This is actually covered in the video. It's the "we should use a chromatic scale" argument and is surprisingly old.

The answer to why people don't use a chromatic scale is also in there. Very roughy, it's harder to sight read intervals between notes.

Standard music notation is a like a London Underground map, it's symbolic rather than literal.

Being more symbolic gives standard notation many advantages once you learn it.

The video does a much better job of explaining that than I've given. It really is very good.

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onraglanroad 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I'll watch the video later but is it more difficult for singers or musicians of particular instruments?

For example, if you number the tones and have a piano style instrument with alternating white and black keys, then you can have a 6 line stave where spaces are always white keys and black keys are always lines.

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Lio an hour ago | parent [-]

I think the argument is that it gets harder to recognise tonal intervals the further they get apart on the stave.

When sight reading chords pianists, for example, don't really think about every note in the chord.

Instead if you recognise the intervals between the tones and the root you can just place your hand without thinking about it too much.

Since most of the time you're in a single musical key you don't need see every tone separately. You can still flatten, sharpen or normal and you can represent key changes too.

There are other details such as beginners often already using numbers to indicate preferred fingering. I guess that's not a big thing but if you use numbers as part of an alternative system you have to cover all of the edge cases and extensions.

Oh, just remembered another reason. Having a more compact staves means you can represent more musical parts on the same page which is important in orchestral situations where you might want to see what others are doing as you play.

	▲	onraglanroad 15 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I think that's a property of the piano though. If every note had an exact lining, it would seem to work better (unless you were very used to the old system).