Sorry, I think you missed all my points and misconstrued others.

> It's an entry method for writing MIDI (and therefore alo getting standard notation output).

Therefore it is music notation. Also, remember that I am not criticizing the work or the author. I think it's great. I simply fail to see how someone knowledgeable enough to compose music --particularly for multiple instruments-- might use this. That's why I asked the author about the use case.

Sometimes we create solutions for non-existing problems. I've done that myself lots of times.

For example, one of the cases discussed in the article is classical music. I cannot imagine anyone capable of creating scores for orchestras (or even single instruments) not having years of traditional musical training, which would include reading and writing conventional scores.

In other words, for writing anything other than repetitive game music that sounds like bubble gum you have to have years of training and experience with one or more instruments. And that, invariably, implies learning music traditionally.

Yes, there are lots of amazingly gifted musicians who can't read traditional scores. I would venture to guess these people think differently and that they also have a number of limitations because of their unconventional path in music. Yes, there are corner cases where their brain simply seems to be wired for music (cases like autistic kids). Yet, from my experience, the vast majority of self-taught musicians (I'll venture to say 99%) hit very hard walls that prevent them from developing musically and technically.

I had to spend years developing technique and musicianship on classical guitar before being able to approach music at a certain level. This meant years of serious discipline playing scales and all sorts of didactic pieces and exercises to develop the hands, timing, musical sensibilities, etc.

Reading notation is a SMALL part of what it takes to become a musician and a composer. It's something that happens over the years as you become those things. Just like a Chinese kid becoming good at reading and writing something that to most outsiders seems impenetrable.

> Tons of self-taught musicians can't handle it

That's only because self taught musicians, for whatever reason, do not put in the effort to learn the notation. It isn't because it is difficult or impossible to learn. You don't have to be gifted or have a special trait to be able to learn or "handle it".

There's nothing wrong with being self-taught. Some people want to screw around with music and instruments. And that's great. From that to say that these people are going to write scores and need a tool they can use without having to learn traditional musical notation is a huge stretch. The overwhelming majority of self-taught musicians amount to nothing and are far from being able to compose music. This is not a put-down. This is reality. There's a lot more to becoming a musician than notation. Notation, as I said above, is a minuscule part of it (yet very important).

The idea that there are people out there who "can't handle it" is preposterous. Want proof? Chinese population: 1.3 billion; India: 1.2 billion; Pakistan: 200 million; Arab speaking: 400 million; I could go on.

Between those countries/cultures alone you have about three billion people who learn, read and use languages far more complex than, say, English, Spanish, French or German. They are taught early on and even little kids have no problem learning. In languages like Mandarin they associate tones, intonation, volume, dynamics and rhythm with the symbols, combinations of symbols and even usage context.

No, claiming that self taught musicians can't handle traditional music notation is just a cop-out. Nothing other than effort prevents them from learning. It really isn't that hard at all. I suppose there could be corner cases here and there, but that's not the norm.

> Besides, the brain doesn't "evolve" in the Darwinian sense in the span of mere centuries that we have had our modern music notation.

You completely missed my point here and distorted what I said.

I did not say that our brains evolved JUST to read musical notation in a few hundred years. That would be silly. My proposal is that the evolution of our brain over millions of years provides us with unique image recognition, pattern matching and association capabilities --that evolved for other reasons, not for music-- that happen to result in us being really good at symbolic notation.

Think of a road sign indicating a left or right turn coming up. Once you learn the meaning you don't even think about it. You see the sign, pattern match, connect it with meaning and make decisions --instantly. We didn't evolve our brains in the last 100 years to recognize street signs, but we did evolve a set of capabilities --perhaps to detect predators, food, whatever-- that make us really good at communicating and receiving meaning from symbols.