nuances of the music. 
Figure 1a, 1b, 1c, 1d: Top, the canntaireachd for the well-known (and my favorite) piobaireachd “Maol Donn” (Brown Cow), also known as “MacCrimmon’s Sweetheart” from Volume I of Colin Campbell’s manuscript. "Nether Lorn" from 1797. Middle, the "modern" re-notation of the above canntaireachd. Bottom-left, a video from YouTube of the performance of the canntaireachd. Bottom-right, a recording from YouTube of the whole piobaireachd on bagpipes.
By the 19th century, industrialized Europe with all of its developments in musical communication was reaching Scotland’s Highlands. Consequently, this antiquated form of musical encoding began to be challenged by the seemingly streamlined and cross-cultural powers of Western Europe’s preeminent form of musical notation (the system of 5-lines, 4-spaces, black and while circles with various stems, and rhythmic hierarchies well-known today).  At this time, the Piobaireachd Society proposed a competition to develop a new way to notate traditional bagpipe music that would reflect modern music notation. Many proposals were made, but Angus MacKay’s  version using the standard five-line-four-space staff was the winner and ultimately authorized and published by the Piobaireachd Society. Many at this time and even scholars to the present day consider this re-notation oversimplified, with inaccurate standardizations of rhythm and time and the over-editing and full removal of exceptional and complicated embellishments, which were present in notated Canntaireachd.  While medieval bagpipe music gained a powerful language of cross-cultural and cross-instrumental communication (able to be read, understood, and appreciated by anyone with a modicum of musical training), there was an ultimate sacrifice that had to be made to conform to the standard system. In this adoption of a new notation of language, part of the language’s original character was lost.
While many music students might be familiar with the history of Gregorian chant notation in the West, and how this language has “evolved,” perhaps “gaining clarity” while loosing its original character along its way from the 9th century to the Renaissance and into the Modern age, such a phenomenon is not exclusive to the distant past or to distant, non-Western, “world musics.” Even in the 19th, 20th, and 21st century, these lingual compromises are necessitated for one reason or another. The “progress” of musical notation clearly gives us new and powerful tools, but by forgetting its past forms, we loose particular nuances of communication, which themselves might at some point be of greater utility than the newer tool. William Donaldson, in The Highland Pipe and Scottish Society 1750-1950, highlights this problem with the adoption of Western notation to Scotland’s traditional bagpipe music:
In its written form, canntaireachd provided the basis of the indigenous notational system and it was brought to its most developed form… at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th Century. Although [Canntaireachd] was almost immediately superseded by a form of staff notation adapted specifically for the [Great Highland Bagpipe], and remained unpublished and unrecognised until well into the 20th Century, it remains an important achievement and gives valuable insight into the musical organisation of Ceòl Mór. 
This independent development of musical notation is certainly an “important achievement” for the Scottish people, which can give any musicologist insight into the musical lives, philosophies, and aesthetics of Scotland. With the complete extinction of this language, we might loose relatively little in our capacity to write music as a human species, but we would certainly loose at least one tool to communicate in at least one manner, which is not afforded to us through our current standard system. Such is the nature of the evolution of any language, be it lingual, musical, or technological: have a floppy disc with some interesting or perhaps significantly important information on it, a modern disc drive will never help you to under