Notational bias and the limits of musical notation

The conventions we necessarily employ to navigate our path in the world, to simplify repetitive tasks, tend to become so ingrained in us that we sometimes consider them to be natural laws and thus universal. Monolingual English speakers scan text from left to right and from top to bottom and find often think this natural. It is hardly surprising therefore that any 'up' is usually considered more and better. Any notation represents a cultural convention, but to what extent does the notation we use influence thought and cause cultural bias? Goerge Boole asserted in Laws of Thought that 'language is [..] not merely a medium for the expression of thought'. And the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis articulated the intuitively felt influence that a language has on the habitual thoght of a speaker. So how do the conventions influence us at a personal level apart from helping to define our cultural operating system? I have long felt that conventional Western musical notation is not only limited as a form of musical representation but has unwittingly skewed our understanding of music itself.

The coding system of music is nonlinguistic and involves a unique combination of attributes. It requires 'a strict and continuous time constraint on an output that is generated by a continuous stream of coded instructions' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_movement_in_music_reading).

Further, I am of the opinion that musical notation necessarily struggles to tackle modern muscial forms. This need not be seen as a problem for contempory musicians who would probably never consider notating their music in conventionl forms. Indeed, hiphop or electronic musicians might rarely notate music at all. Of course this raises the question, what does this music look like and what form of notation might be suitable for its visual representation. Of course, it is quite possible that musicians would resist any abstraction of the aural experience they craft into the visual realm. But it is my view that we live in a culture which historically has been dominated by the visual sense and that it is only naturally to seek visual corroboration of input derived from other sense. Generally, to see is to believe and we *see* what others mean. In fact the words 'see' and 'know' are connates in many languages. The etymology of 'vision' reflects this, for example.

To a certain extent, the task of music visualisation is one VJs are landed with at nightclubs, but they can always cast their work as an accompaniment or parallel artform and are not held to any standard. The visual stream they generate need not represent any essense of the audio offered. And indeed many seem to take pride in divorcing their output from the music itself.

The evolution of music videos through the advent of MTV also offers a source of countless interesting visual renderings of music. Much the same as with the output of VJs, however, music videos seem only loosely associated to the