This sort of "piano-roll" notation has the nice feature that the elements are easy in theory to parse: time goes along one axis, pitch goes along the other, and you just do what it tells you. As far as notation for Western music goes, it does have some disadvantages.
All twelve pitch classes are spaced equally, so the scalar structure of tonal music is harder to make out. I can tell just by glancing at a page of sheet music whether it is tonal or atonal, and I can't do that here. All the notes kind of look the same (though I'm sure this is true for someone who isn't fluent at Western notation trying to read sheet music!). One way we tried to ameliorate this in Rock Band was to color different groups of notes differently, so you had a lot of features to grab onto (e.g., the boundary between E and F is the boundary between blue and green).
Durations are completely visual, which is nice from a intuitive point of view but means that it's harder to parse the underlying pulse and rhythmic structure of the music. A grid might help here. (I was constantly insisting that the grid in Rock Band be made to be as helpful as possible.)
Anyway, it's a nice visualization of keyboard music, and I don't doubt that this is easier to understand for people who don't read music already. I wish he had chosen a less hyperbolic title, though.
This sort of "piano-roll" notation has the nice feature that the elements are easy in theory to parse: time goes along one axis, pitch goes along the other, and you just do what it tells you. As far as notation for Western music goes, it does have some disadvantages.
All twelve pitch classes are spaced equally, so the scalar structure of tonal music is harder to make out. I can tell just by glancing at a page of sheet music whether it is tonal or atonal, and I can't do that here. All the notes kind of look the same (though I'm sure this is true for someone who isn't fluent at Western notation trying to read sheet music!). One way we tried to ameliorate this in Rock Band was to color different groups of notes differently, so you had a lot of features to grab onto (e.g., the boundary between E and F is the boundary between blue and green).
Durations are completely visual, which is nice from a intuitive point of view but means that it's harder to parse the underlying pulse and rhythmic structure of the music. A grid might help here. (I was constantly insisting that the grid in Rock Band be made to be as helpful as possible.)
Anyway, it's a nice visualization of keyboard music, and I don't doubt that this is easier to understand for people who don't read music already. I wish he had chosen a less hyperbolic title, though.