Does anyone recognize this musical notation? It looks like a bunch of vertical bars. Is it supposed to be read by a machine? It was found in an issue of Scientific American from 1846. I'm guessing the "C" at the beginning means common time, as it usually does. 
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To me it looks like wind fingerings. Perhaps for a tin whistle or recorder or fife. Another guess would be something that you can punch holes into for a music box or player piano or something like that. – Todd Wilcox May 31 '21 at 15:56
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3I'll search a bit. However, I did figure out that it's probably not a vertical arrangement of morse code. The letters W R N didn't seem to make much sense. It would help to have an exact date and the name of the paper. – ttw May 31 '21 at 15:59
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Related but not directly helpful: https://www.ifla.org/files/assets/newspapers/2017_Iceland/2017-fisher-en.pdf – Todd Wilcox May 31 '21 at 17:23
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4I’ve looked and looked and I still think it’s a form of clarinet tablature or some other keyed wind instrument. The bottom of this page seems similar: https://lsr.di.unimi.it/LSR/Item?id=615 – Todd Wilcox May 31 '21 at 19:05
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2Fairly certain the source is *Scientific American* Vol. 1 Issue 27 (March 19, 1864), "The Sciences: Music". It's at [this link](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/music-1846-03-19/), but requires a subscription to view (which I don't have, so can't confirm). (@phoog FYI) – Aaron Jun 01 '21 at 06:29
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3@Aaron Indeed that's the source! But the date is 1846. – Tom Jun 01 '21 at 07:40
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1FWIW, Princeton University wasn't named as such until 1896 and wasn't located in Princeton, NJ until 1856 [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princeton_University); there was an American revolutionary war Battle of Princeton in 1777 [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Princeton#:~:text=The%20Battle%20of%20Princeton%20was,Colonel%20Charles%20Mawhood%20in%20Princeton.) (@Tom Thanks for correcting my typo!) – Aaron Jun 01 '21 at 10:51
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@Aaron A place called Princeton Township, NJ was founded in 1838. I did try to find audio of that music and have not succeeded in finding any other references to it so far. – Todd Wilcox Jun 01 '21 at 12:00
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@ToddWilcox the present municipality was founded in 2013 through the merger of the Borough of Princeton and the Township of Princeton, which were both established in the nineteenth century, but the details of how its local government was organized are not perhaps as relevant as the fact that the name "Princeton" first became associated with the place in 1724: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princeton%2C_New_Jersey#Early_history – phoog Jun 01 '21 at 12:16
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@Aaron the university moved to its present location in 1756, not 1856. From your link: "The institution moved to Newark in 1747, and then to the current site nine years later." – phoog Jun 01 '21 at 12:18
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It looks more like gene sequencing than music haha. – Andy Jun 02 '21 at 12:45
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It is "a new system of music" that was set forth in the same periodical, Scientific American, in a subsequent issue, that of March 26, 1846.
The image in the question was taken from the March 19th issue.
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25Unfortunately they fail to explain why they thought this was an improvement on standard notation. – PiedPiper Jun 01 '21 at 15:07
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4@Aaron I just figured that it was something specific to Scientific American, since that seemed likely given the character of the magazine, and I looked at a few other issues from around the same time. I was lucky that the third one I looked at was the one with the key. – phoog Jun 01 '21 at 15:57
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20@PiedPiper: I'm going to guess that the idea was to make music publishing easier by using a notation that was easy to typeset, as opposed to the laborious plate engraving that was standard in those days. – Fred Larson Jun 01 '21 at 17:39
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1LOL at first glance this isn't much worse than guitar tablature (to those who are completely unfamiliar with guitars and chords). But in seriousness, I agree that the sheer number of contributory dashes and dots required to interpret a single note makes this a bizarre system indeed. – Carl Witthoft Jun 01 '21 at 18:06
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9@PiedPiper I guess that depends if you are the typesetter or the musician. Presumably the astute reader could transcribe the music onto paper in the traditional way from the source in the newspaper. The newspaper here would serve only as a medium to transmit the music, not necessarily the medium from which you would *play it*. In the time before the internet we had to be creative about how we transmitted information since there was no other way to do it. This takes up minimal space in a newspaper column and can fit quite a lot of music. – J... Jun 01 '21 at 18:23
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1Hymn-books of this era were *already* being typeset without the need for engraving. If you look at the staff lines in the example below, you can see that each note is a separate type slug. You'd have a precast slug for each duration of each note. (For eighth notes you'd also have freestanding, joined to the right, and joined to the left). https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/pittsspcol/exhibit/sacred-harp-2006/1850-SACR-Gen-Observations-lg_Page_2.jpg – AndyB Jun 01 '21 at 20:44
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@AndyB you need several slugs for each duration of each note, of course, otherwise you can't have any duration of any note appearing more than once on a single sheet. And movable type had been used for music notation since the early 16th century. Thanks for reminding us that it was still in common use in some contexts in the 19th century. – phoog Jun 01 '21 at 21:28
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2It seems like it would have been vastly easier both to read and to typeset if they'd just written out the letters like `ABCDE` etc., with some little dashes and squiggles etc. for octave and duration. – N. Virgo Jun 02 '21 at 00:43
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@Nathaniel They could have invented ABC music notation. Easy to typeset, and certainly no harder to read than this notation. – PiedPiper Jun 02 '21 at 07:59
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2@PiedPiper This notation is more concise than ABC - at a rough estimate it looks to require perhaps half the number of characters and page space as ABC would take. In this time period there was a lot of pressure to get as much information into a newspaper as possible. Every line was precious, so I would expect this was an optimization for size. – J... Jun 02 '21 at 10:16
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@J... Optimisation for size is only useful if the result is readable. – PiedPiper Jun 02 '21 at 12:13
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1@PiedPiper Sure, I just meant that we can understand its purpose as being one with aim to reduce the print footprint, and that playability of the format was not necessarily an objective. That it equally has difficulty in other respects is beside the point - it could have succeeded in being better transcribe-able while remaining impossible to sight-read and still have succeeded in its goal of providing a terse format for the communication of music in a newspaper. – J... Jun 02 '21 at 12:26
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2Seems a lot like compressing a file before sending it in an attachment. The zip file is worthless until you unzip it, but that's fine because the entire reason you compress it is to save space when sending. Different compression methods are better than others for various reasons; I think we're all grateful this method didn't catch on – Taejang Jun 02 '21 at 13:27
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@PiedPiper It kind of reminds me of Braille. If people can learn to read that, I imagine that musicians could learn this. People are remarkably clever at stuff like this, it just takes practice. – Barmar Jun 02 '21 at 14:26
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3Computer magazines used to have programs in hex (including checksums) that readers could copy. – Carsten S Jun 04 '21 at 12:33
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I find this absolutely fascinating, so I decided to use phoog's terrific answer to figure out how this march sounded. So, I present the "Princeton Hill March"!
I won't pretend that this is without error. It's an exceedingly cumbersome notational system, and even slight aberrations in printing can ruin the notation. (For instance, some of the early pitches are unclear: are they Es or F-sharps?) Furthermore, I've found a few errors in the notation, two of which I've marked with asterisks in the above score:
- The first asterisk (the B in m. 5) is technically an octave lower, as is the following D. But then the very next measure jumps up an octave to the written D. This seems odd, so I evened it out here.
- The penultimate A in m. 14 is technically written as just a quarter note, and written one octave lower. But this destroys not only the melodic line, it also results in a measure with one eighth note too few. This pitch is the first glyph on the bottom line of the notational excerpt; the pitch comprises the skinny long-short line, the thick long-short line, and then the notch in the lower half. This notch moves it down an octave (to below middle C), but I'm guessing it's a misprint, and it should be a longer notch in the top half, which both keeps the A in the main register and makes it a dotted quarter instead of just a quarter.
So I'm happy to hear if anyone has any corrections, but really I was just curious to try out this system.
(...I don't recommend it.)
Richard
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2Did you spot the error in the key for the New System? (minim F5) – Elements in Space Jun 01 '21 at 18:35
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3I'm going to have to start answering questions around here to earn enough rep to bounty this answer, if only for "I don't recommend it." Not that it wasn't obviously painful on spec, but I might have been tempted to try to transcribe *something*, just to see how bad it actually is.... – nitsua60 Jun 01 '21 at 23:04
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1@ElementsinSpace Good eye! I didn't catch that, but I certainly see it now. – Richard Jun 02 '21 at 06:52
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That looks like the control sheet for a barrel organ or hurdy-gurdy.
Brian Towers
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16Is there a way for a newspaper reader to transcribe from the image in the question to a barrel organ control sheet? – Todd Wilcox May 31 '21 at 17:19
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2That would be even harder than today's occasional newsprint-rendered `http://example.com/two-and-a-half-column-inches/of/random-letters`. – Camille Goudeseune Jun 01 '21 at 20:48