Facilitating reading sheet music

Hello,

In order to help me reading sheet music for piano & voice more efficiently, I would like to change the appearance of all non-naturals (including accidentals) in addition to the key signature:

• all flats red and a shape indicating the centre of gravity being a tad lower,
• all sharps green and a shape indicating the centre of gravity being a tad higher.

Notes can already be coloured, and I can do the colour coding on a note-by-note basis, but could there be a configurable scheme for note colours and heads?

Kind regards,
peter

Context

After 40 years or so playing the piano, on and off, I still find it hard to read sheet music, let along real-time sight reading. At some point in the past I simply asked my sister to play a piece for me and I learned it by ear; but that is not realy scalable. I wonder what could be done to make reading sheet music easier. In order to come up with mitigation strategies, I need to understand the obstacles first. To me, with an engineering and scientific mindset, and perhaps somewhat on the autistic spectrum, the issues are as follows (based on my understanding of the evolution of the European notation system, https://medium.com/@peter-wurmsdobler/european-music-notation-history-d…).

The initial notation system by Guido of Arezzo created a more or less bijective system mapping symbols to notes in a one-to-one fashion; as music evolved and became more complex, more notes were added to the scale through "modifiers" such as flat and sharps. These as well as key signatures introduced a one-to-many mapping of a symbol to the actual note to be played or sung: a certain position on the staff results in different notes as a function of the key signature. This effect is exacerbated by the existence of different clefs. All together results in a higher cognitive load when parsing sheet music: the note to be played is a function of absolute staff position as well as context (clef and key signature).

As an engineer I would say, that once all twelve tones were established in conjunction with the equal temperament, there would have been the opportunity to come up with a better system; this was probably a century or so before Bach when the amount of complex written music and legacy was not that large yet. Perhaps there were even attempts I am not aware of. The notation system predicament is very similar to the transition from 7-bit ASCII characters, over 8bit ASCII characters allowing language (=context) specific characters depending on the key maps resuling in funny characters, and eventually to unicode as a superset including 7-bit ASCII.

Most musicians have learned to cope with the shortcomings of the established notation system; given the existing wealth of sheet music in this system, and the fact that this system is engrained in most education (including myself), it would be difficult to un-learn that, learn a new system and transscribe all music, even if a better system was around, such as a horizontal version of Klavarskribo. The only way now is to get over and on with it. Nevertheless, perhaps small modification that address the shortcomings could lower the entrance barrier for me and all others who struggle with reading music:

1. only use one clef with a shift in multiples of an octave as necessary, e.g. for piano staves the treble clef for the top (right hand) and treble clef offset by two octaves for the bottom (left hand),
2. in addition to the key signature, all non-naturals (including accidentals) are colour and shape coded in a configurable manner allowing a unique one-to-one mapping between symbol and note.