Is Sheet Music Obsolete?

How to visualize music accurately: A ProTools screenshot. 

One properly learns music through the ears and body, not the eyes.

Musical notation is, in essence, a method of recording music for later reproduction. It is a woefully primitive method, largely unfit for purpose. Of the four elements that make up a musical sound – pitch, volume, phase and timbre or tone colour – notation only records the first with any accuracy, and even then can only do so in relation to a reference tone (A above Middle C = 440Hz). Volume is rendered very roughly, in words – forte, pianissimo, etc – and symbols like < or > (‘turn up’ or ‘pipe down’ respectively): absurd. As for phase and timbre (the latter is the most basic perceptual aspect, apart from loudness, of any sound, musical or not), they are all but ignored. Being told what instrument to use to play a given part in a piece is all the timbral information you’ll ever get.

As poorly served is that other vital component of music, rhythm, which is rendered so ineptly in conventional notation that the rhythmic scope of Western music was badly hobbled – crippled, in fact – by long dependence upon it. In the West, for hundreds of years, rhythmic complexity became the exclusive preserve of folk song and folk dance, which were propagated by ear and bodily movement rather than via sheet music. It was only through later cross-fertilization with African music that rhythmic sensibility came to be restored to Western ears. Modern musical forms like pop, rock, jazz and the blues all owe their genesis – tragically, inescapably – to the transatlantic slave trade.

What does written music still have going for it? Musical notation does convey relative harmonic information very well – again, it’s no accident that Western music is harmonically more advanced than music from other cultures – but in practical terms it is really only good for three things these days: propagating music that is ‘too complex’ to decipher accurately by ear (though this is a faculty that varies widely from person to person), rapidly teaching musicians in ensemble how to play their individual ‘parts’, and to facilitate the composition and performance of musical pieces of the crossword-puzzle variety -- things like Bach fugues or complex Serialist pieces, where geometrical or mathematical conceits are rendered in musical form. The pleasures of such music are visual and intellectual, that is to say not intrinsically musical; and thus, for very good reason, they are minority pleasures, of interest only to a cultivated few and far removed from what the bulk of humanity knows, loves and utilises as music.

Musical notation was rendered obsolete in terms of its original purpose as soon as the phonograph was invented. Now it appears doubly so. Specialist software like ProTools® captures every aspect of music visually without any need for musical notation – and allows you to edit the music too, with far greater facility than any composer ever altered a score. It even gives you the power to hear the result of your edit in real time before you press Save. Less elaborate versions of such software are cheaply available for your smartphone. Given the ubiquity of these far superior recording methods, is there still a place in the world for sheet music?