Cantr II Discussion Forum

Recently I've been wanting to have a character compose music, and actually write that music down for others in a notated form. As of now, music is notated in the typical five-line staff. Do you think it would be bad form to use this type of notation? After all, music notation has gone through so many changes throughout history. At one point there was only a single line that the notes would be written around, and musicians had to make a guess on what the actual note was. Maybe I should use this more simple method instead? Or should I try to create an entirely new method of notating music? A few problems that I see with going with the simpler methods, though, is that creating homophonic or polyphonic textures (harmonies and junk) would be a lot more difficult.

Help me!

I had a character once who wanted to write down her music... For the brief time when she was actively interested in that, I roleplayed her trying to figure out how she could write it out. We never finished that, but my intention was to have it at least resemble the typical five-bar staff.

Anyway, given that there's no actual character-made standard for that in Cantr (as far as I know), I'd go with whatever seemed interesting to you as a music notation system. Whether it resembles the current typical one in real life or not is up to you - though my advice would be to at least roleplay your character figuring it out. (because to the best of my knowledge there isn't a typical system in-Cantr yet)


(That said, I'm in no way any kind of "official" person - this would just be the advice of a random player)


(Other possibilities I had in mind for my character possibly-inventing a music notation system was using color to indicate, I think note length. That's all I remember, really. The five-bar typical staff might be easier for most people who can read music to understand, but if you have an idea for an alternative, or see a historical alternative that seems interesting to you, I'd say go with that.)

Thank you for your input! I think I'm leaning toward the idea of creating my own system, since it would be very interesting to roleplay. It'll be difficult ignoring my existing knowledge of modern notation, but I might as well give it a try!

Once my char wanted to make a book from a certain character's songs. She thought that could be a good training for the young musicians as it helps about keeping some memories alive too. But he didn't prefer it much so I passed the idea since they were not written by my char. There are other 4 musicians I know and I like, maybe if someone takes notes in person we can have at least exact descriptions for their songs.

Traditional, Chinese musical notation is pretty simple to read. It follows a very, simple scale, all the notes are in one line, and has simple notations for octave changes and half-counts, etc.

Compare Western and Chinese: http://enterarena.blogspot.com/2011/05/ ... ation.html

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_musicology