Notation Systems
記譜の様式
Dictionary entry
- Neume Notation 9th century– / Style
The West's oldest musical writing: melodic inflection recorded in curves like the motion of a hand. The gesture of melody before pitch was fixed to lines, still alive in the manuscripts of Gregorian chant.
- Staff Notation 11th century– / Style
From Guido's lines to the five-line staff: pitch fixed to coordinates. Time running left to right, height mapped up and down — the longest-lived format in information design, in continuous use for a millennium.
- Graphic Notation 1950s– / Style
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.
- Tablature 15th century– / Style
Notation from the player's point of view: not what pitch, but where the fingers go. From lute letter-tablature to guitar TAB, the lineage of practical writing that encodes bodily action directly.
- Shape Note 1801– / Style
The American hymnody notation that reshaped note heads into triangles, squares and diamonds for fast sight-reading. The Sacred Harp tunebooks and singings made notation design a community tool.
- Player Piano Roll 1896–1930s / Style
The rolled paper medium on which punched holes are the performance itself. The turn from scores read by people to codes read by machines — ancestor of the punch card and the digital sequencer.
- Dance Notation 1700– / 1928 Laban / Style
The lineage of fixing bodily movement to paper, from Feuillet's Baroque dance scores to Labanotation, whose vertical staff folds weight, direction and time into a single column — an alphabet of movement.
- Knitting Chart 19th century– / Style
The sheet music of the needle: stitches encoded as symbols on a grid. Japan's JIS stitch symbols compress each operation into one figure — design you can see before reading, in contrast to the West's written-out patterns.