I recently realized that shifting the notes on the TwinNote staff up by a semitone offered some nice advantages. Here are the old and new note layouts, showing just the “natural” notes from the C major scale:
In the old layout the notes E and F share the same line, while
in the new layout B and C share the same ledger line. Now
compare these layouts with the layout of the traditional
treble clef staff:
As illustrated above, in the old TwinNote layout the notes C, D, and E are on the same lines and spaces as they are on the treble staff. But in the new layout all of the notes C, D, E, F, G, A, and B (the full C major scale) appear on the same lines and spaces as they do on the treble staff.
This makes it easier for anyone who already knows the treble staff to learn TwinNote, and easier to switch back and forth between the two systems bilingually. Of course, this correspondence does not continue into the top half of the staff, but in TwinNote the top of the staff is the same as the bottom half, so once you have learned the bottom half you know the top half as well.
Aesthetically speaking, the new layout puts the notes B and C on the ledger line below, above, and in the middle of the default two-octave staff. This has a nice symmetry to it, especially since B to C is where the C major scale ends and begins (with C major being privileged in the western tradition as the center of the circle of fifths, the key without any sharps or flats, etc.).
(In the old layout, the lines and spaces of the notes F, G, A, and B match the top of the bass clef staff in traditional notation. So the correspondence extended from the F below middle C to the E above it, spread across the two traditional clefs, which was not as helpful as the new layout.)
Experimental Five-Line TwinNote Staff
In other news I have started to experiment with a version of TwinNote that uses a five-line staff. See TwinNote Labs for more on this.
TwinNote Forum
I wanted to provide a venue for public discussion of TwinNote, and a place where people could comment and ask questions. So I set up a forum on this site using phpBB. Please feel free to post any comments or questions there. Update: I have taken the forum down as of July 2011. Too much spam.