KISS notation

KISS notation (short for "Keep It Simple, Stupid") is a schema for notation systems for any rank-2 tuning system, originally proposed by Mike Battaglia on the Yahoo! Tuning list, using standard clefs, staves, accidentals, and note names. It could be easily extended to any epimorphic scale, rather than used only for MOS, but below is the original specification.

Mike Battaglia's system (the original KISS notation)

For any rank-2 system, choose a MOS to be the equivalent of the diatonic scale, and thus receive the note nominals.

Staff

For an N-note scale, the number of staff lines is equal to (N/2+1) rounded up, so a 7- or 8-note MOS would have 5 lines, a 9- or 10-note MOS would have 6 lines, etc. The treble clef and bass clef are separated by three staff lines, as in standard notation, so that the standard treble and bass clef staves have a single ledger line in between them; the middle note is "Middle C" and is standardized to the same pitch as it is in Western music.

Key Signatures

Choose the mode of the "diatonic" MOS to be equivalent to the major scale. The key signatures will be such that this mode on "Middle C" will have no accidentals.

Note Names

The accidentals # and b represent the chroma of the MOS scale, ascending and descending respectively. Notes can be labelled with numbers, as specified in the original specification, where "Middle C" is labelled 1, and then with ascending numbers up however much is necessary before repeating. The reason numbers are used is to avoid complications with how letters are assigned to note names.

Numbers for note nominals were originally suggested in Battaglia's post. but in the follow-ups, he suggested going with letters instead to avoid confusion between absolute pitches and relative ones.

Possible variations

A Minor

Instead of defining "Middle C", we can define "the A below Middle C" as the top line of the bass clef, at 220 Hz, such that the "favored mode" is minor, rather than major, in Western notation. This makes notating with letters much less complicated, although fixed-do notations will still need to be extended and there is no widely accepted way to do that.

Armodue theory

Armodue theory's notation system restricts the staff lines to span a single octave, such that in the nonatonic scale it uses, there are 4 lines and the note 1 position below the bottom line is labelled "1" and the note 1 position above the top line is just below 1 of the next octave. Then, the clef simply specifies the octave being used. This can be generalized to any scale, where in scales with even numbers of notes, the low and high notes are equivalent.

Quasi-diatonic MOS notation

Quasi-diatonic MOS notation's main extensions to KISS notation are a system of clefs that naturally preserves the relation between clefs and nominals found in standard notation, as well as a systematic way of choosing a favored mode and letter names for notes.