uage 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 Although [Canntaireachd] was almost immediately superseded by a form of staff notation adapted specifically for the [Great Highland Bagpipe], and remained unpublished and unrecognised until well into the 20th Century, it remains an important achievement and gives valuable insight into the musical organisation of Ceòl Mór.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 understand 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, t