Tablature Problems
In trying to develop some pictograms, you have to make an absolute decision 1) how hard or diffcult you want to make creating the final notation, and 2) whether you want the notation to be creatable with special software or drawing skills -- meaning, do you want to use new icons or combinations of existing alpha-symbols (+ - ^ ). Looking at even a very simple guitar tab gives you an idea of both issues:
Tumbling Dice - The Rolling Stones
key: B with capo on the fourth fret ('open G' tuning)
intro
(f#) |--------------------|-------------|
(D#) |-3------------------|-0-----------|
(B) |-2-h4-p2-0-2--------|-0-----------|
(F#) |-----------2-p0-----|-0-----------|
(B) |----------------4-2-|-0-----------|
The 'p' stands for (p)ull which is a technique for manipulating the guitar string. On traditional sheet music, these are represented by nice, intuitive arcs (which also can represent the duration of the pull). But it has to be translated into pure TEXT model to make it available on the web as text (vs an image) and to give everybody the ability to create it.
Acutally, Guitar tab is more detailed than more common chord notation. Because many player will be happy to learn and play the chords of a song (80/20), that's the dominant model from quantity of music score content on the web. Tab is more complex because it illustrates the details of particular notes as well as some technique.
More unusual (and more interesting) is Piano Tab. It is an attempt to convey the basic melody and timing in a TEXT format that will allow it to be easily published on the internet. It is really could be better described as a data format -- a standard way to code that requires decoding at the other end.
Nightswimming by R.E.M. - Intro:
4|-ga--g--|g---|-ga--g--|a---|
4|d----d--|e---|d----d--|d---|
2|g--g-h-3|c--2|g--g-h-3|d---|
b|1-2-3-4-|1234|1-2-3-4-|1234|
-the numbers (1-7) to the left of the tab, indicates in what octave
(starting at the lowest C) to play the notes in that row. When numbers appear elsewhere in a row, it is to indicate a new octave.
-ordinary letters (cdefgah) symbolices the corresponding notes
>>>from pianotabs.net, credit to Tor Undheim - for full details, click here to go to his site<<<
A person probably wouldn't play this tab as they would sheet music, but instead would work out the song from the tab. Maybe overtime someone could get comfortable playing from this notation, but for now I think this is a good representation of a data format use to conveniently transmit infomation.
Big Conclusion: This is a similar challenge with Recipe Notation. It MUST err more on the side of an INTUITIVE model that requires little training to understand an adopt (one of the benefits of the current narrative approach). That probably eliminates the use of a TEXT ONLY based approach (like the tabs above or this) to the notation and requires a pictogram model (like this).
However, that doesn't mean that some use of simple TEXT symbols may be of good us. As you can see in the pictogram model (here) the '+' and '-' can provide good, clear direction without addition visual details.
Towards that end, I think the notation should try for less (existing TEXT symbols) and use more (pictograms) when the symbols just don't cut it -- which will be often.
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