Agreed. The author mentioned that the desire to compose music is what spurred this post. It would be much quicker to read through a music textbook. The basics of western music notation can be taught in 15 minutes, and one could get used to it after an afternoon. There is no need to interrogate the origins and reasons behind conventional notation if creative work is the goal, since there are much more important concepts like harmony and voice leading which are more worth your time.

I think even faster is taking whatever instrument you have, whether it's physical or digital, and start putting together some melodies or notes and making something.

If by "western music notation" you mean the clef and stuff, then lol, no. There's a reason most musicians don't use nor know it.

The reason most musicians don't use staff notation is because most musicians do not need it unless they want to engage with the literate tradition of music, and are not disadvantaged if they can't. Not because of any inherent difficulties in the notation itself.

> and are not disadvantaged if they can't

Literacy is just as helpful in music as in any other artform. One can certainly play and create music without learning how to read and write staff notation, but being literate can only help!

Except the poetry is written in German, but must be read aloud in French. This is how I felt as a young trombone player. I was playing an instrument that had a nearly linear physical relationship with pitch, I was required to memorize the pieces, but I was required to translate sheet music in my head during practice. It felt like training with one hand tied behind my back.

The same goes for the piano keyboard. It's an absolutely terrible design for what it tries to do but it is so entrenched it will be there long after querty has died.

The piano keyboard is quite intuitive to many, since it physically reflects the complete diatonic scale. Isomorphic keyboards may be intuitive as well, but they might pair better with a hexachord-based way of thinking with its unique half-step mi-fa, and hexachord mutation to cope with both "full" diatonicism and transposition/chromatic notes!

If you're in the key of C, then yes. But in any other key it doesn't work nearly as nice so every chord you have to learn many times over. Of course once you have that time invested it becomes a barrier to entry for others so there is all kinds of inertia at work there.

But have a look at the Janko and other cromatic keyboards to see what the alternatives could look like and how nice it is to have all version of a chord playable with the same fingering.

> But have a look at the Janko and other cromatic keyboards to see what the alternatives could look like

That's the isomorphic keyboard I mentioned. Different name, same thing.

> ... But in any other key it doesn't work nearly as nice ...

It works nicely enough from a visual POV if you handle it via the circle of fifths. The biggest obstacle of course is learning basic finger patterns for the new scale; that's where isomorphic keyboards could well be preferable.

I have an interesting synth here with a chromatic keyboard, the 'Chromatone', it's great to experiment with but I have yet to learn how to play anything with it that I already know how to play on the regular keyboard. Would be nice to do at least on piece and then to play around with transpositions.

> it's great to experiment with but I have yet to learn how to play anything with it that I already know how to play on the regular keyboard.

When playing melodically, the biggest initial hurdle is probably learning to handle half-steps (mi-fa and ti-do) specially as compared to whole steps. Learning other intervals (leaps) can then be done similarly. Try it out with very simple melodies first and see if you can grok the right intuition.