The Rotational Score: Part 1: Designing Sheet Music
- Nov 21, 2025
- 8 min read
Because of my audio-visual synaesthesia and autistic way of processing information, traditional sheet music has always felt like a language I could hear but never quite learn to speak. Yet as I’ve explored singing bowls as true musical instruments, I’ve felt a growing need for a form of notation that reflects the subtle, fluid, and tactile way they are played.
So this project becomes both a personal necessity and a creative challenge: to design my own kind of “sheet music,” a custom graphical score that I can intuitively understand—and one that I can eventually share with others who want to play singing bowls with the same depth, nuance, and intention.
Introducing Longplayer
Longplayer is a piece of music designed to last for 1,000 years. Rather than being a song with a beginning and end, Longplayer is a slow, shifting sound environment that is always changing. The music of Longplayer is made from the sounds of singing bowls. Longplayer uses recordings of these bowls and plays them in layers so that their tones overlap, fade, and slowly transform over time. Because of the way the bowls resonate, the music feels spacious, gentle, and continuously evolving.
Longplayer also has a unique visual score designed for musicians to play it live. This is called a graphical score because instead of traditional sheet music, it uses shapes and lines to show how the bowls should be played. Each shape represents a sound and tells a player when to make it and which bowl to use. The score allows six people simultaneously to perform Longplayer together using a very large collection of singing bowls, 234 in total. Currently it is being performed by a computer with audio recordings.
While Longplayer’s graphical score can be performed by humans, it is really best suited for computers to manage. The score was designed to guide a piece of music that lasts for centuries, which means it needs a level of precision and timing that is difficult for people to keep up with in a live setting. For a graphical score to be easily read by human performers, it would need to be much quicker to navigate, and easier to reproduce and teach.
Longplayer’s score, though beautiful and inspiring, would require major changes to meet those needs. Its strength lies in showing what is possible through long-term, slowly shifting musical patterns, and it offers a powerful starting point for developing new, more human-friendly approaches. I love the idea of circles within circles representing the circular nature of playing singing bowls and plan to keep it. I will be sharing below my custom graphical score concept.
Why Not Use Sheet Music?
Traditional sheet music is not well suited to singing bowl compositions because each bowl has its own unique set of natural frequencies, overtones, and resonant behaviors that cannot be captured by standard note notation.
Staff notation assumes that an instrument can reliably produce a single, clearly defined pitch when indicated, but a singing bowl often contains multiple tones at once, which shift depending on how it is struck or played around the rim. Two bowls labeled with the same musical note: such as C or F, may sound very different in warmth, brightness, sustain, and overtone structure.
As a result, traditional notation cannot communicate the subtle choices required to bring out a bowl’s character, such as whether to emphasize the fundamental tone or a higher harmonic, how long to let it vibrate, or how to shape the sound through touch and motion. Without a way to show these nuances, conventional sheet music would flatten the richness of singing bowls rather than express what makes them special.
Exploring Score Requirements
Here are some particular requirements I need to keep in consideration of this custom graphical score and I'll explain below what each factor entails:
Single Performance Timespans (5-60 mins)
Single Person Bowl Collections (4-9 Bowls)
Pre-defined bowl collection (Realistically reproducible collection by single musician)
Interchangeable Bowl Collection (bowl equivalent definition)
Differentiating Fundamental Tone play and Overtone Play
Teachable to read (Intuitive Symbols, Numbers and Shapes)
Scalable to play (works with simple and complex music scores)
Teachable to Play (Music is reproducible by other people)
Single Performance Timespans'
My custom graphical score requires Single Performance Timespans of about 5 to 60 minutes because it is designed for real human musicians who need enough time to enter a steady listening state, follow visual cues comfortably, and shape each sound with attention and breath.
Sessions shorter than five minutes would not allow the gradual unfolding of sound or the meditative pacing that the music depends on, while performances longer than an hour become physically and mentally demanding and risk turning the score into a test of endurance rather than a deep listening experience.
The 5–60 minute range offers a practical window in which performers can explore slow changes, resonance, and spacious timing while still keeping the piece human-readable, playable, and repeatable for audiences and musicians alike.
Single Person Bowl Collections
My custom graphical score uses Single Person Sized Bowl Collections of roughly 4 to 9 singing bowls because this number allows one musician to move comfortably, hear subtle changes, and play with accuracy while maintaining a continuous musical flow. A performer must be able to reach every bowl without rushing, keep track of their placement in the score, and sustain a meditative or attentive state.
By contrast, Longplayer’s use of 234 bowls is extraordinary but impractical for a single musician attempting a planned, uninterrupted performance; no one could manage that many bowls within arm’s reach, remember their sonic roles, or transition smoothly between them without breaking the music’s continuity.
A smaller, personal-sized set ensures that a live performer can stay physically grounded, musically focused, and fully engaged in shaping the sound throughout the entire piece.
Pre-Defined Bowl Collection
My custom graphical score requires a pre-defined bowl collection because each piece is written for a realistic, reproducible set of bowls that a single musician can acquire, arrange, and play. For any given score, I list the specific bowls I am using: usually defined by pitch, size, or material; so that the performance can be repeated reliably in the future.
This not only keeps the music practical for one performer to manage, but it also allows other musicians to assemble a comparable set of 4–9 bowls and produce a composition with similar character, tuning, and resonance, even if their bowls are not identical to mine.
By working with a defined yet attainable collection, the music remains grounded in real instruments rather than abstract sonic ideas, making the score shareable, teachable, and performable by different players in different locations, while still preserving the recognisable sound world of the piece.
Interchangeable Bowl Definitions
My custom graphical score allows for an interchangeable bowl definitions too because it is designed to be adaptable to different musicians, different singing bowls, and evolving sound preferences. By defining bowls not only by fixed pitches but also by equivalent categories: such as size, shape, or general pitch range; a performer can modify the overall tone of the piece while still staying true to its musical structure.
This means a musician could, for example, replace all highest-pitched bowls with equivalent versions that are one standard size larger to lower the sound of the entire score in a consistent way.
Such flexibility ensures that the composition does not depend on rare or perfectly matched bowls, empowers musicians to work creatively with the instruments they have, and makes the score more resilient, reproducible, and personal, while still preserving the relationships and balance intended in the original design.
Differentiating Fundamental Tone play and Overtone Play
My custom graphical score requires a clear differentiation between a musician playing the fundamental tone of a bowl or one of the overtone notes of the bow, because singing bowls can produce very different frequencies depending on how they are activated, and performers need to know which type of sound is intended at each moment in the composition.
By indicating whether a bowl should be struck, played around the rim within a particular note relative to the bowls overtone range options and not a numerically defined frequency. The score guides musicians toward either the warm, grounding fundamental tone or the bright, shimmering overtone, making it possible to shape phrases, harmonies, and transitions with precision and intention. This level of control supports expressive playing, accurate tuning relationships, and the ability to adapt techniques in real time.
Longplayer’s system, by contrast, does not distinguish between these modes of sound production beyond being struck and fundamental notes, which limits the nuance performers can bring to live interpretation. In my score, this separation is essential to ensure that the desired frequencies emerge clearly and consistently, allowing each performance to fully reflect the musical design.
Teachable To Read
My custom graphical score needs to be teachable and intuitive to read, using clear symbols, numbers, and shapes, so that musicians can learn it without years of training and can perform it with confidence and consistency. The goal is for players to understand at a glance which bowl to use, how to activate it, and how long a sound should last, allowing the score to be shared, taught, and reproduced across different communities and skill levels.
Longplayer’s graphical score, while conceptually beautiful, offers only a limited set of visual variables and leaves many aspects of playing, such as dynamics, technique, and transitions; largely to chance or personal interpretation. This works well for a computer-driven system, but it makes human performance less predictable and far harder to standardize.
By contrast, a clearly teachable visual language ensures that performances of scores remain musically intentional, repeatable, and accessible to musicians who may be new to singing bowls or to graphical notation itself.
Scalable To Play
My custom graphical score must be scalable to play so that it works equally well for simple pieces and more complex musical structures without requiring performers to use every possible notation variable each time or a different set of graphical scores.
This flexibility allows musicians to start with basic elements, such as a small set of bowls and a few sound symbols; and gradually incorporate additional layers of timing, overtones, and interaction only when they are ready or when the composition calls for it.
A scalable approach makes the system accessible to beginners while still offering depth for advanced performers, ensuring that the score can grow with a musician’s skill and interest rather than overwhelm them from the start. It also supports a wider range of artistic situations, from short, meditative improvisations to longer, more structured performances, all using the same core visual language.
Teachable To Play
My custom graphical score must be teachable to play because music that cannot be passed from one person to another cannot grow, evolve, or survive beyond a single performer. While this may sound like a basic requirement, it is essential: if a score cannot be clearly taught, then the knowledge needed to perform it remains locked in the mind of its creator, and the composition becomes difficult or impossible for others to reproduce.
A teachable system ensures that players can understand how to interpret the symbols, follow the timing, and produce the intended sounds, even if they were not present for the original creation of the piece. This enables the music to be shared, documented, and preserved in a meaningful way, allowing future musicians to recreate or reinterpret the work rather than relying on guesswork or imitation.
What Will I Call This Custom Graphical Score?
Circles turning within circles, each one a gesture of motion, return, and resonance; echoing the circular motion used to play singing bowls and the cyclical nature of their sound. The result is a score that is both practical and visually calming, easy to recognize, and pleasing to look at. Because circular movement lies at the heart of its design, I will refer to this custom graphical score notation in future articles as the Rotational Score.
What Will Be In Part 2?
In Part 2 of this project, I’ll focus on how a collection of singing bowls is arranged in front of the performer and why layout matters for both musical expression and playability. I’ll explore how the spacing, ordering, and physical positioning of the bowls affect accessibility, rhythm, resonance, and the performer’s ability to move fluidly between tones.
This section will look at practical considerations: such as reach, ergonomic flow, and how the bowls interact acoustically; as well as the artistic choices that shape a visually coherent and musically intuitive performance setup.
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