A proposal of a color music notation system on a single melody for music beginners

Abstract

Music teachers often encounter obstructions in teaching beginners in music reading. Conventional notational symbols require beginners to spend significant amount of time in memorizing, which discourages learning at early stage. This article proposes a newly-developed color music notation system that may improve the recognition of the staff and the numbered musical notation for music beginners. The focus is on single melodies that are relatively easy for music beginners to read and to play, which may increase students’ confidence at the first step of music learning. The color music notation system that associates color music scores with color and music synesthesia by human vision and audition is proposed. Pitch, duration, range, and intensity of music elements are coded as colors, lattices, graphs, and shape sizes, respectively. Based on the 12-tone equal temperament, we adopt the Itten color wheel and the natural color system with 12 primary colors to retain colors accurately when the notation is reproduced. Hopefully, beginners can use the novel colored music scores to read and to play music quickly, accurately, and confidently.