Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale | World Science Festival

> Also, this notation has a slight problem. That problem is that sheet music is terrible. > This has got to be some of the worst jargon and notation for anything, ever. I hear it bandied around in these articles that music notation is awful. Can someone explain to me why? I'm not much of a musician, but I can work my way through sheet music if necessary, or write it when I want to. I don't remember what it was like to learn to read and write music so I'm not going to understand why it's so bad just by thinking about it. First of all, the lines and spaces make a ton of sense to me. When you're playing, reading, or writing a piece, you spend most of your time in a key with a diatonic scale. Maybe you're thinking about the chords: I, vi, ii, V7. The lines and spaces are great for giving you that kind of information. I guess this "completely obscures the relationship between the pitches". I guess that's the case if you forget what key you're playing in. The alternative would be to make the staff fully chromatic, but that sounds like it has a bunch of disadvantages for most music. The chromatic staff ( link ) looks terrible to me, since it spreads out the notes farther. I've already memorized all of the diatonic scales, and now the diatonic scales are jumping around, and the staff covers a shorter interval so you get more of those 8va or 15ma. Hummingbird ( link ) seems like classical notation, just with more redundancy and the symbols changed around a little bit. Maybe it's b