Notation: Palingenesis

After prolonged thought on the subject I'm inclined to give up what I've developed so far in the way of MA notation and start anew. The music-staff-like system that I've been contemplating has a number of shortcomings: its limited in what it can capture, the lines of the "staff" make it difficult to read the overlaid symbols, and much of the staff is often completely empty. This latter fact in particular strongly suggests to me that there may be a more compact, efficient, and readable way of conveying the same information.

Rather than reinvent the wheel this time it seems prudent to survey the field and see what's been done in the past. There's bugger-all in the way of notation specifically devoted to the martial arts, which is the primary reason that I took up this project in the first place, but there's been a surprising amount of work done in the related field of dance notation. In particular Ann Hutchinson Guest has written a book, Choreo-Graphics, which compares a number of historic and contemporary systems, thus saving me the hassle of trying to do that myself.

Intent

Early on in the book Ms. Guest makes the following observation:

What in one dance notation system is seen by some as an advantage is seen by others as a disadvantage. Is the aim of the system to be simple, providing a memory-aid for those who know the style of movement? If so, it is likely to be found efficient by those who need scientific accuracy. But if great care is taken to analyze and record movement precisely, many people may find such a system too complex, requiring that too much attention be paid to the nuances of movement and consequently too great a need to analyze. For an objective evaluation of any system, one must know the purpose that system was intended to serve. Different systems have different aims.¹

There is an unavoidable trade-off between completeness and complexity: a simple system may fail to capture all the necessary information, while a system which captures every detail may prove unwieldy. The appropriate balance between the two is determined by the ultimate aim of the system; what, exactly, is it trying to accomplish? I've got to answer that question before proceeding.

Rereading my original post on the subject of notation I believe that the intent of this hypothetical system that I'm devising can best be summarized by the phrase "be better than English". The MA books in my possession describe forms and techniques in English, occasionally augmented by pictures, but these descriptions suffer from various shortcomings that I lay out in the post. I'm trying to build a system which can do a better job conveying these forms/techniques to the same audience with an equal (or greater, if possible) level of detail.

Let's think about the audience for a second... who are they? The intended audience is a function of the topic under discussion. Manuals associated with a particular school/studio are directed at that school's students/staff. Books concerned with a particular style outside the context of a studio usually assume a reader with a generic MA background. The same can also be said for materials which deal with general MA theory.

What's useful to note here is that, while the assumptions regarding the audience's background may change, the level of detail with which techniques are presented tends to remain fairly constant. Few, if any, of the materials in my collection attempt to assemble a scholarly, scientific record which accurately captures every detail of a performance. Rather, they tend to follow a practical, "how to" format that assumes the reader understands how to execute specific actions, and focus instead on documenting the sequence in which the actions are to be performed.

It follows from there that, since the ultimate goal is to provide a superior replacement for these types of materials, I need not worry about documenting the subtle nuances of a performance. The system under development should assume that the audience understands the basic building blocks of a form or technique and should instead seeks to convey in as much detail as is feasible the means by which these actions are strung together. This approach, while seemingly optimal, necessarily hinges on an accurate understanding of the audience's background, which raises another question: What can the audience be assumed to know?

The Common Body Of Knowledge

A community of practitioners, of any discipline, shares a set of conventions, techniques, definitions, best practices, and so on. This common body of knowledge provides the informational background against which the community's activities take place; all members of the community can simply be assumed to know certain things. Ms. Guest notes how, in the field of dance, this fact can be leveraged to produce more compact and readable forms of notation:

An obvious device for anyone wishing to jot down rapid notes is use of a letter (or letters) for the name of each step. If the steps themselves and their manner of performance are widely known, such abbreviations suffice. All that needs to be recorded is the sequence in which the steps occur in the dance,¹

It seems to me that this holds true for the martial arts as well. Within a particular school or style phrases such as "front punch" or "roundhouse kick" represent well-defined actions with an ideal form of execution; they need no further explanation³. An MA notation system can be made more efficient by omitting such redundant details provided that the nature and composition of the shared body of knowledge is well-understood. So I ask again: What can we assume the audience already knows?

In my post on functional requirements I hypothesized that any form/technique can be broken down into a sequence of postures, strikes, and acts of attention⁴. I believe an MA system can safely assume that, within the confines of a particular school/style, each of the following types of performance elements have a preferred, "correct" method of execution:

• stances
• blocks
• punches, kicks, and other strikes

Having set up this fundamental assumption we'll need to be vigilant for places where it may not hold, providing some mechanism for dealing with deviations from the rule as they arise.

Summary

In conclusion, this system which I've set about devising is intended to provide a practical record of forms/techniques targeted at the practitioners of a particular school/style. What I hope to develop is a framework that works well for any style which the practitioners thereof can then customize as they see fit.

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1 P. xv
2 P. 1
3 Or, if they do, the directions for a form aren't the place to do it.
4 At least in the case of styles/arts centered on atemi waza. That's what I have the most experience with; I can't say whether my observation generalizes to arts which place more emphasis on locks/throws.