This is the first on a couple posts I’d like to make on design and music. Many designers are attracted to music I think. Possibly because music is a complex design that is rendered through sound, and maybe also because good gigs tend to look cool. It’s also true that many people who are interested in art are often interested in different facets of art. To me music is important, and I’d like to use this post to talk about how we write (“western”) music, and why it’s a great example of product design.

a brief history

Music is a sonic, auditory artform. We can render it in paintings, and in notation, but to truly understand it, you have to hear it. We can safely assume that the first tunes would have been handed down aurally, and were most likely sung. However as writing systems developed different cultures did develop different systems for writing down music (just as different cultures developed different systems for numbers — think of Roman or Georgian numerals).

Overtime, and largely driven Christian monks (cite) a form of notation developed especially for music. Growing from plainchant that provided notes but not rhythm, once a rhythm system was developed it became possible for music to be written down and sent away for someone else to recreate. It’s important to note that before the advent of audio recording (in the late 19th century), if you wanted to hear the latest hit you had to either find a minstrel who knew it, or send for a notated copy of the piece and get it played by musician (who could read it).

The modern system we call staff notation allows for the accurate visual rendering of pitch and rhythm for a performer to recreate.

There are also digital systems such as MIDI and MUSICXML which a computer can read. Humans could too, though you wouldn’t want to follow a score written in it.

tablature

If you or anyone you know has every tried to learn the guitar you’ve probably heard of “tabs”. For instruments with frets (rods to stop the strings) like guitars, ukuleles, mandolins, dulcimers, lutes and viols. This is a notation system which instead of showing you what notes to play, it tells where where to put your fingers. It’s a different learning approach. One based on showing you what to do without without necessarily explaining why. And there are strong benefits to this. If you are adept at reading tablature you can play any fretted instrument, without needing to explain the music in a more abstract manner. It’s simply fret this note. What’s more to musical historians it’s invaluable because it tells you about the writer of the tablature, their way of working, their choice of fingering.

Looking at the tablature of John Dowland or Eric Clapton shows you exactly how they did what they did on their instrument. It’s like finding the annotated score of Franz Liszt or Lang Lang. It allows you to copy.

Copying it turns out is a valuable way to learn. Painters copy great works to understand techniques and train their eyes. Designers replicate styles, and functions. We learn a great deal through copying.

Copying it turns out really is fundamental to the general UX design approach of “design for one user, for the benefit of many”. People do repeat each other. This is why personas are so valuable a design tool and why we all copy it. By using multiple personas we start to design for many more users, and we work of flows, journey maps, tablature.

what to read

Is tablature then the better way to learn music then? It’s an incredibly powerful tool for capturing a performance, but it’s probably most useful when there’s more than one version. Just like personas, if you can see the multiple ways in which people have tried to play a piece of music you are able to better understand the way people figure things out. You can see how it is that people go about solving the same problem, and in doing so you learn more about them.

So for me I’m all for tablature, so long as it’s not treated as an absolute authority. It’s best when there are variations present. Just like personas. If you’re only designing for one type of user, you are subjecting all users to just that one experience. With multiple personas you are giving people options, and a way to make the experience their own.

a practical example

That piece of music I referenced above, the prelude to Bach’s first cello suite. It’s incredibly famous, and many people play it on multiple instruments. When the COVID-19 pandemic first began and I was sent home for three weeks I decided that I shouldn’t concern myself with anything. I’ve got three weeks where I need to be at home, I’m going to spend six to eight hours a day with my guitar playing Bach, to see if I can. I play a custom eight string guitar which for a long time was giving me difficulties because I wasn’t sure about the correct way to approach playing music on it. Learning Bach taught me how to play this instrument. To play this cello suite I found a copy of the original manuscript, studied it, played a few lines to see what fingering I could use, played with the tuning of my strings, and eventually settled on playing the suite at pitch with a tuning of B,EGdgbe’a’.

While I have eight strings at my disposal I only use seven to play this piece, and if I want to I could use six with little adjustment. To test this theory, once I had memorised some of the movements I took it over to my standard six string guitar. Now as the guitar is a higher pitched instrument I have to the play the piece one fourth up from where it was orignally written, transposing from G major to C major (double bassists would do the same). Luckily I don’t have to re-learn the piece per sé, because I have memorised the fingering, I have an internal tablature, so I can play the suite by tuning a standard guitar to EAcgc’e’. I can follow the same fingering, the same tablature, and thereby play this music in two different keys.

Here’s the interesting part though. Derek Gripper — a guitarist I greatly admire — plays this music too. I have a copy of his tablature in which he tunes his instrument FAdgc’e’. We both use a high C string, though after that the similarities end. In his tablature he approaches the suite more similarly to the way a baroque lutenist would. He uses open strings as much as possible to create a more resonant sustaining sound (this is also why he uses the low F). My own fingering however uses more stopped (fingered) strings to try and dampen the resonance and control the articulation more. The same piece of music, played by two different people, with different capabilities, on two different instruments produce two very different results.

Now his results do sound much better than mine, he’s a much better player after all. I wouldn’t put that down to the tablature however. Rather the tablature allows me to see his approach show me how he thinks, and what works for him, just as mine would show him. Our starting points were the same. We both began with the same manuscript, and looked at the same notes, scratched down with a couple of ambivalent dotes, and we found two different approaches to playing this music — out of the many thousands that have and still play it to this day.

That could only happen because we were able to read from staff notation.

why i like staff notation

Staff notation is incredible to me because it is instrument agnostic. True it works best with twelve-tone music written in rhythms divisible by two, but it still allows us to capture the essence of a piece, a way that shows us not the method, but the goal. It shows the shape of the music in the most simple dimension of up and down. What’s more it is not confined to “only western classical music” because while only 12 notes are the default of the system, more markers can be added for more microtonal music. While other systems have been proposed using various shapes, colours, and numbers, and these may be useful to individuals trying express themselves, or explore matters of perception. Staff notation is an accessible representation of sound suitable for performance playback. That is what it is, it is an expression of what the composer would like to be played from a purely objective point of view.

Once you have completed the ordeal of learning to read and understand it, any music rendered in it can be played on any instrument. It is elegant, interactive, low-cost, and accessible.

actually, let’s talk about accessibility

Since this is a UX rant let’s assess this.

1. it’s high-contrast by design, black on white.

2. it has an accompanying verbal descriptions such as sol-fa

3. it’s applicable to any instrument

4. it is not bound by linguistic, or cultural bounds.

to conclude

Learning music is difficult. It requires patience, tenacity, and investment. But paradoxically it is also something which comes naturally to us. It is a binding factor of humanity, a universal construct. It’s something anyone can do, often intuitively. But to study it and be a musician requires the right tools, and while instruments definitely have different levels of accessibility (and can be downright exclusive), staff notation for me is for everyone. Provided you’re willing to put the time in.