9 things LV enraged classical music fans with its 7000USD handbag. Is the ‘poor notation’ a good marketing strategy?
Apparently I have no idea about any of the luxurious brands, but the image of this handbag began to show up very frequently in social media this week, especially within my circle of friends who love classical music. So why is this bag suddenly getting discussed? Why is it worth forwarding? With some literacy in reading music, I analysed the pattern and finally got some clues.
The issues
1. The note durations do not match between the left hand and the right hand
The first thing I realised from the pattern is that the note durations of the left hand and the right hand do not match. From what we are seeing, the left hand begins with a minim, but the full bar seems to be in a 10/8 meter, with a quaver rest missing right above the minim — because there is no clef, I can’t tell what pitch it is. 10/8 with a 4+3+3 itself is a very avant-garde idea, which might be a good idea to fit LV’s brand image. However, the right hand includes 4 groups of demisemiquavers, which in total only counts for 4 quavers. This kind of error is all over the place.
2. Poor use of cautionary accidentals
From the same image above, we can see that the top line has natural signs on E (if it’s a treble clef). Normally composers would include a cautionary accidental only when the pitch is preceded by a chromatic alteration. This is not the case in the excerpt. In addition, if the left hand is in the bass clef, the E itself would already suggest a E natural on both hands.
3. Stems are in the wrong side
For traditional music notation, the stems should be on the left hand side of the note-head when they are pointing downward. In this excerpt the stems are in a wrong direction, and it is probably because the designer has flipped the must horizontally — we can tell by the flipped natural sign.
4. The 5-line staff system does not align
This is perhaps a more annoying problem to musicians, especially because if the 5-line staff system is not aligned, we cannot perform! Look at the right hand part, right across the two bars the 5-line system is, all of a sudden, slightly placed higher.
5. The barline becomes a stem?
From the same image above, the barline suddenly becomes a stem on the left hand part. If I were to play this, I might get very confused while sight-reading.
6. The fingerings are upside down
The more I study about this score, the more I realised it’s a collage of images, and the designer might have no idea of what s/he is doing. While we are going towards the end of the work, the fingers are suddenly upside down, and the note head is now overlapping the barline!
7. The beam is not connected properly
From the same image above, the beams of the left hand part is not properly connected to the stems, which make the score looks like a misprint. People are very likely calling a refund if this is a professionally published score.
8. The phrase markings is truncated
Look at the left hand again — for pianist, the long slur lines tell them how to phrase the line, and there’s a line that starts from nowhere.
9. The ledger lines should not be there
Ledger lines are used to signal pitches that are higher or lower than the 5-line staff system, and here, it’s right in the middle, almost as if we are trying to subdivide the 5-line staff system into a 10 line system.
Is this not designed by a human, but by AI?
With this 7000USD handbag, there are so many things that we can discuss — especially on how it makes use of the notation system. While writing this article, I had a feeling that this might not be even designed by a real human, but everything is generated by AI.
So I tried to go on Automatic1111, and asked Stable Diffusion to generate some musical scores. I tried using img2img with a prompt of
Music score, stem, beam, notehead, treble clef, bass clef, black and white, 5-line staff system
As well as feeding a random musical score, and see what the system would return. The result was still non-readable as a score, but it creates a feeling of what a score would look like.
I tried to photoshop on the LV bag and see if the abstract art would fit to the handbag, and it’s feeling even more avant-garde.
Looks like this could possibly be the next trend of luxury brand design.
