Notation Systems
Systems that convert an action unfolding in time into positions on a page so another person can reproduce it, covering not only sound but dance and knitted stitches.
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
Notation that fixes pitch to a coordinate, running from Guido's invention of the line to the five-line staff. Time reads left to right and pitch up and down, a flat design still in use after a thousand years and the longest-lived format in information design.
- 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
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.
- Labanotation 1928– / Style
A notation that turns bodily movement into one vertical staff read from the bottom upward. The shape of a symbol carries direction, its shading carries level, its length carries duration, and its position across the staff says which part of the body moves.
- Knitting Chart 19th century– / Style
The sheet music of handwork, where stitches become symbols laid out on a grid. Japan's JIS stitch symbols compress each operation into one figure, so the pattern is visible before it is read, unlike the written-out instructions relied on in the West.