I couldn't see it until the graphic of it next to the piano.

<comment><USER55> The graphic overlaid on the piano keys was much easier to read - as easy as guitar tabs. Why didn't he just do it all that way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Having learnt standard notation one can easily read music composed for any instrument, and even compositions from a different musical culture (e.g. makam), whereas with this system one's limited to western-music piano pieces. Besides, standard notation is not hard to learn, in fact it's only as hard as learning the alphabet, which kids do in the school, and I'm yet to see someone coming up saying, hey this alphabet is too hard, better kids explain themselves with pictogrammes and emoji, which convey the ideas more directly and easier to recognise.

</comment><comment><USER57> Is this really necessary?

When I took piano lessons as a kid, I never had a hard time reading the music. It looks really complicated knowing nothing and jumping straight to Beethoven, but realistically, you'll learn to read sheet music a lot faster than you'll learn to actually play it.

I only took lessons for a few years, but by the end I was able to read sheet music that I had no hope of actually playing.

And then there's hundreds of years of music using the existing notation, so anybody serious about music will inevitably end up learning the old notation anyway.

</comment><comment><USER45> Disclosure - this is a local startup and though I don't know the founder (or founders, I don't even know) I did fall in love with this app at an open house a few years ago. I am always biased in favour of entrepreneurs, but I double down on local entrepreneurs.

Disclosure 2 - I'm generally a horrible musician, but when I was very young, my Grandma Yvette taught me to play the fiddle before the Suzuki program tried to save me and show me the violin. French Canadian fiddle music is all about patterns and so it's possible that that shaped my brain to look at music and its theory as a set of patterns.

However, those aside, I wonder about a tool like Musix (or Musix Pro) for notation. Within about five minutes of playing with the app, I felt like I had absorbed more real, practical music theory than in my years of formal instruction. Entire melodies started to make intuitive sense to me.

I wonder if a tool like Musix could be useful as a notation tool?? It still makes timing difficult to express and it would likely completely break with more complex pieces so I can't picture it seeing much uptake amongst highly experienced musicians, but I feel that if I had been exposed to an isomorphic notation at a young age, I'd be a significantly better musician today.

Anyone with more experience care to weigh in??

<comment><USER23> Back when Electronic Arts made tools for electronic artists, there was a great program called Deluxe Music Construction Set. I've heard similar versions of your story from people who experimented with that software. Clicking notes on a staff, seeing things light up on a piano keyboard. Some people prefer to learn like this, and some people did.

Professional notation software is an utter shit show. Microsoft Surface 3 launched with an interesting touch screen notation program in their promos. Stuff is out there, though notation isn't as popular (or nearly as well done, or as immediately rewarding) as some of the other apps like Ableton Live.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> I want to say that it's really exciting to see something TAB-like for piano. Something to ease the learning curve into instruments other than guitar I think are in dire need. I hope more instruments can get this kind of easy-to- learn-notation.

I hope this doesn't entirely replace staff notation. The reason for this is because of its connection to music theory. Once I got to a certain level with the violin, I didn't have to think about how notes mapped to the violin physically, but was able to think more in terms of music theory (or at least it was rather easy to switch between the two). This opens up an entire world if you start tinkering with improvisation and gives you a common language with other musicians.

I think staff notation is also quite amazing because it represents music in such a way that it can be easily understood by musicians of many, many instruments at a glance. Imagine writing a symphony of however many instruments in different kinds of notation, or being the conductor who has to read it all simultaneously...

All that being said, I could totally imagine a world where a huge percentage of musicians (especially amateurs) learn only these easily readable musical languages, while people who want to dive deeper learn staff.

</comment><comment><USER59> I like playing the piano because the staves correspond more or less directly to the physical layout of the keyboard. If you flip a score 90 degrees, you end up with this, with the notes laid out over the keys. Compared to almost all other instruments pianos are ideally suited to sheet music. Manuscript notation is also (necessarily) very information dense.

It's an interesting approach; there are apps that will do something similar to this. They're very much like guitar hero. Some of the newer electric pianos will even illuminate the keys in the correct order.

I think one of the reasons that guitarists use tablature is that using sheet music notation for the guitar is more difficult to learn (at least to me). I've struggled with the guitar because I haven't put in the time to get my head around translating between manuscript and which strings/frets I need to be using. Violinists don't seem to have the same problem, but perhaps that's because most violinists are classically trained whereas most guitarists aren't?

<comment><USER60> guitar is also difficult because the same note can be played in as many as 5 different places. sometimes its hard to tell which string to actually play it on, since a choice has fingering and possibly picking ramifications later.

<comment><USER61> How many guitarists (and I'm thinking classical or, perhaps, jazz guitarists) can just sit down and sight-read a piece? I suspect part of the craft is learning a piece, and learning the most efficient fingerings/patterns for the piece.

<comment><USER30> I've been in guitar orchestras, what we do is annotate our sheet music with optimal finger positions as we work through the piece. Especially for long pieces you can't necessarily keep in your head, this helps with sigh-reading tremendously since the positions are written in the sheet music.

Some sheet music for guitar also has note-level annotations for string number and finger positions, which does the above for the guitarist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> Not bad, kind of guitar-hero like. I like that the key and key changes could be very clear. It's also nice that new musicians wouldn't have to memorize certain keys, since an F# when playing in G major could just be printed on the line.

It is also much easier to see intervals. A minor 6th for example would always be a certain number of lines/spaces away, no matter the key. Octaves are obviously also easy to recognize.

I think a couple things are confusing and not as clear as they need to be past the beginner level. For example dotted notes. Counting something like dotted 8th notes or recognizing a dotted note would be hard. You can see a similar confusing rhythm in Linus and Lucy, where the 8th note at the end of each measure is held into beginning of the next measure.

It's pretty neat and a unique project. Pretty cool and I could actually see it being used in for things like Elementary School Music class.

</comment><comment><USER63> Vertical orientation of sheet music looks very much like a music Tracker. [1]

I've recently been learning a tracker program called Renoise [2], and the vertical orientation is a very nice change compared to other DAWs I've used (Reaper, GarageBand, Logic Studio).

Reading sheet music has always been a huge chore for me, so I generally seek out guitar tabs instead when it's possible. Vertical sheet music without the staves would be amazing for people who know music theory but never had the need to learn sheet music like myself.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_tracker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_tracker)

[2] [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/da/Renoise_...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/da/Renoise_2.6.png)

</comment><comment><USER64> This is a neat idea, and I can see a place for a different notation for all instruments to make music easier to read for them. However, of course, this means that music for one instrument is not readable for another, this is no universal system. If perhaps this were also tied to a universal ur-system which ties together the formats for all instruments in a way whereby someone who knows one format can read other instruments' musical notation, either by reading an abstracted central version, or have an automagic system for transcribing the musics to their familiar notation, then this might be the sort of thing to be useful. However, for general musical use, a universal system is likely to be nevessary for musicians, because it makes it much easier to read anything that's lying around.

</comment><comment><USER65> The best use I can imagine for this is as a progressive tool to learn traditional sheet music. You start with this (simple stuff, maybe even add the finger-numbers onto the dots so one knows which finger hits which key) and make it harder step by step. Introduce pedaling, remove the numbers on the dots or replace them with their note (first by letter, later by graphical representations on traditional sheets), before you gradually transform it into traditional sheet music. Last step would probably the switch from horizontal to vertical but at this point you will have the notes down and it should make it easier to transfer from notes to keys.

</comment><comment><USER66> Interesting. Reminds me of the Synthesia game [1], which is like a Guitar Hero for the piano but where you can actually learn to play the real instrument, and not some plastic controller.

I still prefer the Hummingbird notation [2] though. Instead of this, it improves the classical musical notation without creating an entirely new notation. It's relatively easy to go from hummingbird to classical notation and vice-versa.

[1] [http://www.synthesiagame.com/](http://www.synthesiagame.com/)

[2] [http://www.hummingbirdnotation.com/](http://www.hummingbirdnotation.com/)

</comment><comment><USER67> This is a very interesting subject. At least for me, as it draws on two of my passions: HCI/UX/usability and, well, music.

I think this kind of approach is _defined_ essentially by a closer mapping between the sheet and the physical world (which is, according to usability tenets, something good). So, under this "definition", we can consider other approaches which are very popular and indeed work: guitar tabs and "Guitar Hero"-like games.

In the wise words of Thom Yorke, "anyone can play guitar", and I think this is - nowadays - mostly due to guitar tabs. Tabs make it very easy to step into guitar playing. So, I think, it's not a surprise that these approaches are so popular, as they have a easier learning curve for beginners, which is in itself also not a surprise if we consider the usability principle of close mapping with the real world. Traditional music notation just has more layers of translation, so to speak.

So, what are the drawbacks of this? I can think of three, which might explain why these approaches aren't promptly adopted by traditional music education:

1) As this is, essentially, a closer mapping to the physical world, said mapping has to be "done" to a specific instrument. An alternative notation such as this one or guitar tabs wouldn't be very helpful for, e.g., wind instruments. So, with this we would create specific "languages". Arguably, having musicians understand an universal language is a good thing - I'm no piano player, but I can read a piano sheet;

2) Repertoire, generally. The amount of music written in traditional notation is just huge, the inertia to start writing stuff with a different notation would be a problem;

3) Dynamics: I think these approaches overlook dynamics. It's not only about what and how long you play, it also about _how_ you play it. For wind instruments, e.g., the dynamics can get quite complex - if a pianist has to read 5 notes, a flute player has to read one but with 5 dynamics annotations. This is, however, somewhat addressed in guitar tabs, as there are quite excellent tabs with not only dynamics annotations but also instrument-specific techniques. Maybe, in this approach, circle sizing could be used to communicate velocity?

</comment><comment><USER68> How I'd redesign a piano, is with the black keys equal in color and shape to the white keys. That way, transposing a song by a semitone is equivalent to shifting your hands by one key. Much more natural.

I think they call an instrument with this property "chromatic", but I'm not sure.

Actually, perhaps somebody can explain why the black keys were invented. Because their existence makes little sense to me. For example, a guitar is a chromatic instrument, and can be played perfectly fine without any difference between "black" and "white" notes.

<comment><USER69> You have to ask yourself what should feel more natural: transposing songs or actually playing them. I don't know much about why the piano was designed like this, but I can see your idea wouldn't be useful:

\- Black keys are a reference. Either by touching them or by looking at them, you can always know where you are. Not so easy with all the keys being the same. \- The size of the keyboard is more or less adapted to our hand size. The distance between whole tones is similar to the distance between our fingers. A fifth is as wide as my hand, and I can play an octave without much effort. Making all the notes the same shape would change that and those common intervals would be more difficult to play. \- Our hand is not flat. The fact that some notes are higher than others makes playing more comfortable. \- Range. Same-shaped notes would occupy more space (unless you make them smaller than white notes, which would be uncomfortable) so either you get way bigger pianos (as if they were small) or pianos with less range.

There are probably more reasons why the black keys are there, these are just top off my head.

<comment><USER68> Thanks for your explanation.

I think there is another advantage (to merely having the white keys) besides just transposing being easier. And this is that the same intervals will always have the same spacing on the keyboard. I guess this should be my main argument for this type of layout being more natural.

<comment><USER69> Yes, they would be the same spacing, but that spacing would be extremely uncomfortable and lots of pieces would become impossible to play. Making the black keys the same size as the white keys, a 8th would become a 13th. I don't have small hands and I can barely reach a 11th interval. Basically, a lot of simultaneous notes could no longer be played. A solution would be to make the keys smaller, but then you wouldn't be able to play semitones because your fingers wouldn't fit comfortably. To fix that, you could raise some keys, so basically you would end up with the current setup.

<comment><USER68> Good points. But I really don't understand why the keys need to be that big. People are used to typing on smartphones, where the sensitive area of a key is like 30% of the width of a finger. Of course, making them that small would be a little extreme, but I think piano keys could be much slimmer.

<comment><USER70> Have you seen anyone try to type on a smartphone? Slow, and riddled with typos. Keep piano keys the width they are, unless you want slow, error prone pianists.

Besides, we already have the ideal chromatic keyboard layout:

[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=hexagonal+music+controller&t=lm&ia...](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=hexagonal+music+controller&t=lm&ia=images&iai=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.c-thru- music.com%2Fimages%2Faxis64-01.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> I don't understand why insist in "little dots" notation in music if you plan to redesign how it's written. There are common patterns in music that standard notation does not take into account, e.g. a chord is much easier to read and recognize by its name rather than figuring out the dots. There are many more rules that would allow such groupings of notes in a way that's much faster and easier perform. Why not take that approach and make it as easy as reading texts?

<comment><USER72> You lose a lot of information that way, e.g. voicing/inversions. Also, reading text names get a lot more cumbersome when you need stuff like "Ab half dimished +9".

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> I like the idea but one big flaw is eye-movement.

With traditional sheet music, you can see all the notes you need to play clearly in one place.

With this one, if your left hand is playing in lower octaves, and right hand playing in higher octaves, your eyes will have to move around a lot just to know which keys to push. This is in addition to moving your eyes around the actual keyboard to make sure you're hitting the right keys.

However, I do like the simplicity of using this system to learn a fairly basic song.

</comment><comment><USER74> So traditional Sheet Music and hence, notation is akin to C or Perl's verbose and/or messy syntax...the problem is, it's not just about the Notes with Music: there's a lot more in terms of dynamics and the like going on which notation has evolved over thousands of years to support.

Interesting read though. For something not so 'serious' (e.g. not a Concert piece), it could definitely make the correlation easier.

</comment><comment><USER75> The funny thing about talking of tabs for piano, is that sheet music is already that. By representing music on a diatonic staff, with a key signature, it's shown in a perfect format to translate it to keys on the piano, at the expense of some other kinds of instruments, vocals, and general understanding of the music, where it would be more helpful to see the music on a chromatic staff.

</comment><comment><USER76> Just call it piano tab. It's fine for chords and pop songs. There's no way it's going to work for complicated music. I love the project though. It's a fantastic job, I hate to be negative. You did a ton of thinking on this.

For pop music, fake books are easier. That's how you play pop music.

</comment><comment><USER77> Those are great, I could start reading those immediately for piano. I think it would be more enticing for newcomers to learn this "Guitar Hero sheet music" than traditional sheet music.

Just imagine if Guitar Hero had been done with traditional sheet music. I don't think it ever would have taken off.

</comment><comment><USER78> An interesting fact is that Jean Jaques Rousseau also came up with another method, arguably similar to this one. details at [http://normanschmidt.net/rousseaumusicpad/](http://normanschmidt.net/rousseaumusicpad/)

</comment><comment><USER79> This looks pretty much like piano roll to me, used in just about every midi software.

I'd use it though, even though I can read music I like to use tabs for guitar. This would be nice for me since I don't play piano, but would like to play a simple tune once in a while.

</comment><comment><USER80> Isn't C the first key of each group? If so, his black lines appear to be on the wrong side.

</comment><comment><USER81> [https://medium.com/@sampaio96/why-you-shouldn-t-think- about-...](https://medium.com/@sampaio96/why-you-shouldn-t-think-about- redesigning-piano-sheet-music-dc42ff1b7e62)

</comment><comment><USER82> I really like this. I used to play piano, and I just hated reading sheet music. This seems to much more simple.

I don't think it'd work well in paper/book form, but on a scrolling screen I think it'd be a great learning aid.

</comment><comment><USER83> this is the second redesign of sheet music I've seen in the past few years. I applaud every attempt, because it forces us to reconsider what we already know. however, as an amateur musician for the past 30 years, it's worth considering how great of an interface "normal" sheet music actually is. The same clefs and staffs are used for every instrument, so you don't have the compatibility issues that this piano sheet music would have. The only sheet music I personally can't sight read is for the cello, which uses a different clef.

</comment><comment><USER84> Those old saloon barrell piano didn't exactly sound like Chopin so I'm guessing this is a lossy format.

<comment><USER85> That's because it was interpreted by a machine instead of a human. All notation is lossy when compared to human expression.

</comment></comment><comment><USER86> Although may be easier for moons, it takes up too much space to be practical for pros.

</comment><comment><USER12> How is it anything else than sheet music turned by 90°?

</comment><comment><USER87> You are a genius! Thank you!

</comment><comment><USER88> Just a few observations in no particular order from my point of view (classical violinist and pianist--performing professionally for 28 years, and a music theorist studying the structure, composition, and history of the above for about 20 years.)

1\. This, and all other similar modern attempts, is interesting in that it has so much in common with the very earliest forms of music notation. We have as a basic, "this is me telling you how this is supposed to sound" example as far back as the 7th century, in which you had written words with markings above, below, and around that are meant to guide chant practitioners about where to go next to shape the musical phrase. This is also the origin of modern punctuation in written language.

These attempts are remarkably similar in my mind to the early attempt to guide people. They strike me as memory aids more than anything. As in, I've heard this before, I know how it is supposed to go, I just need a little help here.

When I say origin above, I'm talking about the western tradition of music. The eastern tradition of music evolved very differently (both in terms of music notation and the notion of punctuation), and you can trace early concepts of music notation back a couple of thousand years b.c. But I'm not talking about that.

2\. The history of music notation roughly follows the history of the study of music theory in a cycle: is the point to understand and describe what happened in the past, or is the point to prescribe what should happen in the future? People have been fighting this battle for centuries (again, there's a parallel here between language and music), and we continually go back and forth.

Notation methods carry that same problem with them. What are you trying to do? What problem are you trying to solve? I'm not going to say that modern standard music notation is perfect, but it's a good balance of both prescription and description.

3\. Speaking of balance, there's another element that's been mentioned already: creation vs. performance. A good method of notation has to be easy to write, not just easy to read. It has to be specific enough that composers who want to care about details can clearly define them, and I think this method is sorely lacking in that regard.

4\. Re: ledger lines. These are a modern, notational "convenience" that was brought about by printing technology making it reasonable. And because performers hated music without them. Music before the 18th century did something that is much more reasonable in my mind, but in practice is difficult to manage. The clef symbols used to be moveable. They sort of still are. The difference between alto and tenor clef is that the c is on a different line.

In pre-Baroque music, there were only 4 staves instead of 5 and the clefs moved all over the place to accommodate the fact that there were no leger lines. The clefs would switch to a different line in the middle of a phrase or just change completely from a c-clef to a g or f clef.

This kind of shifting around is, needless to say, extremely taxing on the performer. But very convenient for the writer and publisher. Leger-lines were originally an acquiescence to the needs of the player, believe it or not. But you know, give someone an inch, and they'll write Strauss.

5\. These kinds of visual aids have existed forever in music. But they are only useful for the performers. Writers of music have to consider vertical relationships between notes. I mean, they don't have to, but we're stuck in a musical rut where we've collectively decided that the successful music is going to be based on some permutation of I-V-I. And that's even more true of modern i.e., popular non-classical music since about 1940) than it is of modern classical.

You need to understand the conventions, and visually seeing "difficult" intervals is key to helping you write music that conforms to those norms.

In my opinion, modern standard notation is almost as good as a syntax highlighter in terms of seeing parallel 4ths, 5ths, octaves. It's not quite as good, but it's close.

The proposed redesign is . . . not so great at that.

6\. Portability has been addressed by others, but I haven't seen the scalability argument yet. Let's say this works well for one person playing alone. What happens when you try to get 4 people to play together? What about 100? What about 1,000? Someone has to look at all of that and figure out what is supposed to be happening and then lead the group and know when things are going wrong. (I've conducted concerts with 8 harpsichords playing at a time. There is no way this style of notation would work.)

7\. I just don't think this is viable as a redesign of piano music. A learning aid? Maybe.

</comment><comment><USER89> fascinating. nice work.

</comment><comment><USER90> EUREKA! 1.)learn from what U know - Vim, Zshell, Python and engineering 2.)more MATURE so learn the ORGAN not a piano! 3.)go jazz, play from radio, never bought a book on circle of 5ths 4.)some are slow, tool over 6-12 months to coordinate left and right hands. playing off syncopate all the time. 5.)CLICK! read the book. Eureka! suddenly some of it works. 6.)ORGAN is more expensive but MUCH easier can hold down key, change the instrument,etc.

7.)have not looked at sight read, since either jazz or direct composition. I USED the simple method. tap the beat with feet. use basic drumstick to sound melody with pots whistle the 2nd part, etc. 3 piece band?

8.)hobby only, not stress tested like real code

9.) the auto transfer from guitar chord trellis to ORGAN can be useful.

QUESTION: better to go deep first? and be a genius on organ for Tchaikovsky? or just go radio plus jazz and make it up HACKER STYLE as U go?

</comment><comment><USER91> Rather than just addressing sheet music, the piano keyboard itself could be improved. See the Jankó keyboard for an example:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jank%C3%B3_keyboard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jank%C3%B3_keyboard)</comment>


France sells bonds at negative interest rate - <AUTHOR> http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/E/EU_FRANCE_FINANCIAL_CRISIS?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2012-07-09-10-45-53

<comment><USER2> How is this possible? Wouldn't you just hold on to cash instead of buying bonds at a negative rate?

<comment><USER3> For an individual yes, hold the cash. But from what I can gather, banks in some countries must keep their reserves in something other than cash (typically bonds). EDIT: It encourages banks to lend, rather than sit on a giant pile of money.</comment></comment>


Find a collaborator for your startup - <AUTHOR> http://www.collaborist.me/

<comment><AUTHOR> Open invitations for the first 100 people who sign up.</comment>


Show HN: Quabel, a distraction-free online writer with writing goals, fireworks - <AUTHOR> https://quabel.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Quabel is a pet project of two friends of mine and myself, and we are proud to finally present it to HN after a long time of working on it.

Basically, we want to make focussed writing more easy. Quabel is an online editor which uses writing goals very prominently. This allows the writer to stay on track and measure performance with all the benefits of using a web service.

Full list of features:

\- Automatically save your texts so you don't lose anything

\- Create goals and measure your writing performance

\- Nightmode for when it gets dark outside

\- Markdown formatting

\- Drag and Drop your .docx files onto Quabel to import and edit them in Markdown instantly

\- Export to PDF/ODT/Latex/Markdown

\- Easily publish your writings and share them with others

\- (optional) typewriter sound when you hit a key

\- (optional) fireworks when you reach your goal

Please tell us your feedback, we value your opinion very much! Thanks!

Our future roadmap includes offline editing, revisioning (hard topic!) and collaboration between multiple writers.

<comment><USER2> I love the self-irony of being "distraction-free", but having fscking _fireworks_!

(Note: I do "get it", gamification/rewards work, but it still strikes me as funny.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice that you noticed. To be honest, it seemed a bit weird for me as well as I was typing out the text above :-)

The funny thing is, my cofounders hated the fireworks idea, but then some blog post said very positive things about it and so we kept it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> You have a smart marketing ploy with the "Privacy made in Germany" slogan. Similar to "German engineering", instantly recognizable. Also, great looking product.

I wonder though, I am a German lawyer myself and under the impression that German data privacy laws (which I am not specialised in) are not that different from US/UK/generic EU country laws. Do you have any research or comparisons on that?

Because I see two ways how my data might get misappropriated anyway: either by your hosting provider, over which you have no control whatsoever if you don't own the physical servers, or by a police investigation, with which you have to comply anyway. So what exactly does German privacy protection buy me here?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Daniel, thanks for your thoughtful considerations. Due to my experiences, I think privacy laws in Germany differ in one main point frome those in the UK or other EU countries, which is enforcement. As you probably know, we have had some data scandals which created a sense for data privacy in large parts of the population. On top of this, big internet corporations such as Google and Facebook are often portrayed as "data hungry" molochs by German media outlets.

Coupled with our own "bad feeling" when replacing the local OpenOffice or Word installation with Quabel.com for writing documents, we've decided to clearly state data privacy as a feature on our homepage. We hope this emphasizes the user-oriented aspect we have had in mind when creating this application.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I tried this once and really liked it to the point where I considered replacing Google Docs with it.

Only to find the freemium usage-terms way too limited. You want me to pay to have more than 5 free-text documents stored each, probably occupying in total less than 10kb?

Seriously?

Edit: Seemingly the limit is 15 documents now. That's still a no-go.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for your comment.

How to limit the free user was a though decision for us. You can increase your document space without buying premium: for every user you invite both you and your referral get 5 additional docs. Also, a free user can download and store his docs locally and enjoy Quabel for free for an infinite time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> <https://quabel.com/subscribe/hobbyist/> doesn't work for me. "You cannot access this page"

<comment><USER5> You're probably using Quabel as a dummy user. Please sign up for a regular account first and then try again. We'll work on that error message ;-).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hi, I'm Aaron and the designer of Quabel. If you have any feedback regarding design I will very appreciate it. Cheers!

</comment><comment><USER6> Looks very... inspired by iA Writer. Not that it's a bad thing.

<comment><USER7> except for it's free and not Apple-only.

<comment><USER8> ...free for up to 5 documents.</comment></comment></comment>


The Story of the U.S. And Cuba's Middleman - <AUTHOR> https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/08/03/the-untold-story-of-the-u-s-and-cubas-middleman/ <comment><USER2> This is very enlightening.

Would the Swiss be compensated in some form for their efforts?

How would this work in international diplomacy?

<comment><USER3> I expect them to be satisfied gaining trust from the international community. After all, trust is a currency much scarcer than money.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Typing test for software interviews? - <AUTHOR>

I've found that a simple typing speed test can reveal a lot of things that algorithms or engineering questions leave out. You find candidates with amazing resumes who top out around 50 words per minute. Then there are candidates who don't know keyboard shortcuts in an IDE (when asked to copy some code in their favorite language+IDE). This got me thinking... are there other mechanical interview questions that actually have a good deal of correlation with software engineering prowess? <comment><USER2> Good job filtering out all the carpal tunnelers.</comment>


Gendered Language Effects [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/405621528167411253/pdf/WPS8464.pdf <comment><USER2> This was an interesting read but I struggle to see the value in this study. Gendered language begets gender inequality, but so what? There's nothing (reasonably) actionable about this information. I have to imagine the time, effort and funds put into this could have been better spent studying what can actually be _done_ about gender inequality in these countries.</comment>


We have money to fight climate change. We're spending it on defense - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/oct/08/climate-change-defense-spending-fighter-plane-climate-change-defense-spending-fighter-plane-program <comment><USER2> What is the point of having nukes if one does not use them to defend against icebergs?

<comment><USER3> Nuclear winter solves global warming.</comment></comment>


Are the American people obsolete? - <AUTHOR> http://www.salon.com/news/us_economy/index.html?story=/news/feature/2010/07/27/american_people_obsolete

<comment><USER2> "Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no'"

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_Law_of_Headlines>

<comment><USER3> news.arc seems to trim apostrophes from URLs, so your link correctly is

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_Law_of_Headlines>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wow, what a dream world... "Hi, all you 'little people' who don't have jobs? Go to China and compete there, so I can enjoy this empty country and my immigrant labor"

Time to get cracking on methods to replace that class of people with small shell scripts...

</comment><comment><USER5> As they say, fifth time is a charm!

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1604933>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1553937>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2189544>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1991615>

</comment><comment><USER6> Perhaps the poor could also furnish infants for the rich man's table?

I see that the spirit of Swift is alive and well...

</comment><comment><USER7> I think it can be said, more generally, that nationalism is obsolete..

</comment><comment> DanI-S It reminds me of the sci-fi concept of creating hyper-intelligent, benevolent AIs to run human life as optimally as possible. That's basically what capitalism attempts to do, except with hyper-wealth in place of hyper- intelligence.

As anyone who reads sci-fi knows, it's never long before the AIs figure out they can get along most 'optimally' without the humans there at all.

</comment><comment><USER8> I may be wrong, but hasn't this article already come up on HN before? Maybe I've just seen it before, it's not new.

</comment><comment><USER9> I mean people aren't going to take a cut in the standard of living, and has that been to social contract all this time? That sounds like some plebeian system. I thought it was trying to equalize tax "burden", not some creepy subsidization program.</comment>


Highest Paying Tech Companies of 2019 - <AUTHOR> http://levels.fyi/2019/index.html <comment><USER3> If you're a software engineer in a city where these companies employ folks and you're thinking this doesn't apply to you, I'd encourage you to at least give it a shot. It's not only the absolute best of the best who get these jobs.

I recently decided to do a round of interviews after 10+ years as an independent web / iOS dev, having _never_ had a professional software dev job. I'm also a self-taught developer with a business degree from a no-name state school. Despite all that, I've been really surprised and happy with the market reception here in NYC. I got interest from the bigger guys like Amazon, FB, and Twitter, as well as smaller companies like Dropbox, Stripe, Square, Coinbase, etc. Last week, I got a very good senior / staff offer from one of the smaller public companies for around $400k in first year comp. With bonuses, promotions, refreshers, etc, that could easily average $500k - <USER2> per year over the next few years. And I had no competing offers. Some of the other companies I'm in the loop with will almost certainly offer quite a bit more, although I love this company that made the offer and I'll probably just drop the other interviews and take it. Comp isn't everything.

All this to say, if you're interested in making more $$ and these companies are hiring where you live, don't pass it up because you think it's only for hotshot 22-year-olds coming out of Stanford.

<comment><USER4> Have you studied extensively for the technical exams? I've tried, and I've gotten interviews at several of the FAANGs as well as some desirable mature startups, but I fail at the technical screeinging stage. Not sure if I've tanked it or was close, but I get the "no hire" call or email after take-home projects or whiteboard exams.

Btw, to give you sense of it, I'd have no trouble finding a loop in a linked list, printing all permutations of a set, or searching a tree recursively. I'd have to puzzle a bit to figure out how to do DFS vs BFS, but I'd get there, I don't have it loaded into memory. I wouldn't be able to implement merge sort on the spot, I'd need to look it up, though I could probably get it frontloaded. All I can say is dayum those interview exams are hard, what I described is a pre-req, nobody will just ask you to permute a set, but if you can't, you'll never solve whiteboard the problem they ask you in 45 minutes.

For take-home projects, one (a rails app) was rejected because I used named routes rather than using the more conventional methods (I know this wouldn't be good to do in a production app... guess I just wasn't thinking about routes, it was a demo app, so I just threw some names routes in there for demo purposes, it was a take-home), along with some "duplicated" code that I thought was justified but never got to explain (I personally think extracting this into another method would be a pre-optimization that would need to be undone when the methods diverged, something I thought would be likely under the admittedly fabricated business requirements). I did have what I though was good testing, the reviewers did complement that along with some aspects of the app in their review.

Sorry, don't mean to give you my sob story, I just... I'm at the point where I wouldn't mind a crack at these jobs but just feel like maybe it's not an effort that's going to pay off (I mean, how much more time do I really want to spend on the kind of problems in cracking the coding interview? I actually feel like I got something out of studying it and preparing, but going back over and over, nah... maybe other people retain this stuff better than I do, and you know, maybe that does actually say something about suitability for these jobs).

<comment><USER3> How many tech screens and interviews did you do? I cast a pretty wide net to start, so I was in the loop to some degree at a bunch of companies over the last ~7 weeks, which was exhausting. But I didn't really think I had much shot at these bigger tech companies, honestly, so I interviewed at a ton of NYC startups too. The practice was really helpful.

I haven't totaled up my stats, but this is roughly how things went:

1\. Once I got a recruiter on the phone, I had a 100% chance of going to next stage

2\. For take-home projects, I had a 100% pass rate (did 3-4 of these)

3\. For online assessments, I had a 50% pass rate (did 2 of these)

4\. For live coding screens, had about a 60% pass rate (did 10-12 of these)

5\. For onsites, I had a 50% offer rate. I did 4 of these at NYC startups, and 2 at bigger tech companies, one of which made an offer. Still waiting to hear from other one, but not hopeful.

I'm still in loop at 3 big tech companies.

The point is, it's pretty random. I flopped a couple of tech screens pretty badly because the interviewer was just difficult. Some give easy questions, some give hard. Some you click with, some you don't. And you get better at this over time too.

 _(I 've also been amused to watch startups give more challenging interviews than the big tech companies and then make offers that are 1/2 as valuable)_

In terms of prep, I took a data structures / algos class at Harvard Extension a couple years ago that was really helpful, and then I've been doing some Leetcode and CTCI problems the last couple months. Not enough though, honestly. I also went through some mock interviews with Interviewing.io and TripleByte, both of which were helpful.

By far the most helpful thing though is that _both_ of the big tech companies where I did onsites actually tested me on mostly real world iOS dev, not generalist whiteboarding algorithms. And the other tech companies where I'm in the mix have also been a little more flexible. Twitter for example offered me the option of a take-home iOS project or a traditional 1-hour generalist tech screen. Although their onsite is still whiteboard coding algorithms from what I understand. Sigh...

<comment><USER4> Thanks for your reply! Your pass rate is quite a bit higher than mine - I'm 0/2 on projects, probably 2/5 on interviews (I'm only counting the in-person interviews, don't have a problem with phone screen level). Some were much easier than others. I think my most recent interview was a couple years ago, though, haven't done much of it lately. I do agree with you and the other reply (mdocherty) that it is a bit random and you only need to connect once. That said, it's not totally "free", there's no real point (for me at least) in going into these without substantial prep.

At my google interview, I asked for 3 weeks. My lunchtime "interview" (this one is unscored, just a chat) told me that he had requested and studied for 6 months! Seriously.

Now, some of that may seem nuts, but if you really don't know much about data structures, algorithms, binary arithmetic (or are very very rusty on it), I can see how a stretch of studying would be good for you. But once you have, it starts to feel like re-studying for your midterms. Still, for $250k and up, with growth potential... yeah, I can see why people are willing to keep going through the washing machine.

Lastly, I suspect you're just a little better at this than I am. I think I'm in range, but it's a little more of a stretch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Looks like they're including RSUs for private companies as equivalent to cash, which _dramatically_ skews the data.

For private companies, RSUs aren't liquid, and ISOs actually _cost_ money to exercise, so they arguably have negative value. Treating them as cash- equivalent makes these rankings very misleading.

<comment><USER6> They would be remiss not to include this when making a statement about total compensation.

<comment><USER5> > They would be remiss not to include this when making a statement about total > compensation.

Ideally they would be separated out. But if you have to make a single ranking, it's way more misleading to include RSUs/options for private companies than would be to ignore them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> These salaries are incredibly high for someone who never worked at a tech company in the valley. What's the general consensus on whether these salaries will increase, decrease, or stay the same in the medium term (i.e., next 5-10 years)?

<comment><USER8> With nothing to back me up except the general impression I have, these numbers look out-of-whack even for the highest-paying employers in the Bay Area.

<comment><USER3> I know I'm just a random internet commenter and thus you could be forgiven for thinking I'm making things up, but I just got an offer from a smaller public tech company for a senior / staff level position making almost $400k in first year comp. I'm pretty confident that after negotiation we'll land a little over $400k. And recruiters at several other tech companies where I'm interviewing have told me they can match or exceed this offer. I think FB or Snap would pay more than $600k at this level, but I don't want to work for either of them :)

To be fair, I have 12 years of experience, 9 of that in mobile dev, but _all of it is self-employment experience_. Comp is just insane at the top companies.

<comment><USER9> If you can get 600K at FB or Snap, you must be a top 3% candidate, according to FYI.levels, right?

<comment><USER3> I mean, I don't know? To be fair, I have not gotten an offer from either of those companies. Maybe I never could. But I did get an offer from a company that competes with them for talent and it's roughly at the L5 level at Snap and E6 level at FB. Looking at levels.fyi, I'm seeing $550k - 575k, and given that the offer I got was about $50k higher than the data levels.fyi has for the company in question, I don't think hitting $600k is crazy, especially if you have competing offers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What's in Pittsburgh driving the median so high? I know Carnegie Mellon is there, but I was not aware of any sort of commercial tech hub.

<comment><USER11> Zaheer from Levels.fyi here. Argo AI & Duolingo are based out of Pittsburgh. Uber & Google also have a decent sized presence. Some more context on their tech scene here: [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-pittsburgh-tech/a-tech- bo...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-pittsburgh-tech/a-tech-boom-in- pittsburgh-brings-hope-and-angst-idUSKCN1MM13Y)

<comment><USER10> Huh, it's been about a decade since I last visited Pittsburgh, I had no idea. Thanks for sharing.

<comment><USER12> Pretty much all the big tech companies have a presence here.

From what I can remember, Microsoft (Azure Storage), Amazon (ML Alexa Teams), Google, Uber (ATG), Argo AI, Aurora, Facebook (Oculus), Duolingo, and Apple are all have offices in the city.

In the suburbs I think Netapp and Oracle have offices.

<comment><USER11> Significant concentration of AI & ML teams probably raises the median (thanks to CMU). Some of the hottest skills in the market today.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> As a Canadian Software Engineer with 10+ years of experience.. I think this list is comical..

I've managed to barely squeeze 120k-130k CAD (90-100k USD) out of big companies here (e.g Shopify). I'm not sure if having free medicare is worth losing 2-300k...

Oh and I've tried applying for remote positions in the US and I get the good ol compensation skewed based on COL mantra.

</comment><comment><USER14> I feel like this list is skewed by cost of living. The top four cities are also very expensive cities to live in and around. 200k in the bay area is scraping by whereas 100k in the Austin area gets you a house in a reasonable amount of time.

Are there any plans to provide adjustments like that?

<comment><USER15> Can we please stop with the hyperbole? $200k in the bay area is emphatically _not_ scraping by. You can live on your own, without roommates, save money _and_ have a social life if you have a $200k income in SFBA.

What people (especially on HN) think "scraping by" looks like is getting a little nuts. Just because you can't have an opulent lifestyle and a cheap five bedroom house doesn't mean you're struggling. $200k in SFBA is well beyond the point where all your basic needs are met.

<comment><USER9> it all depends on your situation. Sure, as a single person 200K is doing well. But, 200K with a family of 4 (2 kids and a wife) is definately scraping by on the penninsula or SF. The only way that's not scraping by is if you bought your house over 20 years ago (or during 2010-2012 housing slump) OR you got yourself a Rent controlled apartment. Other than that, You ARE scraping by.

In SF, day care is almost 3K per month per child! On the penninsula/SF, if you rent a 3 bedroom apartment, it'll cost 4k-6K or so per month or more, that's 60K of your 130K take home pay.

<comment><USER16> >But, 200K with a family of 4 (2 kids and a wife) is definately scraping by on the penninsula or SF.

Lol. No, it isn't. It is absolutely mind blowing what the general tech industry thinks "scraping by" means. The _median_ household income in SF is less than 100k. At 200k, you make more than twice that. If you're just "scraping by" with 200k, then I can't even imagine what people making less than the median are doing.

<comment><USER4> Child care in San Francisco, the kind that goes from 8am to 6pm, runs over $2500 a month. That's not ultraluxe, that's pretty standard fare, and my estimate is probably on the low side. A 3br house in an unfashionable but largely safe part of town is probably well over $4000 in rent. Again, that's not a high estimate. If you have 2 kids in daycare and are paying a mortgage or even just renting, you're looking at $9,000 a month in these expenses alone.

Wealth in San Francisco is more measured by when you got into the housing market than what you make, salary-wise, unless you're quite a ways up.

Now, a two income family with tech jobs is likely going to have at least 300k in family income (though even with the expensive 8am to 6pm day care, expect lots of phone calls coordinating who will scramble over to day care before 6). These families are not "scraping by", and I agree we need to be careful with hyperbole. But the median household income may not reflect the cost structure for new arrivals to the housing market who lack the family structure that would cushion the blow of daycare costs.

<comment><USER17> Being able to afford 8 hours of child care for multiple kids every weekday, and a mortgage/rent on a 3br house, is way above what most Americans consider scraping by. Americans who are scraping by use family, friends, and spouses for child care (or just hope for the best), and they live in low-cost housing often in pretty bad neighborhoods with bad schools that are far away. They also have trouble affording health insurance, they often share a single car (if they even have a car), have debt, and aren't saving.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Is this getting flagged? It's currently near the bottom of page 4, and should be in the top 10 of page 1. Are HN'ers just bitter / skeptical of these numbers?

<comment><USER8> I don't know why it's falling away from the front page, but as far as skepticism goes, numbers that surprising raise more questions than answers. Your anecdotes have been very informative by the way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Obviously San Francisco and New York City have the highest salaries... they have the highest cost of living. Can we get a list adjusted for cost of living?

<comment><USER19> Depends on who you're living with. When I first moved to SF, living in a dorm downtown w/ shared bathrooms/kitchen among some ~50 people, I was paying $1.8k/mo. Then my wife and kids joined me, and we moved to a "proper" place in outer richmond. The cost for 2 bed + 1 kid in preschool went to 6.5k/mo. If you're single, you're probably looking in the range of 3.6 - 4.5k for a 2 bed rent, or half of that if you can get a roommate. Transit runs you about $80-100/mo. So if you're young and cheap, there's a lot of opportunity to build up a bank.

On the other hand, If you are married w/ toddlers and your spouse is on a non- work visa, you're gonna have some tougher luck w/ COL.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> How is the level mapping between various companies decided?

<comment><USER11> Within a company, levels codify the hierarchy, scope & responsibility of employees. The question we try to answer with our mapping is: "If an employee at company X were to switch to company Y, which level would they come in at?". The answer then is: what is the equivalent scope / responsibility across companies. There's several other factors (company size, interview performance, etc) that go into actual leveling when you switch companies and thus we really emphasize that this is a _rough_ guide. I think we've settled on something that's generally agreeable for most folks. We constantly take feedback though and adjust based on what we hear from users switching between companies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Is there data on the UK / London available?

<comment><USER6> Honestly if you're a software engineer in the UK and you're concerned about salary... you should move to the United States.

<comment><USER22> Who isn't concerned about salary? Who is _only_ concerned about salary?

Like most software engineers in the UK, I could almost certainly make at least triple by moving to the US but I don't consider it worthwhile for me. Many people do - there's no right answer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Can we separate salary from stock-based comps?

<comment><USER24> Why? They're all reported the same as income on your taxes

<comment><USER25> Compensation from stock grants is significantly more volatile than base salary or bonus targets, but otherwise I don't see a major difference.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Does this data include Cyber Security type jobs?

</comment><comment><USER27> These salaries is kind of obscene. But then, the conduct and social impact (in the US or outside of it) of many of these companies is also kind of obscene: Lyft and Uber employ pseudo-freelancers for very low effective wages; AirBnB are keeping apartments out of the regular rental market in favor of jacked up per-day prices; Facebook tracks everybody and shapes (to some extent) their consciousness and knowledge of the world; and so on.</comment>