Graphic Notation vs Player Piano Roll
図形楽譜 / 自動ピアノロール
Both sit in Notation Systems, so the question is not what they belong to but how they behave. Both are read here as style. They are reached for with some of the same intent, which is where they get confused.
Graphic Notation
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The scores Cage and Cardew drew when they abandoned the staff: shapes, lines, map-like pages. Opening performance to interpretation rather than instruction, the score itself became visual art.
Player Piano Roll
A recording medium of rolled paper on which the punched holes are the performance itself. It marks the turn from scores read by people to codes read by machines, and it is the ancestor of the punch card and the digital sequencer.
| Graphic Notation | Player Piano Roll | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 1950s– | 1896–1930s |
| Family | Notation Systems | Notation Systems |
| Kind | Style | Style |
| Cues | The staff abandoned / Instruction by shape and line / Pages open to interpretation / The score as artwork | Rows of perforations / The scrolling roll / Machine-readable music / Performance physically recorded |
| Best used for | Handing improvisers a map instead of a list of instructions · Making the page of a piece into a figure worth hanging on a wall | Exhibiting performance data as an object a machine visibly reads · Visualizing the structure of a piece on a scrolling time axis |
| Type | Few kinds of sign, with the range where one shape holds one meaning | Hole length is duration and lateral position is pitch, never varied |
| Composition | Show which direction on the page carries time before anyone plays | Time runs with the take up, control holes pushed to both margins |
| Material | Line weight mapped to loudness, kept dark enough to print clean | Paper moves with humidity, so leave reading tolerance between holes |
| Caution | Freedom claimed without a key or any agreed convention scatters interpretation across players, and the score gets treated as a doodle. | Punching every fine note thins the paper bridges until they tear, and the performance breaks down partway through the roll. |