Numbered Musical Notation - History and Usage

History and Usage

A similar invention was presented by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his work presented to the French Academy of Sciences in 1742. Due to its straightforward correspondence to the standard notation, it is possible that many other claims of independent invention are also true. Grove's credits Emile J.M. Chevé.

Although the system is used to some extent in Germany, France, and the Netherlands, and more by the Mennonites in Russia, it has never become popular in the Western world. See the external links for more information.

The system is very popular among some Asian people, making conventions to encode and decode music more accessible than in the West, as more Chinese can sight read jianpu than standard notation. Most Chinese traditional music scores and popular song books are published in jianpu, and jianpu notation is often included in vocal music with staff notation.

Indexing with numbered notation makes it possible to search a piece of music by melody rather than by title. An actual example can be found in the Chinese New Hymnal. Parson's code on the other hand contains information on rise and fall in pitch only but precise pitches can be decoded from numbered notation. This way, a children's song book be indexed like this:

|1· 1· |1 23· | Row, row, row your boat |1 1 5 5 |6 6 5 - | Twinkle, twinkle little star |1 2 3 1 |1 2 3 1 | Frere Jacques

A reason for its popularity among Chinese is that jianpu fits in with the Chinese music tradition. It is a natural extension and unification of the gongche notation widely used in ancient China for recording music. Gongche uses a number of characters to indicate the musical notes, and jianpu can be seen as using numbers to replace those characters. The monophonic nature of music in Chinese tradition also contributes to widespread use because so few elements are needed for monophonic music that music can be notated with little more than a typewriter.

Compared with the standard notation, the numbered notation is very compact for just the melody line or monophonic parts. It is even possible to transcribe music in between the lines of text. Transcribing harmony can be done by vertically stacking the notes, but this advantage diminishes as the harmony becomes more complex (or polyphonicity increases). The standard notation, with its graphical notation, is better in representing the duration and timing among multiple notes.