stand or recover it – with but the passing of a magnet, it is lost forever.
Many musicologists have made meaningful careers from being the musical equivalent of floppy disc readers (if not beeswax cylinder readers) in our modern day. One might ask, why do you still need such antiquated means of data encryption and retrieval? The reality is that we still have much musical data encrypted in relatively extinct forms of musical notation, many of which cannot be fully unencrypted, re-encrypted, and then reproduced under modern musical-data encryption systems (the five-line-four-space staff with a handful of time-signatures we know so well). While I do not attempt to belittle or problematize our modern standard system of musical language encryption, I do hope to shed light on some of the powers and limitations it has bequeathed us while also showing some of the advantages older and “newer” systems might return to us should we familiarize ourselves with them.
Perhaps one of the first truly awe-inspiring innovations our system of Western notation evolved was the ability to demarcate time. Beginning with the long period between the fall of the Roman Empire and the eventual rise of the Holy Roman Empire under Charlemagne, Western music as we know it was un-notated. The first pitch notation of any kind  appeared with a variety of symbols, called neumes, scribbled above words to be sung in religious services (particularly Christian) sometime in the centuries before and during the reign of Charlemagne (see Figure 2). During the reign of Charles the Great, governmental efforts were made to standardize this liturgical chant in order to unify a suddenly and arbitrarily created empire (The Holy Roman Empire). Charlemagne believed that by unifying the liturgy under one chant and one standard text, he could bring some non-arbitrary unification to his awarded empire. He realized that to do this effectively he could not rely on orally transmitted music and text, which was the primary form of musical transmission at that time. Thus, to more rapidly and assuredly unity people under one musical liturgy, this music should be written down such that the human mind would be less likely to accidentally "corrupt" (vary) it from region to region. Such needs soon brought a system of pitch notation to help insure the fidelity of the reproduced chant, no longer safeguarded only in the memories of cathedral choirmasters and cantors.
Consequently, the form of chant notation, often called “square notation,” evolved, particularly under the innovations of Guido of Arezzo, to effectively communicate the pitch content of any melodic line of music (see Figure 3). However, it did not communicate any aspect of rhythmic performance, if there was any aspect as such at all. 
Figure 2: Neumatic notation from the early Middle Ages. Gestural shapes written above the text to be sung. These shaped gestures were merely a reminder to the singer of the shape of the chant tune (the melody goes up, down, zig-zigs, etc.). This system predicated itself on the fact that the singer would already know the chant, having learned it from a teacher and memorized it. This system gave no precise indication of pitch or rhythm.
Figure 3: Square notation of chant, which now gives a clear reproduction of pitch content, the four lines and three spaces being a prototype of our modern system with one additional line. The placement of a clef (usually a moveable C-clef) at the beginning of the line would tell the singer the relation of half- and whole-steps on the staff of lines.
It wouldn’t be until the 12th and 13th centuries at the School of Notre Dame in Paris that musicians developed any system of written temporal demarcation. This system, often known as “the six rhythmic modes of Notre Dame,” would be rather limited, confined to only the various three-grouping permutations of “longs” and “shorts” (one time-unit and half that same unit, or like the modern quarter and eighth note), specifically reflecting the common meters in Latin poetry (see Figure 4).  This system of notation was based on 