The English term „music“ refers to what we actually listen to, but also to how we write it down on paper, like this:
This musical notation is actually like a programming language, because it allows to write down complex musical pieces on paper.
But there is of course more to it than just mechanically playing what is on the paper and dealing with the inconveniences of the musical instruments. What makes it pleasant is the interpretation and that requires skill and intuition and experience and feelings. Since this is not a music blog, I will leave this as it is and stick with the relatively irrelevant side issue of the musical notation language, how we write music.
Generally there might be issues that it is hard to read, because things look too similar, but on the other hand musicians just see it immediately and at least fast enough to work efficiently with it, so I guess that this way of writing music is generally OK.
Now we have the possibility to cover a certain range, slightly more than two octaves, efficiently. Beyond that it will get hard to count the auxiliary lines. To cover different instruments, at least three kinds of Clefs are in use and the same note usually means the same. I think that there are ways to shift the whole system by one ocatve, at least for beginners, but usually with the three clefs that is not necessary for the whole piece of music.
Now for some brass instruments we have different sizes, as for other instruments as well. So the same way to play it yields a different tone on different sizes of the instrument. Just take the recorder, which has five common sizes. They are based on different f and c notes and when you play an f-based recorder you have to adopt to this by playing an f when reading an f-note, for example by closing all wholes. On a c-based recorder you read a c (the deepest you can regularly play) and close all holes to play this. Normally people know this and can deal with this. For brass instruments a different approach was chosen. For situations where you actually want to hear an F and might actually write an F in the notes for one size of the instrument, the larger or smaller instruments just call something an „F“ which is actually not an F at all for the rest of the musical world. So for these instruments „F“ does not mean the tone that you hear, but the grip combination that you do to achieve the tone, simplified. It was supposedly meant to make it easier for relatively unskilled musicians to adapt to different sizes of their instruments, but now even professionals have to live with this.
So they invented a new mechanism to simplify things, which in the overall view makes things a lot more complicated and simplifies just something trivial that even average skilled musicians can easily learn.
I respect the musicians for what they do and I guess since they can deal with this irregularity, it is kind of OK. Or at least up to the musicians to decide if they want to fix this or not.
But we can learn a lot for IT solutions from it.
We often have the situation that we need to adapt a software for another related, but slightly different use case. And we often get the request to simplify things.
It is important to think carefully at which level we do the adaption, so that it will make sense in the long run.
And we should simplify things, but there is no point in trying to make things simpler than they actually are, this simply cannot work an will backfire.
