Proposal to Encode Kahnotation

[MTDougherty]

Tap dancing is a unique form of dance because its actions are intended to produce a variety of percussive sounds.  Tap dancers frequently perform as musicians in an ensemble; sometimes as vocalists or instrumentalists. These percussive sounds are integral to the musical performance, and on occasion the rationale for the song’s composition.

Feet and hand movements are precisely timed in a fashion similar to drummers, creating unique percussive sounds through intricate body movements.  A dance movement can produce multiple sounds.  The method of percussion also creates timbre, variability of impulse, attack, and decay.  An example comparison would be a drummer’s “rim shot” and the Tap dancers’ “Stomp”.

Kahnotation was developed in the 1930’s by Stanley Kahn and was published in 1951, making it the second oldest dance notation in continual use.  Stanley Kahn is considered a legend in the Tap community, recognized as such by the International Tap Association for having created Kahnotation and for having taught Tap dance for sixty years until his death in 1995.  The notation has been used in training and choreography for decades.  Some of the Kahnotation symbols are identical to common music notations (e.g., repeats, fermata) and are not duplicated in this proposal. Attached are two routines (“Shim Sham” and “EE”) demonstrating Kahnotation composed in musical script. 

Enabled though standard musical notation practices, the inclusion of Kahnotation into musicXML will enhance student training and choreography, promoting a sustainable framework for archiving.  The use of common musical notation software will encourage more precise and effective written communication between Tap performers and other members of the musical ensemble.

Symbol specifics and examples are attached. EE-D7.mscz.pdf ShimSham-Weber-D7.xlsx.pdf ShimSham-Weber-D7.pdf

MusicXML_Proposal_to_Encode_Kahnotation-D8.pdf

[pavelstudeny]

Are the Kahnotation symbols included in Unicode, first of all? I can't find them.

[MTDougherty]

They are not in unicode.

[MTDougherty]

Here is the typetool font file. KahnotationV3.vfb.zip

The font contains symbols that are not part of the proposal. For example "1234567890&e" used to describe time counting in a spreadsheet; but not needed when notating with standard musical notation software because one uses measures, triplets, quarter notes, etc.

[mdgood]

Thank you for this most interesting proposal!

Before adding this to either SMuFL or MusicXML, I would like to see more investigation about the usage of different dance and tap dance symbol systems. If this is indeed a commonly used standard format in the tap dance community, often used together with common Western music notation, then it seems like a promising idea. On the other hand, if this is one of 20 different tap notation systems, none of which is used very much, or not used in combination with music notation, then it doesn't seem like such a good idea.

SMuFL's size adds complexity. This is fine if the complexity is worth the benefit. I think expansion of SMuFL beyond music notation symbols should be carefully considered before moving forward.

Is there a survey of different tap and other dance notation systems, or data about their relative usage?

[MTDougherty]

Here is a rough historical perspective. Music notation is far more evolved and cohesive. Dance notations go back barely five hundred years and are fragmented with no coherency, only in the last 120 years they have become formalized. Unfortunately there has been no figure like Bach to unify dance notation to music notation. I would estimate around 100 systems have been developed, all incompatible. The best authority of the subject is Ann Hutchinson Guest, Choreographics: A Comparison of Dance Notation Systems from the Fifteenth Century to the Present; she has written about 25 books, mostly about Labanotation.

Notation systems fall into three categories: narrative descriptions, quasi-musical, and dance-centric incompatible-to-musical-notation. I will skip narrative methods and mention only Labanotation because it is the longest in use beginning in 1928, and is most widely used in ballet. Of the 100 systems probably 10-20 are in use today for all types of dance. Kahnotation dating to ~1933.

The fail on previous quasi-musical systems has been to mess with the notes/stems or the direction of staves to indicate rotation angles. Stepanov (~1894) would be a good example, extensively used by Russian Ballet until the Bolshevik revolution, it is completely incompatible with music notation software, and could not be corrected to conform to current software.

There is a trend in the last 10 years to develop dance notations wholly from music notation software; an example would be Castano Flamenco notation. Each stave indicates a type of movement/sound such as a heel-step or toe-tap. In tap I have been able identify two systems, one is privately used in Germany, the other (Varlotta) can be purchased. Both systems are like Castano, having no special dance symbols and they are recently created. The meaning of staves and use of musical symbols are incompatible amongst each other. But fundamentally they are doing the same things to generate sounds. The difference being the Kahnotation system defines a unique symbol to the sound (hand clap, foot stomp, toe tap). From this an unambiguous Rosetta stone can be created amongst these and future dance notations using music notation software, see zapateado attachment. This is because Kahnotation catalogs nearly all the fundamental actions that a foot can make to produce sounds, using unique symbols.

zapateado-IntroD2.pdf

Although dance is the fundamental driving purpose behind Kahnotation, I must emphasize the creation of unique sounds is what makes tap dance different from almost all other dances. The tap instrumentalist is as critical to the musical performance as any other performer in the ensemble; their percussion instruments are on their feet, that the rest of the band needs to hear precisely in order to work the song. To the untrained ear such sounds may sound the same, but for professional tap musical performers the different sounds are as different as using up-bow, down-bow, accidentals, or snap-pizzicato to define musical sound.

At the moment there is not wide use, which I would say is true for all dance notations because of the lack of software tools. Without notation software the creation of dance scores is a very labor intensive and inflexible process. Labanotation is probably the only effort that has professional Choreographers and notation archivists.

There is also a similar philosophical current as in music: notation limits spontaneity and artistic freedom. Although specious, it is more ingrained in the dance community, hence the lack of wide coherent effort compared to the music community. Musicians function as part of a band working in stratified ways; generally dancers are independently interpreting the music. I see a real opportunity beyond tap to get dance and music on the same page for social-lead-follow dancing, where fundamental beat rhythms are coin of the realm; essential in learning the basic dance patterns, and for staying in sync to music. Although not producing musical sound, this form of dance in social music settings is where great potential lies and where most dance training occurs.

Choreographers, as opposed to general dancers, typically use dance notation. I believe the future of dance notation is music notation because of economics, path of least resistance for software tools, and the intimate connection of rhythm, sound, music and dance. By creating a unified approach connecting musical rhythm to foot movement & sound, notated by music notation software, it opens up possibilities and tools previously inaccessible to tap dancers, and more generally to non-ballet dance instructors & their students.

[pavelstudeny]

Unicode support should be a necessary condition and even then it would be a question whether SMuFL scope should include all kinds of musical symbols, like byzantine music notation (supported by Unicode) or Kahnotation. Probaby not, at least at this stage.

[dspreadbury]

@pavelstudeny, I couldn't disagree with you more. SMuFL exists principally because Unicode itself does not encode a sufficient quantity of the music notation symbols in common (or even uncommon) usage in what you might loosely term Common Western Music Notation (or CWMN to its friends). The vast majority of the symbols encoded in SMuFL are not encoded in Unicode, and pre-existing inclusion in Unicode is absolutely not a criterion for new symbols to meet in order to be included in SMuFL.

Although one possible end goal for SMuFL might be to pursue inclusion of the characters identified through the creation of the standard in a future version of Unicode, this has so far been explicitly determined to be a non-goal of the project. Instead, it is our intent to implement in SMuFL the range of symbols that is useful for developers of music applications and, consequently if indirectly, for musicians themselves.

I personally believe that there is a strong case for including Kahnotation in SMuFL. It is possible that we should also include other schemes of dance notation that are used in conjunction with CWMN, but the other prominent dance notation in use, Labanotation, is from what I understand of it unsuitable for inclusion within scores using CWMN as it is essentially orientated vertically rather than horizontally, making it impractical to match events in the music with the characters describing the steps and movements.

Kahnotation is an established, complete, and practical. I believe we have included other ranges in SMuFL with far less convincing cases for their inclusion.

[pavelstudeny]

Ok, apologies, point taken.

[dspreadbury]

Addressed with pull request #75