Converting sheet music into F# major

[GorillaMan]

@AHunter3

Here is what the viola player would see for a section of 1812.

…which takes up far more space than using conventional notation. Page turns are going to be fun.

The part at the top is the volume indicator. Each voice (instrument) has (or can have) markup for how loud each individual note is to be.

Conventional music doesn’t do this, for very good reasons.
Last time, and I’m trying not to seem harsh or rude here: if you don’t understand the way five-line staves enable the clear display of harmonic structure, then you’re not going to see what’s missing from a piano roll.

[Johanna]

If anyone has studied mid-20th-century composition, you know Pierre Boulez’s scores have stretched convention five-line staff notation to its limits in the direction of AHunter3’s preference… and other scores e.g. by Krzystof Penderecki or Iannis Xenakis have discarded the staff entirely and just use geometrical diagrams to suggest pitch, volume, duration, timbre, and what have you. More like Labanotation (used in choreography) than music. And then there’s electronic music notation, which was developed in the 1960s. But this stuff was notated that way because the conventional staff was useless for kinds of sounds the composers had in mind. For the same old diatonic scales and chords still used in popular genres of music, the blackbirds with funny feathers perched on telephone lines (good imagery there) convey the maximum information my mind needs with the most economical use of space I can imagine.

@Wikipedia

Alternative music notations using chromatic staves

Over the past three centuries, hundreds of music notation systems have been proposed as alternatives to traditional western music notation. Many of these notations seek to improve upon traditional notation by using a “chromatic staff” in which each of the 12 pitch classes has its own unique place on the staff. Examples are the Ailler-Brennink notation and John Keller’s Express Stave. These notations do not require key signatures, or sharp, flat and natural signs. They also represent interval relationships more consistently and accurately than traditional notation. The Music Notation Modernization Association has a website http://www.mnma.org/ with information on many of these alternative notations.

Musical notation

[GorillaMan]

@Johanna

And then there’s electronic music notation, which was developed in the 1960s.

This is the closest to the midi transcriptions AHunter3 is talking about. And you’re right to bring up alternative systems, but often these came about through the necessity of microtonal systems, or by being able to produce ones which are not intended to be read musically by the human eye. This is quite different from asserting "Two notes in the same vertical position differentiated by some stupid floating symbol in front? Stupid", and using this as an argument for reworking established conventions.