Since I'm not terribly great at the technicals of playing a piano, I thought I would do really well with a piano roll, but in practice, I find it much easier to read sheet music. Some reasons why:
1. Piano rolls spend a lot of visual real estate on functionally unimportant stuff. You need to see the full 7-octave range even if you need to play only 3-4 octaves at any given point of time. By contrast, traditional scores let you use clef changes or 8va/8vb notation to do access different ranges, allowing the full range to be compressed in around 2 inches or so of space.
2. Even worse than pitch range is the difference in the time dimension: when you have a piece that varies between long, sustained notes and bursts of short melodies, a traditional score can give you the pitch contour of the first part and the sufficient detail of the second part. A piano roll means that you either have to stretch the first bit out so long you can't see the overall contour or you have to make the second part so small as to be virtually unreadable (or, as I've found on some pieces, both!). Alternatively, you might opt for a non-uniform mapping on the time dimension, but that is probably going to screw players up big time.
3. Piano rolls (at least every one that I've seen) are unable to reflect useful ancillary information, such as dynamics, very effectively. Admittedly, traditional scores tend to suck at reflecting the true dynamics very well, but they are more than adequate for getting people to reproduce them in a rather recognizable way. It's kind of like written text and language--our written languages, even IPA, can't faithfully reproduce spectograms of human speech, but there's sufficient information to reproduce sounds that we can understand as pretty accurate speech.
4. It definitely seems a lot harder on a piano roll to recognize patterns that ease the actual playing of the tune. For example, seeing that this section is an earlier section at a different tempo, different key, different pitch, etc.
Your comparison to IPA is interesting—it’s as if the piano roll is a raw “phonetic” transcription, while traditional notation is more like a structural “phonemic” representation that conveys the sounds as they’re functionally understood. The former treats all information as equally important, missing high-level structure and using space poorly; the latter omits some information and encodes other information redundantly or in a compressed format to convey what’s most important to the reader.
1. Piano rolls spend a lot of visual real estate on functionally unimportant stuff. You need to see the full 7-octave range even if you need to play only 3-4 octaves at any given point of time. By contrast, traditional scores let you use clef changes or 8va/8vb notation to do access different ranges, allowing the full range to be compressed in around 2 inches or so of space.
2. Even worse than pitch range is the difference in the time dimension: when you have a piece that varies between long, sustained notes and bursts of short melodies, a traditional score can give you the pitch contour of the first part and the sufficient detail of the second part. A piano roll means that you either have to stretch the first bit out so long you can't see the overall contour or you have to make the second part so small as to be virtually unreadable (or, as I've found on some pieces, both!). Alternatively, you might opt for a non-uniform mapping on the time dimension, but that is probably going to screw players up big time.
3. Piano rolls (at least every one that I've seen) are unable to reflect useful ancillary information, such as dynamics, very effectively. Admittedly, traditional scores tend to suck at reflecting the true dynamics very well, but they are more than adequate for getting people to reproduce them in a rather recognizable way. It's kind of like written text and language--our written languages, even IPA, can't faithfully reproduce spectograms of human speech, but there's sufficient information to reproduce sounds that we can understand as pretty accurate speech.
4. It definitely seems a lot harder on a piano roll to recognize patterns that ease the actual playing of the tune. For example, seeing that this section is an earlier section at a different tempo, different key, different pitch, etc.