Abstract

In his book The Ethnomusicologist (1971), Mantle Hood recalled his mentor Jaap Kunst advising him how to produce a musical transcription that “looks the way it sounds”. Hood went on to describe this quality as “one of the most desirable features of a system of notation”, but was not very specific as to what it means or how one system of notation might “look the way it sounds” more than another. His starting point was Western staff notation, and although he recognised its limitations for representing non-Western music and considered alternatives such as computer-generated “melographs”, his thoughts on an ideal form of notation for analysing any music remained speculative.

In this presentation I take a closer look at what it might mean for notation to “look the way it sounds”: that is, I consider what makes a good visual analog for a particular form of sound patterning. This leads me into readings on the psychology of auditory and visual perception, from which I infer certain principles for representing musical sound in analogous visual forms. While recognising that what “looks the way it sounds” will also be affected by personal and cultural variation, I apply these general principles in evaluating existing notation systems and imagining a new one that would be intuitive for the widest possible range of users as a means of representing any musical sound for purposes of analysis.

To make these abstract principles more concrete, I reflect on my progress in developing such a notation system over the past ten years. This system, which I call Global Notation, has been introduced in my website globalnotation.org.uk and in a 2020 article in the online journal Analytical Approaches to World Music. I am currently trying to improve it in line with the principles discussed here, and would welcome responses from this audience as to what would make Global Notation look more “the way it sounds”.

Bio

Andrew Killick taught ethnomusicology at the University of Sheffield for 22 years before retiring in 2025. He has published extensively on music of Korea and currently focuses on exploring questions of transcription and analysis through his own form of visualisation, Global Notation. He is a Research Editor of the online journal Analytical Approaches to World Musics.

Recommended reading

Bregman, Albert S. 1990. “Chapter 1: The Auditory Scene.” In Auditory Scene Analysis: The Perceptual Organization of Sound. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Pp. 1-45. [Read at least up to p. 29.]

Killick, Andrew. 2020 “Global Notation as a Tool for Cross-Cultural and Comparative Music Analysis.” Analytical Approaches to World Music 8(2): 235-279.

[The above article is accompanied by responses from eight senior scholars in world music analysis, which can be found through the journal’s Previous Issues page. Of these, I recommend reading at least the following:]

Widdess, Richard. 2020. “From Staff to Global: A Response to Killick.” Analytical Approaches to World Music 8(2): 339-345.